The Wild Tears Fall

And when the king came back out of the garden set with trees, and entered into the place of the banquet, he found Aman was fallen upon the bed on which Esther lay, and he said: He will force the queen also in my presence, in my own house. The word was not yet gone out of the king's mouth, and immediately they covered his face. And Harbona, one of the eunuchs that stood waiting on the king, said: Behold the gibbet which he hath prepared for Mardochai...And the king said to him: Hang him upon it. So Aman was hanged on the gibbet...and the king's wrath ceased. (Esther VII: 8-10)

Queen Esther observed in prayer, before she went before her lord, king, and husband's face, that the threat against the Jews had been visited upon them as punishment for sin. Great then had been her personal mortification before she undertook to save her people. Likewise, she demanded fasting and weeping from them, before she ventured to beg Artaxerxes to spare the lives of the Israelites.



Father Augustyn Kordecki, and later King Jan Kazimierz, made the same observation concerning the Swedish 'Deluge' (1655-1660), the former ascribing that chastisement to the sins of Poland's people, and the latter to the crimes of her rulers. His majesty spoke these words after he had crowned the Virgin as his nation's queen:

As I see, to the great sorrow of my soul, that all the adversities which have fallen upon my Kingdom in the last seven years—the epidemics, the wars, and other misfortunes—were sent by the Supreme Judge as a punishment for the groans and the oppression suffered by the peasants, I promise and vow, after the conquest of peace, in union with all the states, to use all means to free my people from all unjust burdens and oppressions. Grant, Oh most loving Queen and Lady, that I obtain the grace of Thy Son to do all that I propose, and which Thou hast inspired me! (Memoirs of the Siege of Częstochowa, Augustyn Kordecki, C. S. P., translated by Plinio Correa de Oliveira)

This noble resolution was most wisely entrusted to Our Lady's keeping. After all, it had been the miraculous survival of her shrine that had turned the tide of the war in Poland's favour. 

Yet, while the great men living through this fiery era beat their breasts for their own sins and prepared to save their fatherland with mortification and repentence, the enemy were unwittingly blunting their own swords by committing iniquities themselves. Like Nabuchodonozor's warrior, Holofernes of the Book of Judith, General Burchard Müller, might have fared better in his campaign against the Catholics of Poland if he had had his own Achior to warn him thusly: 


Wheresoever they went in without bow and arrow, and without shield and sword, their God fought for them and overcame. And there was no one that triumphed over this people, but when they departed from the worship of the Lord their God. But as often as beside their own God, they worshipped any other, they were given to spoil, and to the sword, and to reproach. And as often as they were penitent for having revolted from the worship of their God, the God of heaven gave them power to resist. (Judith V: 16-19)


Alas for him, the general's religious sect had ousted that book from Holy Scripture, so he could not profit from its wisdom.  Making the same mistake as General Holofernes, he sallied forth in contempt of the Church still revered in Poland, even referring to the shrine he wished to capture as a 'henhouse.' History would soon turn him into another proof that God is not mocked, and only a fool spits on His beloved.


Still, no one could call him unreasonable for expecting the surrender of a single, Polish fortress (and a monastic one at that) when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had already buckled under the Swedish invasion. And did he not go about the siege with the greatest of human wisdom? Did he not send Polish, Catholic aristocrats and even old friends to treat with those stubborn Paulines? Did he not offer them the hope of preserving their monastery if they would yield? Did he not cajole them not once, but eleven times? One of these emissaries even begged Father Kordecki to give in by threatening the defenders of Jasna Góra with damnation: 


...the aim of a religious order is to abstain from temporal matters. What do you have to do with the turbulence of war, you whose rules call you to solitude and silence. Ponder it well, lest the arms which you brandish instead of your Rosaries, carry you to perdition…. (ibid.)

