The Words of Institution

How much is bound up in the meaning of “this”—

Meanings of flour ground on heavy stones

To spill on the threshing floor, scattered in dust,

Where mice track it into the dark, or it sticks

To men’s boots while the barnyard jigs to a fiddle;

To small toes that climb a ladder to find

            That the crying in the haymow is not actually cats

            Nor crying at all, but delight of Rumschpringe.

Not so different, perhaps, from the loafered feet

That drag on the steps to a chilly court

Where a cheated man deeds his wife to the state;

From loud heels profaning the wrath of holy silence

After a child falls from the window, or from grace;

From the aged shuffle of a crabbed old man, world-weary because his dog has died:

            For all, they have walked in thorns and sweat,

            And ploughed their brows with the harrow of grief.

But man does not suffer for bread alone

And not every child is better stillborn

For the grain that falls to the ground and dies

Finds substance in the dust and will bear much fruit,

And the cup of sorrow is wrung of the vine

That feeds the Cup of Blessing.

Thus the steadfast Word cried from broken ground

Saying, “This is my body, my blood.”

Downton's Dignity Question

Several weeks back at Verily Magazine, Monica Weigel wrote about “The Women of Downton Abbey,” contending that the show’s female characters keep the story going and provide most of the interest.

Ms. Weigel describes the aristocratic universe in terms of devastating ennui: “Well-born women paid social calls and decorated the room with their presence until a suitable husband came along, and then the cycle began all over again in a different house.” For Ms. Weigel, “the show’s…best attraction is its…strong, feisty, and independent women living in a time that does its best to stifle strong, feisty, and independent women. The story line may begin with the hard truth that the estate is at risk because it cannot be inherited by a woman…but the story continues because Mary, Edith, Sybil, Anna, and even the Countess refuse to rest easy in their allotted places.” Sounding like the beginning of a Tolstoy novel, she says, “There is something universally compelling about people who fight to change their circumstances.”

Mostly, the claim about what drives the story is true. In the beginning, the Countess/Cora/Mary trio is eager to circumvent inheritance laws and keep Downton, while Lord Grantham sees only a dead end. The ladies remain activists throughout. But that a totally insipid society produces women like the Dowager Countess, I’m not convinced. I also dissent from using “universally compelling” to describe Matthew Crowley’s reform-obsessed mother. If Downton Abbey is just a lengthy, gussied-up girl-power soap opera, why do so many men enjoy it too?

If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. Yes, Downton Abbey is about a family of hard-headed women, but it’s not just a girl-power soap opera (that was Pan Am). It’s also about the landed nobility, their servants, and how everyone’s fortunes and relationships fare in the societal sea change that followed on World War I. I wish Ms. Weigel had taken a look at the men of Downton Abbey as well and acknowledged the substance of the relationships that ground the story.

If Downton’s women fight to change their circumstances, most of Downton’s men are unsettled by change. In Season 3, Lord Grantham tells his American mother-in-law that he feels like an animal whose habitat is being destroyed. He wonders if his species will become extinct—if the stuff that is in him can pull through intact. For me, this comment captures the central conflict of (most of) the male characters: What will become of dignity?

Lord Grantham is (generally) a good husband, father, and employer. He is a sincere patriot and a loyal subject, and he apparently seeks to be a wise manager of his estate. He sets the tone for the whole household, and the intelligence of his daughters and the caliber of his staff attest to his quality. Some household members are petty at times, but none of them are narrative throwaways.

So let’s look at the other men. There’s Carson, whose gruffness as the head of the staff hides a deep conviction that “he who is tired of style is tired of living.” Since life is worth living, appearances must be maintained. Then there’s Bates, of mysterious past and haunted future, who is utterly committed to his integrity. William greets the chance to prove his valor on the front as his rite of passage. Matthew, who comes on the scene as a callow lawyer from who-knows-where, rises to the challenge of inheriting Downton and shows a strong sense of honor both at war and in love. Even Branson, who despises the whole order of Downton and draws well-deserved wrath on his head later in Season 3, strives to live by principle.

