The Difference Between Being a Do-Gooder and Doing Good

One of the best known of Jesus’ parables is recounted by St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, verses twenty-five through thirty-seven. The passage begins with a lawyer asking Jesus the question “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Even though St. Luke tells us that the lawyer was not asking this in good faith but in an attempt, rather, to trip Jesus up, the Lord does not respond as you or I would probably be tempted to do to one of the barristers, solicitors, and attorneys in general of our own day by saying “Fat chance that someone in your line of work will ever make it”. No, Jesus passed on this opportunity to tell an excellent lawyer joke (1) and instead turned the question around and asked the lawyer what the Torah had to say about it. The lawyer answers this by quoting the two verses that Jesus Himself would quote when asked which is the greatest commandment, and Jesus commended this answer, but the lawyer then came back with a second question “Who is my neighbour?” It is then that Jesus relates the parable in which a man is robbed, stripped, and left to die on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and is left there by a priest and a Levite who happen to pass by but is rescued by a passing Samaritan who treats his wounds and takes him to an inn to take care of him. This parable has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

I would like to tell a different parable that begins in the same way Jesus’ did, but takes a rather different turn towards the end, hoping, that in doing so, I am not committing a terrible act of blasphemy. Here it goes.

A man is on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem when he is beset by thieves, robbers, and cutthroats, relieved of his possessions, and left bloody, wounded, and mangled on the side of the road. Shortly thereafter a priest comes along, followed a little later by a Levite, and both avert their eyes and walk on the other side of the road, rather than trying to help the poor soul. Then the Samaritan comes along. He is outraged at the plight of his fellow man and the callousness shown by the priest and Levite. In Jerusalem, Jericho, and all the surrounding communities he circulates a petition demanding that highways be made safer for travelers and that legislation be passed forcing people to stop and help the victims of highway robberies or face a heavy fine or possibly a lashing and prison time. He calls for the establishment of a public fund to take care of those victimized by highway crime and for taxes to be imposed on the priests and Levites to pay for this fund. He makes a nuisance of himself lobbying for these reforms before the Sanhedrin and in the courts of Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate and King Herod. Eventually, word of his crusade reaches Rome, and a committee of Senators invites him to come and present his case for highway security and social programs for robbery victims before Caesar himself. Meanwhile, the man who was robbed remains on the side of the road and dies.

This, of course, is the Parable of the Do-Gooder Samaritan.

It is one of the curiosities of the English language that the expression “do-gooder” does not refer to people who actually “do good”. Indeed, the expression is one of ironic contempt that suggests that there is a disconnect between the good the person to which it is applied thinks he is doing and the actual outcome of his actions. Sometimes it is just a matter of ineffectiveness in which the do-gooder has good intentions and a noble goal but fails to actually accomplish anything. Often, however, the do-gooder might accomplish harm either instead of the good he intends or which is greater than and outweighs the smaller good he actually achieves. A do-gooder typically displays naivety of one kind or another, ranging from a simple lack of the experience and know-how necessary to accomplish his lofty goals to a kind of tunnel vision in which he is so focused upon achieving one particular ideal that he is blinded to the negative consequences of his attempts to achieve it.

We usually associate the idea of a do-gooder with that of a social and moral crusader. A crusader of this type is someone who attempts to bring about a particular end either by persuading the government to pass legislation or by organizing private citizens to take action. The interesting thing about this methodology is that it distributes the cost of accomplishing a desired goal among many people, either the organized private citizens or the taxpayers as a whole, and can sometimes lead to the blame being distributed if something goes wrong as well. Meanwhile, the crusader or do-gooder gets the full credit if something good is actually accomplished. This may or may not justify an attitude of cynicism towards the motives of the reformer but it is worth taking note of and contrasting with the example of the Good Samaritan of Jesus’ parable, who when leaving the robbed man with the innkeeper told the latter to add the cost of any additional assistance that might be required to his bill.

Another contrast between do-gooders and people like the Good Samaritan who actually do good is that the latter are concerned with personally doing the right thing whereas the former are obsessed with improving everybody else. This leaves other people with the impression that the do-gooder is a self-satisfied, self-righteous, better-than-thou type of person, an impression that is in no way lessened when he enlists the help of the government in accomplishing his goals. All sorts of ridiculous legislation that is far more of an obnoxious nuisance to most people than it is a benefit can be attributed to this cause in the last century alone. Some of this legislation, like Prohibition, the biggest single effect of which was to make the mob rich and powerful, was long ago discredited and rescinded. Other such legislation, no-less discredited, for some reason remains on the books. Canadian and American federal drug laws are a prime example. Other laws that were initiated by do-gooders and which harass people more than they help them are laws which prohibit people from driving when their blood alcohol level is above an arbitrary percentage point regardless of whether they are capable of driving safely in that condition or not, laws which jack up the price of tobacco, prohibit smoking sections in restaurants and drive smokers out into the cold whenever they want a puff or two, laws that prevent an employer from offering a man a high enough wage to support his wife and children lest a single woman be discriminated against, and laws that ensure that that an employer, if he wishes to remain free of harassing lawsuits, will hire a certain percentage of ethnic and racial minorities regardless of their qualifications. Any legislation associated with the concept of human rights can be regarded as falling within the category we are discussing.