Yet, though the Polish king was a refugee in Silesia, the nobles had surrendered to the invaders, and all tactical and technical prospects of defending the Bright Mountain were bleak, Father Kordecki was driven by one fierce determination--no one who despised Our Lady would stain her sanctuary with his impious feet.


His staunch defiance cannot be justified or condemned in the light of human reason. The probability of clemency on the part of the Swedes would have been a matter for diviners, not logicians. Though defeat was certain, stalling for time in the face of capitulating to an unendurable peace possessed its own wordly wisdom. In the end, surrender is always a gamble, and choosing one side of a coin is not mad.


Can the priest be condemned on religious grounds then? Was the nobleman correct in admonishing him against taking such an active stance on what must in the end be a secular affair--the identity of one's sovereign?


There can be no doubt that fire for one's homeland and the principles of natural pride consumed many of the hearts defending Jasna Góra's walls. But the motto carved above so many portals in Polska is Bóg, Honor, i Ojczyzna. When some of the monks complained against Father Augustyn that it was for God's providence to determine the fate of kings and sovereigns, he did not dispute this fact, but made a new argument:


“…what Faith is ours,” he bellowed, “what love, what gratitude to God Who is so generous to us—that such small damage to our earthly comforts is able to turn us away from the guard and protection of the chest containing the celestial treasures of the eternal King? Let us consider that it is far more prudent for us to defend the integrity of the House of God, the Holy Faith and at the same time our own liberties, than for us to lose all and, in addition, to go into exile and eternal slavery.” (ibid.)


There would be no trust given to the devil, nor a chance for him to commit defamation. This resolve, united with hopeful reports of the king, does much to justify the Pauline's reason, but the feeling remains that there was also something--rather someone--else, who would not allow him to give in. As with Ozias, the Israelite ruler of Bethulia, this someone was very likely a woman.


When Holofernes lay siege to the above-mentioned city, the inhabitants (like those sheltered in the monastery) did not religiously apostatize as they became parched with thirst. Separating their earthly state from their eternal duties, they argued for capitulation on different grounds:


For it is better, that being captives we should live and bless the Lord, than that we should die, and be a reproach to all flesh, after we have seen our wives and our infants die before our eyes. We call to witness this day heaven and earth, and the God of our fathers, who taketh vengeance upon us according to our sins, conjuring you to deliver now the city into the hand of the army of Holofernes, that our end may be short by the edge of the sword, which is made longer by the drought of thirst...

and their ruler, Ozias, was prepared to give in:


 Ozias rising up all in tears, said: Be of good courage, my brethren, and let us wait these five days for mercy from the Lord. For perhaps he will put a stop to his indignation, and will give glory to his own name. But if after five days be past there come no aid, we will do the things which you leave spoken.
(Judith VII 16-17, 23-25)


In the modern world, with its restive field of free choice, we so often forget what our individual duties are or if we have any at all. What is explicitly holy or evil is taught to us and inscribed on our hearts, but the things we owe to God and the world as ourselves is a thing we hardly ever stop to consider. Living life according to the universal virtues, it does not often occur to the modern thinker that what is allowed for him, may not be permitted another man or that the reverse may be true.


Hence, while such a resolution as Ozias's is not objectively impious, and a Christian state of today may even be permittied it, it was wrong. The matter was apparent for the noblewoman Judith:

And who are you that tempt the Lord? This is not a word that may draw down mercy, but rather that may stir up wrath, and enkindle indignation.You have set a time for the mercy of the Lord, and you have appointed him a day, according to your pleasure...And therefore let us humble our souls before him, and continuing in an humble spirit, in his service: Let us ask the Lord with tears, that according to his will so he would shew his mercy to us: that as our heart is troubled by their pride, so also we may glorify in our humility. (Judith VIII 11-13, 16-17)


Perhaps the Pauline priest was not reading Judith in his time of great trial, but he responded to a traitorous, Polish lord that came to urge his surrender with the same fire as that great lady:

“On account of former benefits which Your Excellency has conceded to this sanctuary, your life has been spared various times during this siege; but lower thy head, do not abuse the patience of God!” (ibid.)