The glaring exception is Thomas. Thomas offers a check on anyone who would dismiss aristocratic dignity as pretentious, artificial, and expensive (at best). He doesn’t give a fig for anyone but himself. His concept of dignity is entirely about position and has nothing to do with a good conscience. He lies, sneaks, steals, cheats, sticks his nose in the air with pleasure whenever he puts someone down. He proves his cowardice in France. Unsurprisingly, everyone hates Thomas. Even his friend O’Brien comes to view him with disgust.

Which brings me to the second theme: loyalty. Where Thomas answers to no one, the Downton family is committed to their estate—not simply out of selfish luxury, although Mary displays some of that too, but because they feel an obligation to provide sustenance and employment to lower-ranking people in their area. The servants are, in general, loyal to the family. And as English subjects and members of a class-based society, they all share in sustaining the greater order of things.

This is where I think Downton departs from Jane Austen’s satires of decorative women and empty gallants, and where I depart from Ms. Weigel’s analysis. There’s something compelling about this understanding of “the order of things” that goes beyond marriage plots and mere show. It’s not a coincidence that the show’s most redoubtable aristocrat—the Dowager Countess—is also its most practical and forgiving character. Those who know the rules best know best how to break them. We would never put up with such rigidity ourselves, and Ethel Parks's story demonstrates that we truly have made moral progress in some areas—particularly in the notion that prostitutes should be treated as victims rather than offenders. But Downton's classiness and propriety, where genuine, reflect values that offer a healthy counterpoint to modern acquisitiveness and isolation.

If the women of Downton Abbey represent progress, the men represent a nearly-forgotten idea of dignity. What apparently supports it is their aristocratic order, which fascinates us Millennial Americans because we live in a web of social chaos (romantic attachments, case in point). But if the denizens of Downton can exit the 1920’s with relationships and self-respect intact, perhaps we can weather our postmodern upheavals with dignity and good grace, too.

A strong spirit doesn’t depend on the society you live in, whether you’re fighting to change it or not. It depends on the stuff you’re made of.

Christmas Night

O holy night

When shepherds guard for angels

Plague and hazard riding on their wings

O night, when wolves run hungry through the dingles

Preying sheep that snooze by forest lanes,

Where mushrooms, black, lank, grow from who knows what

Where phantom fires make the pilgrim stray

To where the wood-wise robber lies in wait

Where light can’t fall, for thickets shut the sky

O night, whose terror makes the children pray

Whose secrets are known only to the moon

While white-faced hours inch so slowly by

God’s face is hid, and all the stars aloof—

You brought to birth the blood that turned to wine:

So lives the world, O night—O night divine.

Adventus

You cannot know what it means to be a baby—

A fresh-wrought being, born and knit of love,

Familiar-featured with your parents’ skins.

You cannot have compassion on the trembling and fear

Of holding perfect life within your hands,

Or understand the weight of innocence,

The awe of recognizing in my flesh

And bone—your face—the crowning of all hope.

The world seeks wealth—or justice. Women weep

For men, and men for power. All this, sought,

Eludes. And we are found alone, unloved,

Unlovely in our prides and politics.

To all this answers, “The Virgin shall conceive;

The Kingdom has been made for such as these;

Forbid them not; you must be born again.”

Yet hope’s not now, not here, nor even you.

Before your babyhood gives way to youth

You will know avarice, gluttony, and sloth;

Growing, how knowledge can distend your soul;

By Grace, learn need, and come to find salvation.

Yet you partake eternal Infancy.

The promise of your face is not a lie:

“For He shall save his people from their sins.”

I will wait for the coming of the Child King.

Skyfall: Bond vs. Belial

I don’t normally think of the Holy Spirit as a bearded Scotsman with a sawn-off shotgun. I also rarely see a movie as thick with Christianity as Skyfall.

I never went scavenging for Christ figures in the Lord of the Rings, and it would be wrong to say Skyfall “had Christian themes,” as if the directors had sat down and sketched out the prepackaged problem, the gospel message, and Bond’s conversion experience in advance. Rather, at the climax of Skyfall, I felt that I was actually watching the drama of the Gospel unfold.

