Chairman's Blog

Reposted from June 2014. A footnote to what I write here is an interesting fact I have since learned about 'Puritan' fashions: the Roundheads and Pilgrim Fathers and so on wearing black. The contrast between Roundheads and Cavaliers in the English Civil War derived from two different inspirations: the Cavaliers took their fashions from Catholic France, the Roundheads from the Protestant Netherlands. And where had the Netherlands got it from? Spain: a natural influence because of the Spanish control over much of it. This is of course an historical irony, but even in its Catholic origin it was a statement about rejecting frivolity and licentiousness. (See this section of a Wiki article.)

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This is both ugly and glamorous.

Continuing our series on a Catholic approach to fashion, I interrupt the posts of Queen of Puddings with a little philosophical interlude. I promised to say something about how the Protestant attitude is different from the Catholic, something referred to (without being developed) by Tracey Rowland.

Our inveterate commenter 'Eufrosnia' wants to know if there is anything wrong with dressing in an ugly way. Of course there is.

1. Ugliness is a natural evil. (Will anyone disagree with this?)

2. To embody it is bad. (This just follows from 1)

3. To do so deliberately or through negligence is morally bad. (This just follows from 2.)


To build an ugly building is wrong, if it is done deliberately or negligently (when it can be avoided without serious inconvenience). To dress in an ugly way is worse. It evinces a lack of gratitude to God for one's own creation, a lack of respect for oneself, and a contempt of others.  There are even more fundamental issues involved here, as this post will argue.

The trouble with searching for 'Grunge' is that you get the fashion-industry imitation. The real thing is a street style and far more extreme.

Dietrich von Hildebrand noted the unfortunate tendency in some of the more rigorist Catholic circles before the Council to disparage natural goods, because they had failed to distinguish them from worldly goods. Worldly goods, like money and worldly honours, have no intrinsic value. To set one's heart on them is to set one's heart on a vanity: on nothing. Natural goods, like beauty, have intrinsic value. Beautiful things were created good by God, or if man-made, they reflect His goodness. To reject natural goods is to reject the goodness of creation and its capacity to reflect God, and lead hearts to God.

Such a rejection is characteristic of Protestantism, and this forms the background, looking at the big picture, of the crisis of fashion we are living through. The Protestants taught that at the Fall nature human became depraved, evil, and by parallel the created world falls under suspicion. The Protestant attack on religious art did not limit itself to devotional images: it included Gregorian chant. Of course it is impossible to exclude the artful use of created things to raise the heart to God completely from religious architecture and liturgy, but Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists settled at different points on this dismal road. The Anglicans smashed the stained glass and abolished the antiphons of Vespers and Compline. The Lutherans insisted that no syllable have more than one musical note. The Calvinists got rid of the organs. All of them created white-washed churches which look like neo-classical meeting rooms instead of holy places.

The Protestant mindset had it that to contemplate a devotional image - a crucifix, say - is to contemplate something other than Christ, to give to the image what we owe to Christ. It is idolatry. By extension, to contemplate any beautiful thing is to focus our attention away from God, onto something else. Something, in fact, which is worthless or even evil, because all created things have been tainted by the Fall.

The Catholic attitude is that by contemplating the crucifix we look beyond it, and raise our minds and hearts to the real Christ. By extension, any beautiful thing can raise the heart to God. Religious and devotional art, of course, expresses all sorts of specific truths, but all art which aims at beauty expresses the Catholic doctrine that God's creation is good even after the Fall. It lost Grace, and was wounded, by the Fall, but it did not lose all its value.

On clothing in particular, the more extreme Protestants adopted a sort of uniform of black and white, without colour or decoration, and with the simplest form. In fact this can look extremely elegant, but the logic of the position would suggest it should not please the eye at all.

Just as devotional images were thought to take the mind away from what they represented, it is easy to develop the idea that clothes distract one from the real person wearing them. The real thing, devotionally, is supposed to be something entirely spiritual: as if the Incarnation had never taken place. Similarly, the real thing in any material thing, including humans, might be thought to be something beneath and separate from the outward appearance. You can see this idea developing in the Enlightenment, in the writings of philosophers imbued with Protestant culture. This is essentially the Heresy of Formlessness which Martin Mosebach talks about, and I make no apology for mentioning this book again. Anyone interested in these issues should read it. 