Yes, lower thy head lest a hand mightier than Judith's sever it as she severed that of Holofernes's. It was not until after the siege, and from the mouth of enemy witnesses, that the Virgin's gallant knights learnt she had been with them all the time:


"What witch is this that is to be found in your cloister of Czestohowa, who covered with a blue mantle sallies from the cloister and walks along the walls, resting from time to time on the bastions – and whose sight makes our people drop with terror, so much so that, when she appears, we have to turn our faces to the ground and protect our eyes?" (ibid.)

However, the Poles had soldiered on by faith and not by sight. That vision which terrified the Swedes had not consoled their earthly eyes. Persevering with the sacraments without fail, honouring Our Lord without fear, and praying without ceasing had been their preservation and sweetness of spirit. In the end, it prevailed in Heaven and on earth.

Whatever else is said, this ought to be noted:

'In truth, Karol Wojtyła was not transformed by the papacy. Rather he was practically tailored for the roles of priest and bishop within a Poland that was a microcosm of the troubled twentieth-century world around it...men like Stefan Wyszyński and Adam Sapieha insisted that the Church not flee to the catacombs. It had to be everywhere in Polish life...even in the teeth of brutal repression...

Besides the Church in Poland...had developed an outlook that was genuinely global; and this globalism was faithfully reproduced in its political institutions, which, though serving Polish nationalism, were imbued with a genuinely geopolitical sense. This, too, he inherited.

The great difference between the Karol Wojtyła who entered the papal Conclave on October 14, 1978, and the man who emerged from it two days later was that he had walked in Archbishop of Kraków, and had walked out as Bishop of Rome.' _Malachi Martin SJ, The Keys of This Blood, Book I: The Geopolitics of Power, Part I: the Arena, Chapter 5: The Keys of This Blood

In June 1863 after more than two years of bloody conflict the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee commanding, slips across the Potomac to begin the invasion of the North...Their objective is to draw the Union army out into the open where it can be destroyed...General Lee knows that a letter has been prepared by the Southern government; a letter which offers peace. It is to be placed on the desk of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States the day after Lee has destroyed the Army of the Potomac somewhere north of Washington... (Opening Narration: Gettysburg, 1993 [emphasis mine]) 

Surely there are few literal pacifists living on this earth. The majority of us would acknowledge the necessity of violence in the case of self-defense or the defense of others. To feel one's self in danger invokes all the natural instincts necessary to commit physical evils in order to prevent moral evils. Love, which moves us to will the good of another, brings other persons into that realm of one's own being which we wish always to protect. It may even be more intense than the attachment one has to one's literal self. The more loving the husband and father, the more tender the wife and mother, and the more devoted the brother or sister, the more capable they are of turning viciously on a wicked aggressor in a way which they would never even wish their loved ones to witness. 


This is rather self-evident to anyone who has truly loved. What is not self-evident is when the ratiocinations of which man alone is capable projects beyond our emotive, animal instincts and thinks of defense in the light of attack. Here the avenging hand falters. Less than two centuries ago, at just such a juncture, i.e., the Mason-Dixon line, thousands of the grey army of the Confederacy, though bound to their General Robert E. Lee with the most intense filial affection, laid down their arms and refused to go further:

'They had volunteered willingly enough to defend their homes,' a regimental historian explained, 'but some did not think it right to invade Northern territory.' _(Landscape Turned Red, Stephen Sears) 


On such a subject as attacking in the name of defense, I am writing of something completely out of the reach of my personal sympathies, both as a woman and as one of melancholic temperament. When I hear of one nation bearing swords across the boundaries of another, I shudder with the same repugnance that I would feel on seeing an armed man entering another man's home. Yet, with my reason, I must acknowledge that my emotive reaction is not necessarily an intution of what is true. Reason must govern emotions. 'The heart can and should obey the head.'