I also felt like I was crazy. Since seeing the movie I’ve read reviews that criticize the plot and characters as unoriginal and ask when the Bond franchise is going to wake up to its eternally unsavory treatment of women. I’ve been more absorbed by the movie’s symbolic qualities, but I should acknowledge those reviews because they helped me understand what my analysis was not—and also offered a clue to the sense of bleakness that ensued from thinking too long about certain aspects of the film.

The narrative of Skyfall is a triumphal rejection of paganism. What it says about life and death, love and hate, sin and judgment and redemption, is so emphatically Christian that it felt lifted from the pages of medieval theology. You don’t have to see the movie this way, but it doesn’t take much mental exertion to do so if you recognize the villain. What the story did with him was bound to be important, just because of the characteristics he possesses.

Silva is a man of the world: smooth-tongued, seductive, brilliant, urbane. He controls a global operation of spies and intrigues, rigs elections and ends lives with a wave and a yawn, and lives as a law unto himself. England and the empire are jokes to him. He is the accuser, hacking into M’s computer and conscience to tell her to “Think on your sins.” And for all his polish, he’s demonic:

“[Even] the use of electricity may be ‘demonic,’ as in fact may be the use of anything and of life itself…[T]he experience of evil which we call demonic is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations or anxieties. It is indeed the presence of dark and irrational power” (Alexander Schmemmann).

It’s no coincidence that Silva is totally dependent on force. His clockwork of computers and mind games boils down to control. In every way, Silva matches the character of Satan in classical and medieval theology and literature: scoffer, accuser, warlord, gentleman—a genius only able to corrupt, not create. So what do you do with the devil?

This is where Bond comes in. Early in the film, he’s mired in reckless dissipation. When he comes back from the dead and back on duty in the face of a shadowy but personal threat to M and MI6, he is still struggling with M’s earlier betrayal and the effects of living for himself: substance and alcohol addiction, a deterioration from his machine-like physical condition, and a disdain for authority rooted in “psychological issues from his childhood.” He may have skirted death, but he hasn’t found newness of life.

Nevertheless, he begins hunting down the threat. Eventually he meets the mastermind (Silva), who plays with his confidence, shows off his own strength and the bizarre wreckage of an island from which he brings his twisted fantasies to life, and even invites (then threatens to coerce) Bond to join his side.

Bond’s response to this situation is clever, but not morally compelling. In a distasteful sequence involving a waste of trust and a woman’s life, Bond relies on his wits and training to spring Silva’s trap and take him back to England. As ugly as this moment is, it’s the point where he declares himself as Silva’s enemy. Whether he can outsmart the villain or not, he’s picked a side.

Back in London, M and Bond find out Silva is still playing his own very planned out game. When the technological wiles of MI6 fail to exorcise the demon, Bond realizes their conflict is about more than which spider has the cleverer web. The real question is whether loyalty can withstand blind force and impersonal hatred. So Bond changes the battle. He goes off the grid and into his past, luring Silva to his fortress of a childhood home. Some viewers found this implausible. Fine, but the symbolism starts to get really interesting. Here we find out that Bond is an orphan, and M recruited him to the Secret Service from the Scottish moors.

Arriving at the mansion, Bond and M find an unexpected companion: the old gamekeeper, Kincade. When Bond tells Kincade the upcoming showdown “isn’t your fight,” Kincade answers, “Try and stop me, you uppity little shit.” Out of childhood, out of the shadows, out of the past, enter the Helper—one who has become unfamiliar but who knows the orphan as well as he knows himself, and will care for the widowed M in her distress.

When Silva arrives, Bond is no longer impressed with his wiles and force—he actually rolls his eyes at the overbearing mode of Silva’s approach. M, the defender of Britain, is defenseless. Her job is execute Bond’s plans and flee at the right moment, with Kincade’s help, to the estate’s old chapel. Bond has taken her place as defender. In defending M, he defends Britain; in defending both of them, he also defends his mother. The orphan is fighting for natural affection, safety for the widow, and kingdom against chaos. Everything Silva laughed at, Bond has owned. This isn’t just the settling of an old score—this is about an eschatology of chaos vs. peace.

