We Mustn’t Ask Ourselves What It Says but What It Means

Things have been crazy at work, and it's taxing my undiagnosed ADHD something fierce.  I've been reading a lot, bouncing around between books - astronaut memoirs, random sci-fi, Tolkien, Le Guin, Shakespeare's Kings - which, despite my lack of attention span, still helps me wind down (certainly more than watching sportsball of late).

Trying not to doomscroll too much, as my mental health is already tenuous at best.  Yet I see that the orange rapist/felon/fascist plans to send his brownshirts into Portland, all based on MAGA's conspiracy theories and other fever dreams.

It's a big stretch, but all this insanity reminds me of a debate over heresies between William of Baskerville and Abo of Fossanova in The Name of the Rose:

“[T]he Patarine preaching of Arnold of Brescia, in Rome, more than two hundred years ago, drove the mob of rustics to burn the houses of the nobles and the cardinals.” 

“Arnold tried to draw the magistrates of the city into his reform movement. They did not follow him, and he found support among the crowds of the poor and the outcast. He was not responsible for the violence and the anger with which they responded to his appeals for a less corrupt city.” 

“The city is always corrupt.” 

“The city is the place where today live the people of God, of whom you, we, are the shepherds. It is the place of scandal in which the rich prelates preach virtue to poor and hungry people. The Patarine disorders were born of this situation. They are sad, but not incomprehensible. The Catharists are something else. That is an Oriental heresy, outside the doctrine of the church. I don’t know whether they really commit or have committed the crimes attributed to them. I know they reject matrimony, they deny hell. I wonder whether many acts they have not committed have been attributed to them only because of the ideas (surely unspeakable) they have upheld.” 

“And you tell me that the Catharists have not mingled with the Patarines, and that both are not simply two of the faces, the countless faces, of the same demoniacal phenomenon?” 

“I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life. I say that very often the simple do not know much about doctrine. I say that often hordes of simple people have confused Catharist preaching with that of the Patarines, and these together with that of the Spirituals. The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of distinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist. It is always done because on earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are...”

A big stretch, as I said.  Regardless, it does almost feel like Antifa is akin to the Fraticelli to some extent in the current political context.

Selah.