An officer of the state must take in a dangerous criminal, even if he must do so before the man's wife and children. Her pleas and their tears must not alter the course of justice. However clemency may wish to provide for these unfortunates later, evil must not be tolerated to spare them pain. The sacredness of the threshold of hearth and home is not an absolute thing in the case of the individual. Nor is it the case with the State. A nation that has been bellicose against another is not often sufficiently rebuked by merely being defeated on the foreign soil where it had no right to go: 

Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow... _Stonewall Jackson


The enemy must be pursued and soundly chastened. It is not enough to make a thief return his booty. He must give expiation for the evil in his act--providing some recompense to the injured party. He must be punished enough himself so that he shall never wish to commit the crime again.


Lee therefore justly overruled his generals in taking his army North. What seemed a desecration of the cause to some, was the best chance of ending the war and securing victory. Considerations of feeding the Confederate army and the hopes of impressing--even galvanizing--European allies also played a great part in the decision. The ability to carry a hard or even severe idea into act is the reason choleric men exist. Once vindicated by their minds, they see--and rightly see--that the time has come to lock up their hearts. 


Lucy Maud Montgomery observed this well through one of her finest works. In her narrative, it is revealed that it is possible for a woman's husband to have a surgery that may restore his senses after years of living life only half-aware. The trouble is that he was an unkind, selfish, immoral bore beforehand, and his wife's life has at least been easier after her husband became an idiot. Anne naturally wishes to spare the wife, who is also her friend, but the men in her life come down against her:

"Oh, Captain Jim, I didn't think you'd say that," she exclaimed reproachfully. "I thought you wouldn't want to make more trouble for her." 

Captain Jim shook his head. "I don't want to. I know how you feel about it, Mistress Blythe-- just as I feel meself. But it ain't our feelings we have to steer by through life--no, no, we'd make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There's only the one safe compass and we've got to set our course by that--what it's right to do. I agree with the doctor. If there's a chance for Dick, Leslie should be told of it. There's no two sides to that, in my opinion." 

"Well," said Anne, giving up in despair, "wait until Miss Cornelia gets after you two men." 

"Cornelia'll rake us fore and aft, no doubt," assented Captain Jim. "You women are lovely critters, Mistress Blythe, but you're just a mite illogical. You're a highly eddicated lady and Cornelia isn't, but you're like as two peas when it comes to that. I dunno's you're any the worse for it. Logic is a sort of hard, merciless thing, I reckon." (Anne's House of Dreams, Chapter XXX: Leslie Decides) 

Leslie's decision was one for the truth. In the end, it set her free. Ergo:

'Let's not do politics; let's build Poland.'

Thus said a billboard featuring a large image of Donald Tusk, looking rather blue collar with no jacket or tie. If his sleeves were visible, I'm sure they were rolled up above the elbow.


A Pole walking with me frowned at the slogan and said that the sentiment communicated by the billboard was actually, to a certain extent, illegal.

'What? How so? I personally rather like the words, though I don't believe that Tusk genuinely means it.'

'He's supposed to support his party's politics; he's taken an oath to do so.'

I groaned. 'The law should never be able to restrict a man from having an awakening of conscience, especially the crime is merely breaking with one's party platform.'


Last Friday, such an awakening, or at least a stand, did take place in Poland. Fifteen noble souls defied the PO's (Civic Platform) party line, and voted in favour of a bill that would ban abortion completely. And yes, their coalition now wants to make them pay for voting according to their conscience, rather than following the coalitions modus operandi.


One may argue that rejecting their faction's position and favouring a higher, moral code was undemocratic. Is PO not in power because of votes? However, Jacek Tomczak, one of the fifteen, did not only justify his actions ethically, but politically as well.


