Sadly, the cult surrounding Wilde’s “transient notoriety” has a lingering persistence. Happily, however, there are a growing band of Wilde’s admirers who are seeking him where he wishes to be sought—in his art.
John Burrows, artistic director of the Bare and Ragged Theatre, based at Stratford-upon-Avon, organized a Festival of Wilde at the Edinburgh Fringe. Apart from the stage dramatization of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which the Bare and Ragged Theatre had staged for the past six years, always to sellout crowds, a specially devised play, entitled Out of the Depths, was also performed. This was an “impressionistic celebration of Wilde’s art”, concentrating on Wilde’s literary genius while downplaying the “transient notoriety” of the court case, which is only “vaguely mentioned”.
The best-selling author Adrian Plass, writing in the Christian Herald, compared Wilde to G. K. Chesterton. “I think my own fascination with these writers . . . is something to do with sensing that there is a deep desire to be good and lovable beneath the public displays of personal style and crackling paradox.” Although Plass admits that “this is much more clearly evident in the case of Chesterton”, he emphasizes “the conventional morality at the heart of Wilde’s art, even in such pieces as Salome and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both vilified as obscene and decadent in his lifetime.” Plass continues in words that closely parallel those of Shaw:
The soul of Oscar Wilde, continually reaching for and retreating from the Catholic church, is to be found in its purest form in his prose, his poetry and his plays, rather than in those things which ambushed the pursuit of his deepest instincts.
Wilde’s deepest instincts, those that invariably triumphed in his art even when “ambushed” in his life, were profoundly spiritual, not carnal. This spiritual dimension was emphasized by another writer, Mary Kenny. Commenting on Wilde’s reception into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, Kenny drew parallels with other leading Decadent writers in England and France who “took refuge in Catholicism”. It seems that for Wilde, as for so many of his circle, the way of Decadence became the Way of the Cross.
A further twist to the Catholic dimension in Wilde’s art emerged from deep within the very heart of Rome. A report in the Irish Independent stated that the Vatican had “rehabilitated Oscar Wilde on the eve of the centenary of his death, praising the turn to spiritual values and ‘understanding of God’s love’ that followed Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading gaol.” Writing in La Civilta Cattolica, a Vatican-backed Jesuit quarterly, Father Antonio Spadaro said that Wilde had seen into the depths of his own soul after a lifetime of “degradation, vanity and frivolity”. In his last works, such as De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, he had made “an implicit journey of faith”, wrote Father Spadaro.
Father Spadaro could have added that the same implicit affirmation of faith is present in many of Wilde’s earlier works, such as his fairy stories, his controversial novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and many of his plays, particularly in the challenging symbolism of Salome.
Perhaps the last word should belong to Wilde himself. “We are all in the gutter,” says Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the “marsh-water” or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look at him in the gutter but with him at the stars.
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MAKING OSCAR WILD
Unmasking Oscar Wilde’s Opposition to “Pathological” Gay Marriage
IT’S FUNNY HOW URBAN MYTHS can mask reality. Take, for instance, the peculiar case of Oscar Wilde. Ask the average modern intellectual what he knows about Wilde, and he will probably tell you that he was a brilliant artist who was persecuted for his homosexuality and deserves to be remembered as a martyr for the cause of sexual liberation who was sacrificed on the altar of puritanical Victorian values. Ask a homosexual intellectual, and he might even go so far as to describe Wilde as a “gay icon”, a poster child for the homosexual movement who has inspired many young men to “come out of the closet”. Such is the myth. The reality is very different.
If we take the trouble to unmask the myths surrounding Wilde, we discover a man who is very different from the one imagined by our self-deluded moderns. We find, in fact, a brilliant artist (the moderns get that part of the story right, at least) who was never at peace with his homosexuality, who never managed to “come out of the closet” and who, when at last faced with the reality of his situation, described his homosexual predilections as his “pathology”.
Let’s play the daring game of removing the masks of self-deception. Let’s dare to look reality in the eye, however unpleasant, ugly—or beautiful—it might be. Let’s declare ourselves liberated from outmoded forms of repressed truthfulness. Let’s whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, let’s face facts.
The first thing we must know about Wilde is that he was at war with himself. Wilde the would-be saint and Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other. In this he was no different from the rest of us. Throughout his life, even at those times when he was at his most “decadent”, he retained a deep love for the Person of Christ and a lasting reverence for the Catholic Church. In this, indeed, he differs from many, if not most, of us. Certainly he differs in this from most of those active homosexuals who seek to claim Wilde as one of their own.