The action sequence in the old house is flawlessly executed and amazing. (Implausible, some complain, but that’s the whole point of making Bond movies.) Bond neutralizes Silva’s attacks one by one, until they are both paused, hiding behind fortresses. So with one fuse Bond destroys both. The conflict becomes man to man.

And it centers on M. The woman who earlier declared that “regret is unprofessional” is wounded at the hip, shedding blood for the sins she wouldn’t acknowledge. Kincade, the Helper, is leading her to the church, shining a light for her feet on the dark moor. That flashlight catches Silva’s eye. Naïve Mr. Kincade, the viewer thinks with a cringe, but the nature of light is to overcome darkness.

When Silva finds M in the church, she’s all alone. Another failure by Kincade, you’d think. But just as providence is not the same as redemption, Kincade’s job is to come alongside, not ultimately to save.

Silva thinks he has dispatched Bond, so when he finds M, all obstacles between them have fallen. In a stunning renunciation of his quest for revenge, Silva embraces M, puts a gun to both their heads, gives M the trigger, and begs her to “Free us both.” Suddenly all he wants is oblivion, absorption, and dissolution into the universe. What he’s demanding of M is an admission that her love and his hate, her sins and his justice, her self and his self, are finally meaningless and indistinct. What he thought for so long was hatred for her was nothing but hatred for his own corrupt self and everything that was not corrupted like it. This renunciation of personality, rationality, moral distinction, and being itself, is the pinnacle of demonic paganism. Weston’s possessed and jumbled consciousness in Perelandra came vividly to my mind:

“‘You be very careful, Ransom. I’m down in the bottom of a big black hole. No I’m not, though. I’m on Perelandra. I can’t think very well now, but that doesn’t matter, he does all my thinking for me. It’ll get quite easy presently. That boy keeps shutting the windows. That’s all right, they’ve taken off my head and put someone else’s on me. I’ll soon be all right now.’…Ransom could never make up his mind whether it was a trick or whether a decaying psychic energy that had once been Weston were indeed fitfully and miserably alive within the body that sat there beside him…The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces.”

Silva’s last request is for negation of his being—to become utterly incomprehensible.

And it is his last request. Of course Bond isn’t dead, and he shows up and finishes Silva in the knick of time. (Interestingly, no shot is fired in the church.) M is beyond physical help, but she’s safe from moral madness. The apostle of Death has died. Her death isn’t a theft or an abdication, but a passing on into the province of God’s mercy. Bond is there to mourn and Kincade to witness when she goes.

I suppose it should be strange that in all of this there isn’t really a Christ figure. Bond might fit in a pinch, since he defeats death symbolically when he kills Silva and personally when he escapes drowning twice. But he needs redemption as much as anyone. Not until he spends himself for love of someone else does he find himself again after his long malaise, and many of his actions in the meantime are repulsive. If I was to stick an archetype on him, I would pick the prodigal son or maybe the wayward apostle returning to grace. But I don’t think it’s necessary to stick an archetype on him for the drama that plays out among Silva, M, and Kincade to hold its Christian resonance. Bond is just a sort of spokesman.

The theme of the whole movie is expressed in a word, in the scene where Bond is tied up in a chair on Silva’s island. Silva has just finished showing off his machines and his global control, prompting Bond to comment, “I suppose everyone has to have a hobby.”

“What’s yours?” asks Silva.

Bond thinks a moment. “Resurrection.”

The Mercy of Breakfast

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Unmerciful, the morning breaks on heads

Unkempt with dreams and eyes as bleared as sheets

Upon which coverlids flick dumbly back

In disarray of textile and of mind.

Unmerciful, the morning showers dawn

And song and beauty down upon men's backs

And work-bound feet before their eyes can lift

Or hearts can pause to sing with its refrain.

Unmerciful, the morning brings the day

And call to draw the world along with hands

And spurs and laws and rakes and winning words:

The trappings of vocation, and of hope.

So thank you for the sacrament of strength:

A silent breakfast in the rosy light

That rises as your word in mouth and heart

And man stares uncompanioned at his thoughts.

A homely eucharist, this cud that feeds

Our limbs and every small obedience

Written in the book of allotted days

Till joy comes, and the shadows flee away.