“I voted against the rejection of the (bill) because it was a civic project supported by 600,000 citizens...As a conservative I could not vote against my conscience, especially as it concerned the right to life of the most innocent and defenseless human beings.” (http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-interview-polish-lawmakers-threatened-with-fine-for-supporting-ab)

Mirosław Puta stated outright that one's political party should not dictate positions on 'ideological' issues at all. That's an intriguing statement. When Aristotle concluded the Nicomachean Ethics, he ended with the words, 'Now let us begin.' He meant that the student was finally ready to read his work, Politics. For the Philosopher, the entire point of laying down a rational framework for moral conduct was to guide one's understanding of how a state should function properly. While Puta rightly understands that his party does not have the final say on moral issues, he ought to recognize that it should be the other way around.


The formal Marshall of the Sejm, Marek Jurek, did not tolerate such flaws in his own coalition, and in his integrity, resigned his tenure. He has now formed his own party, but it is a tragedy in Western democracy that he had to do either of these things. A statesman should be chosen for himself, not for the conglomerate faction to which he is expected to pay court. Consider this scheme to institute genuine democratic reform in Britain:


Can one guess why the fictional Prime Minister did not put it forward? Yes, that's right. By the end of the episode, the elitist 'Permanent Secretary for the Department of Administrative Affairs' (backed with a bargaining chip from a Leftist politician) reminds the Prime Minister that he was not given power by the people, but by his party. What kinds of horrible things would the coalition do to revenge itself upon him if he betrayed it by reforming local government at the party's expense?


George Washington's Farewell Address on bequeathing the presidential office is not infallible advice for a state, but it does contain the sincere opinions of a man who was a leader and a statesman rather than merely a politician. Of the five key warnings laid down in the speech, the second is by far the most significant to a democracy qua democracy:


...Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. 

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. 

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty...

...It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another. (George Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States)


The reason I am a monarchist and not a democrat is not because of the superior beauty, pomp, and poetry of the former order. It is because there will always be a king, whether he rules directly or through the command of a group. Whatever title one may choose to give him, be it president, prime minister, dictator, or Cromwell's hideousely ironic label, 'Protector of the Realm.' The only variation is how entangled the support behind the throne is, whether there is indeed one head or many, and how long the reign may last (life, four years?).

An outright, functioning monarchy is more advantageous to the people in its transparency. If the king did in fact become a Cronus devouring his children, it would be better to know exactly who he is that one may visit him at his bath à la Charlotte Corday (assuming of course, that it is the kind of tyrannicide that St. Thomas Aquinas would approve of: removing rather than exacerbating the problems of the state). In a party state though, such an expediency is absolutely impossible. As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, the tyranny of the majority would be more entrenched than that of a king's, and one cannot combat that sort of tyrant.

Washington, et al., had been more reluctant to demand independence from England than the fiery rebels of New England, and though he has left many rousing and eloquent words as to the reason he took part in the War of Independence, we shall never know how much he believed that the colonies would be freer in their own union. Like Tocqueville, he seems to have seen the constitutional form of government as an experiment, and his tenure as president undoubtedly showed him how delicate an experiment it was. 


One wonders what he would think of the EU's 'Philadelphia moment' and of a system governed by men who are not elected at all, though they definitely toe a certain party's line. 

Gaius Mucius Scaevola, as so vividly depicted by Livy, shall always strike an impressive visage in the imagination, regardless of one's political views. Even though he botched his venture into the hostile Etruscan camp by assasinating a well-dressed secretary rather than the enemy king, he managed at least to declare his fierce defiance, and that of 'three hundred other youths of Rome', by thrusting his hand into a flame and saying, 'Rather this than a king in Rome!' 

According to the republican historian, this impressed King Porsenna so much that the monarch released him. Yet, had that young man seen the forthcoming travail of the modern world, he would have placed both hands in the fire crying, 'Rather this than the rule of a party in Rome!' 

Would a party be as clement as Porsenna at such a display of defiance? Well, are those fifteen lawmakers being fined or not?