Wilde almost converted to Catholicism as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Dublin; he almost converted as an undergraduate at Oxford. There were no doctrinal differences preventing him from being received into the Church. He believed everything the Church believed and even spoke eloquently and wittily in defense of Catholic dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception. The only reason he failed to follow the logic of his Catholic convictions was a fear of being disinherited by his father if he did so. Years later, after his fall from favor following the scandal surrounding his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, he spoke wistfully of his reluctant decision to turn his back on the Church. “Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic”, he confided to a journalist. “The artistic side of the Church would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.” Wilde would be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, an event that not only meant that his particular “fairy story” would end happily ever after but that, through the healing power of the Last Rites, would finally cure him of his “degeneracies”.
In truth, however, Wilde never completely turned his back on the Church. Throughout his life, and particularly through the medium of his art, he continued to reveal his love for Christ and the Catholic Church. His poetry exhibits either a selfless love for Christ or, at its darkest, a deep self-loathing in the face of the ugliness of his own sinfulness. His short stories are almost always animated by a deep Christian morality, with “The Selfish Giant” deserving a timeless accolade as one of the finest Christian fairy stories ever written. His plays are more than merely comedies or tragedies; they are morality plays in which virtue is vindicated and vice vanquished. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction, the overriding moral of which is that to kill the conscience is to kill the soul.
“You knew what my Art was to me,” Wilde wrote plaintively to Lord Alfred Douglas, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as mere marsh-water to red wine”. These words, written from prison to the man who was largely responsible for the scandal that caused his downfall, show the extent to which Wilde knew that the Christianity expressed through his art was far more important than the sinful passions of the flesh to which he had succumbed. In the same letter to Douglas, he also referred to the homosexuality that had been the bane of his life during the 1890s as his “
pathology”, his sickness.
Is this the voice of a “sexual liberator”? Hardly. It is the voice of one who had finally freed himself from the slavery of sin. Far from being a sexual liberator, Wilde’s life climaxed with a liberation from his sexuality or, at least, a liberation from the slavish addiction to the lustful manifestation of his sexuality.
Would Wilde have supported “gay marriage”? Hardly. He would not have considered it either “gay” or a “marriage”. He would have called it what it is: a “pathology”.
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TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION
AS WITH MOST THINGS that claim to be modern, science fiction is not really modern at all. It is as old as mythology. Take, for example, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. It has all the ingredients of science fiction. Two men, a father and son, develop new technology that enables them to fly. The older and wiser man, Daedalus, cautions his young and impetuous son against taking the technology too far. Icarus ignores the warning. Putting too much faith in technology, he falls to his death.
Similarly, science fiction is not so much postmodern as postmedieval. One need look no further than Saint Thomas More’s Utopia for a vision of a strange world, unknown to man, where alien people do things very differently from the way things are done in our world. Two hundred years later, in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift wrote about an intrepid aquanaut who journeys to strange microscopic and macroscopic worlds, who encounters weird horselike creatures enamored of platonic philosophy and who visits strange islands that float above the world. A hundred years after Swift, Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein, a tale in which modern science meets ancient necromancy in a chilling embrace. Again, however, Shelley’s tale owes an unpayable debt to the past. Dr. Frankenstein could, after all, have been called Dr. Faustenstein.
What, then, do all these grandparents of science fiction have in common? Apart from their predilection for strange places and “new technology”, they are united in the morality of their message. In each case, the strangeness and novelty are only means to the moral end, the “science” in the fiction being merely a servant of the morality that the author wishes to convey. Of course, the morality may vary from author to author. In some cases, the fiction will be a servant of good morals; in other cases, it will become a slave of bad morals. Since, however, morals, whether good or bad, are always present, the fiction is to be judged accordingly—that is, according to specifically moral criteria. And, of course, it is the morality that roots the fiction in the facts of everyday life. Morality is the very ingredient, the spice of life, that makes a story relevant to the real world. Its application within a story makes it applicable to the world beyond the story. This being so, it is chilling to see how truth is often more real, and more terrifying, than science fiction.
Take, for instance, C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, the final book in his Space Trilogy. One might think that its plot is fantastic beyond the realms of all possibility. Surely no government organization could be as cruel and as sinister as the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). Yet today, in the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E.) has called for in vitro fertilization to be made freely available to any childless couple that wants it. Such a policy, if adopted, will mean the slaughter of countless innocent babies, discarded in the test tube as inferior specimens.
Returning to That Hideous Strength, surely nothing in the real world could be as bizarre as the N.I.C.E.’s decision to use the scientifically “revived” head of the executed murderer Alcasan as the “head” of their organization. Yet today, in the United States, the head of a former baseball star, Ted Williams, is being preserved, floating in a stainless steel can kept in a freezer vault, by a company called Alcor (zan?). Meanwhile, his decapitated corpse is suspended in a nine-foot-high tank of liquid nitrogen.
