O Magnum Mysterium

I am still working on two or three posts which will finish my preliminary series on the Monarchy. Mr. Holden can call upon a vast reservoir of past thought and opinion. He has been evangelising and thundering from the pulpit of the Holden Republic with little opposition for some years. When he responds to me, he has the world-weary tone of an aged uncle bothered by mosquitoes, and he attempts to swat me with an excess of verbiage, links, and a tone which suggests that he could say more, but he has more important things to do.

Ah, well. We mosquitoes are small, but we are persistent. As Anne Shirley said, one mosquito can keep me awaker than a bad conscience. Confident that with time, we will catch up, and assured that Mr. Holden has a conscience to be kept awake by, we will continue in our efforts to stir it.

But I have a few thoughts to contribute first on reason and truth.

Sir Laurence Olivier speaks some very wise words in the official Coronation documentary, A Queen is Crowned. Facing the High Altar of Westminster Abbey, under the eye of Christ and His Apostles, and the great and ancient heritage of the English Church, he says:

In the knowledge of the mystery of human life, this ceremony is performed.

I confidently expect republicans of every stripe to call this metaphysical and subjective clap-trap, of the kind which occurs after too much sunshine, or too much sentimental music. I never read one of Mr. Holden's hyperbolic denunciations of my hyperbole without feeling like one of those quivering women at the WI in twin-set and pearls, rushing over to greet the dear Vicar. He even suggests, with kindly condescension, that he will probably disagree with my next post, because he has a more "rational" approach than I do. (I think he means "rationalistic", because I don't think I am technically insane, at least not in the Bill Wilmot category, I hope).

After I had got over the worrying Wordsworthian implications of this, and dismissed the mental imagery of me prancing through daffodils and saying with a dramatic sigh Bickerstaff, have you no soul!, I thought about reason, and the crimes committed in its name.

The right public use of reason is as a tool to access truth. By the use of reason, we apprehend what is true, or as Locke puts it, what corresponds to reality, what is real. Reason is not an end in itself, but a means by which we arrive at Truth. Further, reason is not applied in a vacuum or a void. By the use of reason, I can make out a case for the abolition of the social safety net, optional infanticide up to age three, or letting Irish peasants starve to death so as to reduce the surplus population.

Yes, that is hyperbole, but like all my uses of it, it makes a point. We can have abstract debates about all kinds of things, and in a vacuum, make rational cases for all kinds of things we would never dream of actually doing. The rationalism advocated by many republicans is the sort of ideology which rams through reform for our own good, and in actual despite of the facts of real life as we know them. It divorces reason from truth, and hence reality.

Fides et Ratio calls both faith and reason wings by which we approach ultimate truth, by which we apprehend (note the word) mystery.

Lewis makes a very nice abstract case for a republic, which I will go on to answer in rational terms later. But I am hammering this point past endurance for a reason; the Monarchy is about more than abstractions or pragmatics, it is about truth, and transcendent truth at that. And that truth is actually real.

It is not fashionable to believe in a communicable human nature, or in truth, or in transcendence any more. But in practice, they exist, and we act as if they do. They aren't subjective feelings, but deep human impulses. The desire for truth. The appreciation of mystery. The craving for a personification of the body politic, in times of joy and sadness, in times of national grief and pain. These desires are answered in the Monarchy, and if it does not exist, we have to invent institutions that approximate it. Those "useless Monarchist fripperies" which Lewis condemns as simply gilding the sow are actually one of the primary points of the Crown. (As he would know had he read Montesquieu properly).

In the knowledge of the mystery of human life, this ceremony is performed.

Life is a great mystery. And when we travel through it, we need reminders of our noble ideals, our best intentions, our most gracious and unselfish selves. That is what Her Majesty does. Do you think she is called "Your Majesty" for no reason? No, it is because she personifies Sovereignty, grace and majesty. Mercy and justice are the attributes of Princes, and courtesy follows in train. Even when Kings are evil, wicked and dull, they maintain the nature of their office, and that ideal is a noble one. I'll back it against a misused and jerrymandered "political equality" any day of the week.

Lewis writes that to elevate, ennoble and personify, the Queen must be seen, and the Governor-General is de facto New Zealand's head of State, since HMQ is foreign. Leaving aside the endearing old-fashioned nature of this argument (I saw the Queen this morning on television looking very nice at the Commonwealth Day service, and then I read her message this afternoon on the internet), the Governor-General derives much of his moral, social (and legal) authority from the fact that he is the Queen's representative. To the extent that we listen to Sylvia Cartwright or Anyand Satyanand, it is because they speak with our voice, and with the Queen's. They say what she would say, they speak as she would speak, they are as she is. They are covered with her mantle, and bear her authority. They are the ensigns of mystery.

I am fully expecting this post to be completely and flatly misunderstood. I am rather looking forward to enraged emails denouncing mystical clap-trap, and theocracy. You get it, or you don't. You hear the great music, or you are deaf to it.

But either way, it exists. The mystery is real. When we say that the Queen commands our allegiance, we are not pledging allegiance to a flawed human being in fancy dress, but to what she represents. The mystery and the nobility of human life, and to the ideals and virtues which the monarchy personifies, even when the monarch is not virtuous.

To them we fly, on them, we stand, and for them, we fight.

You get that, or you don't.