The Kings

A man said unto his Angel:
"My spirits are fallen low,
And I cannot carry this battle:
O brother! where might I go?

"The terrible Kings are on me
With spears that are deadly bright;
Against me so from the cradle
Do fate and my fathers fight."

Then said to the man his Angel:
"Thou wavering, witless soul,
Back to the ranks! What matter
To win or to lose the whole,

"As judged by the little judges
Who hearken not well, nor see?
Not thus, by the outer issue,
The Wise shall interpret thee.

"Thy will is the sovereign measure
And only events of things:
The puniest heart, defying,
Were stronger than all these Kings.

"Though out of the past they gather,
Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,
And pallid Thirst of the Spirit
That is kin to the other twain,

"And Grief, in a cloud of banners,
And ringletted Vain Desires,
And Vice, with the spoils upon him
Of thee and thy beaten sires, --

"While Kings of eternal evil
Yet darken the hills about,
Thy part is with broken sabre
To rise on the last redoubt;

"To fear not sensible failure,
Nor covet the game at all,
But fighting, fighting, fighting,
Die, driven against the wall." _Louise Imogen Guiney

As I sit in my flat and ponder the execution and aftermath of the glorious Warsaw Uprising, I shiver. I know what I love so much about the Polish Nation; heroism and martyrdom still breathe alive through a generation not entirely gone from this Earth, pulses beat now that did beat in an age of heroes. There are testimonies in flesh here as well as in stone.

I think of the Polish resistance against the twin heads of the Godless Right and Left, and I find I can believe in anything. Achilles's shield blinds my eyes; the Maccabean sword pierces my vision. The Song of Roland rings in my ears as does the whizzing shaft of Robin, the Hooded Man. Arthur's mallet shatters my stony, sceptical heart, and my faith in man is renewed. Even the cringing treachery of the West and the demonic brutality of the East cannot draw a veil over the deeds of this 'Christ of Nations.'

Sixty-six years hence though, I see worrying trends paired with encouraging ones in a nation despised by the 'little judges,' yet revered by the truly wise. As I ready myself for the pilgrimage from Warsaw to Częstochowa, my first plea is to the souls of the heroes for their intercession. Their nation still requires their aid.

For we have not by following cleverly devised myths, made known to you the power, and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ; but we were eyewitnesses of His greatness. For He received from God the Father, honour and glory: this voice coming down to Him from the excellent glory: This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him. And this voice we heard brought from heaven, when we were with Him in the holy mount. And we have the more firm prophetical word: whereunto you do well to attend, as to a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: Understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation. (II Peter I: 16-20)

‘Is that story true?’ many a round, cherry little mouth has asked me. Whether it was a younger sister I strolled with hand in hand through a gold-hued field of tall grass, a few young boys crouched around the mossy bank of a pond, little cousins reclining on a couch in the sitting room, or a small child sitting next to me on the bus, I would always arch my eyebrow at this query after one of my winding yarns. ‘Of course it’s true!’ To hesitate with children is to die. No being on Earth is quicker to sense hypocrisy or tentative reasoning than a child of man. Nothing but the best feigned indignation against one’s veracity being suspected and the most audacious assertion that one’s tales are in fact annals of history would hush a child’s suspicions. Even so, I would still see them screw their mouths up in a pout and glance over their shoulders with a scrutinizing, ‘I wonder…’

Is this wrong? I can imagine a few Scholastic eyebrows rising as I call to mind St. Thomas Aquinas’s position on ‘jocose lies.’ I have to confess (and I know I’m not the only one) that I have often involuntarily justified some of the masculine disdain for feminine reasoning. Nearly always, I jump ahead with my intuition when I come into contact with a problem. My reason has to struggle to catch up with it, often with a great deal of clumsy tripping that always makes me game for anyone’s wit in conversation. Fibbing to children for the sake of their own amusement is one such instance where I refused to admit it was wrong, even with no logic to justify my position. The rationalization came later, and with the assistance of more articulate persons than myself.