In life, Williams was a dashing athlete who served in the Second World War and fought as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. As a star player with the Boston Red Sox, he achieved the highest batting average of the modern baseball era. In death, his corpse casts morbid light on the practice of cryonics, the “science” of freezing bodies in the hope that one day scientists may be able to revive them. For a reported fee of $136,000, his body has been stored along with sixty others at an industrial park in Scottsdale, Arizona. The facility is run by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has more than six hundred subscribers paying a monthly fee so that they can also be deep-frozen when they die.
It is indeed a weird and frightening world in which we live, a world that would stretch the fertile imagination of Thomas More, Mary Shelley and C. S. Lewis to the very limits. In pursuit of a scientific utopia, Frankenstein Inc., trading as Alcorzan, prepares to revive corpses from the dead while the N.I.C.E. calls for widespread experiments on unborn babies. Truth is indeed stranger than science fiction.
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HOLLYWOOD AND THE “HOLY WAR”
“EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT DAMAGE is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family” These words, written by Pope Pius XI in 1936, have lost none of their potency. On the contrary, with every passing year they seem to cry out more plaintively than ever to a seemingly heedless humanity.
There is no denying that motion pictures represent an important weapon in the culture war that is gripping the world in the first years of the new Christian millennium. In the battle of ideas and the struggle of contending faiths and philosophies, the medium of film remains a powerful and formidable weapon. Islam, resurgent and resilient, has challenged the fundamental tenets of the West’s dominant and decadent materialism. The terrorist attack by Islamic militants on the United States might not be sanctioned by the vast majority of the world’s one billion Muslims, but it does highlight the gulf that separates and alienates Islam from the liberal secularism of Britain and America. The two Weltanschauungen are ultimately, and profoundly, incompatible.
Where, however, does Christianity place itself in this struggle between contending faiths and philosophies? Do we, as Christians, have a moral duty to side with one side or the other?
The sapient and salient words of Pope Pius XI would suggest that Christians must spurn the overtly agnostic, and often covertly atheistic, assumptions of the prevailing secularism and scepticism of the postmodernist West. Indeed, such is the cultural or anticultural power of Hollywood that the very concept of “the West” sometimes seems synonymous with little more than the west coast of California. Does that mean, however, that we should sympathize with the view of many Muslims that the United States is the “Great Satan”? The desolate decadence, posing as culture and regurgitated from Hollywood, is worthy of the contempt of all Christians—and, indeed, is treated with contempt by millions of good Americans. The United States might not be the “Great Satan”, as Muslim fundamentalists would have us believe, but there seems little doubt that the prince of lies has found a very powerful mouthpiece, and foothold, in much (though not all) that emerges from Hollywood. If, however, the prince of lies has gained a foothold in Hollywood, the “Holy Wars” of militant Islam have precious little claim to any communion with the Prince of Peace.
Perhaps the position of Christianity in relation to the war between Islam and secular humanism is best summed up in the words of the Bishop of Como in an interview with the Saint Austin Review (StAR). “There are, it seems to me, clear signs of decay . . . exposing Catholicism to the threat of being swamped by violent religious forces, such as Islam; or by the sort of mushy relativism that often goes hand in hand with the widespread availability of a comfortable lifestyle.” Certainly these are somber and sobering thoughts.
Are Christians therefore caught between the devil and the deep blue sea? Or, considering the Bishop’s evocative descript
ion of relativism as “mushy”, are we caught between the fierce and formidable deserts of Islam and the stinking and stagnant swamps of postmodernity?
Furthermore—and here is the crux of the matter—if we are caught between these formidable enemies, should we be forced to take sides? The deep blue sea might be more desirable than the devil, but is the desert more desirable than the swamp? Do we have no choice except dehydration of the spirit or drowning in the dregs of decay?
In truth—and “truth” is the operative word—Christians find themselves in the middle because Christianity is the Center. Christians have, as their infallible Guide, Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Through Him, and through the infallible guidance of the Church, His Mystical Body on earth, we can and shall prevail.
In the war between emergent Islam and declining decadence, we must arm ourselves with the weapons of the cultural and spiritual struggle. Apart from prayer, always the most potent of weapons, our army includes the holiest of saints, the mightiest of philosophers and, last but not least, the giants of art and literature. Our army includes Saint Michael, Saint Dominic and Saint Francis; Socrates, Aristotle and Plato; Giotto, Michelangelo and Da Vinci; Palestrina, Mozart and Mahler; and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Thus is the army of God assembled, rank after rank beneath the radiant splendor of our Lord’s and Lady’s banner. Called to arms, the Church Militant prepares for what could prove the mother of all battles.
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