Applied to the liturgy you get the Novus Ordo. Applied to clothing you get grunge.

In reality, we are incarnated in our bodies, and we express ourselves in our clothes. Garments do not hide us: they clothe us.

This was noted in their newsletter of last weekend. It seems they have a building for the school, which is often a big obstacle to opening a school.

The Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest has a very successful, highly professional, bi-lingual school in Belgium, the Brussels International Catholic School, with the energetic English priest of the Institute, Canon William Hudson as headmaster.  It is wonderful news that the Institute is starting something in England; I wish them luck.

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A Roman sacrifice: the (male) priest has covered his head.

This weekend I have a letter in the Catholic Herald about hats.

I've written about headcoverings in church here, and the decline of hats in fashion here.

What I didn't mention in the letter is that the view I put forward in it, which I think is overwhelmingly plausible--that the discipline on head-coverings in the primitive Church was at the time a counter-cultural sign, as a reversal of Jewish practice--contradicts the standard narrative explaining why Catholic women are no long obliged to cover their heads in church today. This view found its way into the 1976 Instruction of the CDF, Inter insignores: that St Paul's stern demand that what he describes as a universal custom among Christians was 'probably inspired by the customs of the period', or, more simply, was a 'cultural fact'.


Inter insignores is a desperate attempt to stop post-Vatican II 'updating' throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The CDF wanted to argue that some of what St Paul and the New Testament in general said about the differences between the sexes was culturally-conditioned and could be ignored, but other things are of perennial and fundamental importance. It is a tricky argument to make, because what St Paul says about male headship and women covering their heads is so much more emphatic and theologically grounded than anything in the New Testament about women not being allowed to be priests. Indeed, if you want to construct a scriptural argument against female ordination, a topic not explicitly addressed anywhere in the canon, what St Paul says about the roles of the sexes is going to have to be your starting point: there is really nothing else.

To reiterate the point about the historically indefensible idea that the head covering rules were 'culturally conditioned', St Paul says that men should uncover their heads, and women cover them. In Jewish practice men's head-coverings were far more important than women's: and still are. In ancient Greek custom (to generalise) neither men nor women covered their heads in cultic contexts, though both could wear garlands of flowers. Anyone can see for themselves scores of depictions of sacrifices on Greek vases from a Google image search. In ancient Roman custom men or women who actually carried out a sacrifice covered the head, but no one else did (apart from those garlands): again, the are scores of ancient depictions which underline the point. There simply is no contemporary cultural practice corresponding to St Paul's rules.

Sir,

Laura Cathcart (Feature, May 26) is correct that men should take off their hats indoors, but this is a very recent custom. Prints and paintings confirm that men of the 18th and even 19th centuries thought nothing of wearing hats in coffee houses. Hat-wearing in the houses of Parliament was so widespread it became part of procedure. Only the Highest Anglicans took hats off to visit churches; earlier, Puritans had doffed them to pray, but replaced them to hear the sermon. The general rule of no men's hats indoors may owe something to the end of the 'Little Ice Age', which lowered temperatures from the 16th to 19th centuries, with a number of consequences for fashion.

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John Stuart Mill

Like everyone else involved in universities and schools, I have had to undergo training on dealing with students who might be at risk of 'radicalisation', as part of the Government's 'Prevent' strategy. In fact I think anyone can access and do this little on-line course. There has been a lot of criticism of the Government's policies in this area, but this aspect at least seems pretty sensible. It contained some important insights into how people are drawn into dodgy groups, which correspond with what I have read about recruitment done by cults, which is of course a pretty close parallel to what is happening. I can't comment on other aspects of Government policy, but I'm not uncomfortable with what I am myself being asked to do as a university tutor. It just looks like good practice: a matter of being concerned with student welfare.

The other, paradoxically, is with non-judgmentalism. I took a screen shot of one remark made in the training. We must keep people safe from certain ideas and world views, because they are harmful. They are harmful to people who end up being the victims of terrorist atrocities, but they are also harmful, and hideously so, to the people who are drawn into them. It is important to make that point because where we have a duty of care, or a simple concern for student welfare, we are concerned directly with the good of the young person in front of us; it not a just a matter of being a sort of auxiliary policeman trying to prevent a possible future crime.

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