First, there is a dichotomy in fantastic stories. It is difficult to see where children draw it, but it is evidenced in their reactions on seeing 'the man behind the curtain.’ I have witnessed bitter tears drawn from children who prematurely learned that Santa Claus died circa 483 A.D. in Italy—probably not having ever owned any reindeer and the only visit he ever made to a chimney being to drop a few pouches of coins down the smoke-stack. I have hardly ever seen this reaction when a littlie learned that Easter bunnies don’t lay eggs or that the tooth-fairy doesn’t exist. Perhaps others may observe that the reverse sentiment is true in their experience, but that is not to the purpose. The fact remains that in the same children of the same ages very diverse reactions are elicited.

The contrast between horrified bewilderment and stoic resignation is severe, and it does not always have anything to do with the superiority of the tale or the lovability of its characters. Some children even latch onto a story knowing from the beginning that it is a dream and love it still with a fiery intensity. Tolkien—ever the apologist of infant savvy—took issue with the author (or collector) Andrew Lang’s argument that fairytales:

…represent the young age of man true to his early loves, and have his unblunted edge of belief, a fresh appetite for marvels. ‘Is it true?’ is the great question children ask. (Fairy Books, Introduction)

With the merciless acumen a Tolkien reader has come to expect from the man that had the audacity to confess disappointment in Shakespeare, the Don tears this innocuous statement apart:

It seems fairly clear that Lang was using belief in its ordinary sense: belief that a thing exists or can happen in the real (primary) world. If so, then I fear that Lang’s words, stripped of sentiment, can only imply that the teller of marvellous tales to children, must, or may, or at any rate does trade on their credulity…What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub- creator’. He makes a Secondary World…Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world…The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken…You are then out in the Primary World again. (On Fairy-Stories: Children)

Then it isn’t really lying after all? Children know immediately what a myth is in their hearts, and they understand that what the author relates inside his own world is proper to that world? Looking to experience to test the hypothesis, it initially seems absolutely true. When little girls are told that mermaids have dark hair the colour of seaweed, they don’t often wrinkle up their noses as they would on seeing someone with green hair. It is a mermaid, and it’s perfectly fittng for them to have green hair.

On telling my little second cousin a story about a monster that had to devour people alive after his teeth had been broken, she gasped in horror, asked many questions, but later reversed to her former play without unperturbed. She even presented her own emotionally animated version of the story to her parents, as if at the age of three she knew that it was only a story and one that she could make her own. So there is no Man in the Moon, no Easter Bunny, no wicked faërie that steal newborns, and no werewolves living beneath the mossy pile of old uprooted railway tracks in the glen, and the best part is that children never really believed there were. Certainly, they acted as if they did, but that was only in the sphere of Pretend. After all, children with make-believe friends are hardly mentally ill.

However, what of the children who do weep on hearing the truth about Santa Claus? Nineteen years ago, I barely escaped a spanking for informing my little sisters of the location of his relics, they were so upset. And what of the moments where, even after telling little ones that wicked, watery Burda doesn’t exist, they still look about fearfully every time they walk past that muddy corner of the pond?

My cousin Jennifer and I remember the time we ate weeds that greatly resembled one of Rapunzel’s salads in an illustrated volume of fairytales (for we had concluded with five and four-year old logic that her diet must have effected such exquisite hair growth). Thanks to the tattling of a neighbour’s boy, we spent the whole afternoon guzzling pints of milk with my mother on the phone with Poison Control. Even if these bizarre instances are only found with abnormal children, i.e. the ‘exceptions that prove the rule’ (such a hateful saying), the children’s abnormality must be accounted for in itself. Do 5% of fairystories actually exert spells so forceful they force their way into the ‘Primary World’? Or is it a defect specific in the child and as abnormal as it would be in an adult?

Lucy Maud Montgomery—the beloved author of children’s books—had a less rigorous opinion on the child's mind than Tolkien. Every single work she ever produced was in effect a study of aesthetic philosophy, and all her books held to the argument that living a life in union with the Beautiful was only truly possible by remaining childlike.

As John Banim observed: ‘there is a world of difference between “childlike” and “childish.”’ So much in fact, that they represent two poles of man’s spirit at that stage. The latter is to be shrugged off more readily than an insect’s grotty, old exoskeleton and the former is to be clung to with unwavering tenacity.

Now in Maud’s novels, the children are more likely to wish tales from fancy to reality, and to never let go of the fantastic. Hence the young Davy’s interrogation in the third volume of the Anne of Green Gables series:

‘…Say, what is echo, Anne; I want to know.’
‘Echo is a beautiful nymph, Davy, living far away in the woods, and laughing at the world from among the hills.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Her hair and eyes are dark, but her neck and arms are white as snow. No mortal can ever see how fair she is. She is fleeter than a deer, and that mocking voice of hers is all that we can know of her. You can hear her calling at night; you can hear her laughing under the stars. But you can never see her. She flies afar if you follow her, and laughs at you always just over the next hill.’
‘Is that all true, Anne? Or is it a whopper?’ demanded Davy staring. (Anne of the Island: Chapter XXII; Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables)

Though Anne threw her hands up in despair that Davy couldn’t distinguish between a lie and a fairytale, she was likely forgetting an instance in her own childhood where she walked through a perfectly harmless wood nearly paralyzed with the fright inspired by her conjectures concerning the place. She had come out of that experience resolved to ‘ “be contented with everyday life.” ’

Lucy Maud Montgomery herself was very harsh on her characters who persisted on holding onto dreams and fancies instead of embracing the reality before them. Anne was almost severely punished for not seeing in chummy Gilbert the other half of her soul. Pat of Silver Bush bore the full brunt of idolizing her magical home. Emily of New Moon alone seemed to understand the true part that the faerie world plays in that of the concrete (though she had many faults of her own). She observed, as did Maud, that:

It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it, and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse, but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile. (The Alpine Path)

I remember a suspiciously Platonist priest, who used to call peculiarly beautiful places (mountain balds, mossy begs, rocky caverns, verdant glens, etc.) ‘thin places’--the space between our deceptively accessible, concrete realm and an other world being markedly slight at such points. It was not that these fair, little spots were perfected by the addition of faërie influence, but that they were already more hauntingly lovely than we could understand. They referred to another excellence even beyond themselves.

In Maud’s exquisite, childlike vision of the world, we see that there is a need for all the things we love and haunt us in lore to be at least a reflection of a reality beyond this mortal veil. G. K. Chesterton often observed that our very disappointment with the non-existence of ‘turnip ghosts’ was proof that there must be, somewhere, real ghosts. The very absurdity of the fantastic is due to its aping the realistic. Even shielding one’s eyes from biographical information about Tolkien, it is blatantly obvious that his Secondary World is modelled event for event, tenet for tenet, on what is—for millions—the true story of the Primary World.

Even as one acknowledges that the Seven Days obviously represented ages and not seven twenty-four hour periods, or that Job’s tale was entirely allegory, the gist remains that the events of Revelation must be true. Aristotle said that poetry was a reproduction of real life, altered slightly to ‘instruct and entertain.’ Poetry then must have some basis in real life. If the endless procession of morality tales and fables is to take any effect on the listener, the related incidents, though unnecessary to cool reason, must have happened in some way, somewhere.

If man is expected to live his life not first for himself, but for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then there had better not only be these three things, but Someone else who could set the example. Humble Peter, the childlike Apostle, whose enthusiasm always outran his prudence, understood this yearning very well. He addressed it directly in his second letter.


Fae Truth by Rachel Rudd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at foolishnessntears.blogspot.com.