Ultimately though, the worst thing about being a do-gooder is that it is a cop out of the ethical or moral life. It is far easier, to sign up for some “save the world” cause or the other – take your pick, they are a dime a dozen – and try to fix other people, than it is to try and do the right thing yourself, to cultivate the virtues and good character, and to seek after the good, the true, and the beautiful. The latter is the hard work of a lifetime and the rewards, while enduring, take longer to appear whereas the former is easy and the rewards are instantly gratifying.

(1) Have you heard the one about the dispute between God and the devil over the fence between Heaven and Hell? The fence was run down and it was the devil's turn to have it fixed. He, being the blighter he is, did nothing about it. God pointed out his negligence and he replied "So sue me". When God said that He might do just that the devil came back with "Oh yeah. Where are you going to find a lawyer?".

Progressive Thought Police Are At It Again

Down south of the border, in Barack Hussein Obama’s America, the anti-racist Stalinists are currently indulging themselves in their favourite pastime, a Two Minutes Hate. The Emmanuel Goldstein over whom they are working themselves up into an orgasmic frenzy of rage, is Donald Tokowitz Sterling, the lawyer and real estate developer who owns the basketball team the Los Angeles Clippers. The NBA has banned him for life and fined him two and a half million dollars for committing crimethink. More specifically, he complained over his phone to his mistress that she had posted a picture of herself with Magic Johnson and told her that he did not like her publicly associating with black people and bringing them to basketball games. He apparently was unaware that she was recording the conversation with the intention of using it against him, possibly in revenge over a lawsuit his wife had initiated against her demanding the return of some expensive gifts Sterling had given her.

From what I have read about Sterling over the last week he strikes me as a rather repulsive person, although I hesitate to express such an opinion lest I be thought to be lending even the smallest amount of support to the racial grievance industry which is busy manufacturing phony outrage and milking this situation for all it can get out of it. As for his remarks, which, having been made privately ought to have remained private and would have remained private had his mistress and the mainstream media been possessed of even a modicum of decency, I am reminded of these remarks of Auberon Waugh from thirty-eight years ago:

I can quite understand people wishing there were fewer blacks around, and am not particularly shocked to hear such sentiments expressed although I might say, 'Tut, tut'. I can quite understand people feeling it wrong that others should be discriminated against on account of their colour, and might even give a feeble clap or two if somebody put this case forcefully enough. (1)

The point Waugh was arguing for, in the article in which he made these remarks, was that racist ideologues and progressives determined to stamp out racist thought or at least the expression of it were both pompous, silly, and bossy and that neither ought to be taken seriously. This was an excellent point for the time in which it was made. Since that time it has become evident that the anti-racists progressives are far more capable of imposing their views on the public and harassing and harming their opponents than the racist ideologues and so, while my own sentiments are similar to those expressed by Waugh in the quoted remarks, I would have to say that my clapping would probably be even more feeble than his.

The self-righteous, progressive crusade to eliminate all racist thought, a carryover in spirit if not in content from progressivism’s roots in Calvinist Puritanism, has created a very toxic culture indeed, if it is now regarded as acceptable and even desirable that a man be punished with a couple of million dollars’ worth of fines, a lifetime ban, and probably the forced sale of his team, over remarks that were supposed to be private. This toxic culture has unfortunately spilled over into other areas that have nothing to do with race.

Up here, for example, in the true north strong and free, the Law Societies of Ontario and Nova Scotia have just voted to ban from the bar any lawyer who has graduated from the law school which Trinity Western University, an evangelical, Protestant university in British Columbia, is working to establish. It is not a question of the competency of TWU law school graduates. Rather, it has to do with the university’s covenant, in which students and faculty agree to live according to the rules of ethics taught by the Christian faith. This includes, of course, the rule against sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and by marriage, the Christian university means marriage as Jesus, quoting the book of Genesis, defined it, i.e., what happens when a man leaves his father and mother, is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.

That a Christian school would expect its students to abide by Christian rules is hardly surprising. This sort of policy is exactly what one would expect such a school to have and such policies form part of the appeal Christian schools have to families who do not want to send their children into the hedonism that is the culture on so many secular campuses and, believe it or not, to many students themselves, who may prefer a campus cultural climate in which they are not constantly under pressure to conform to a secular, pleasure worshipping, lifestyle.

So why is that the legal associations of Ontario and Nova Scotia think this is something to ban TWU graduates over?

The policy, we are told by the Law Societies and by those who support them in this ban, discriminates against those who are sexually attracted to members of their own sex. It is therefore, they say, bigoted and against Canadian values and should not be allowed.

Most of TWU’s supporters would argue that their policy is not discriminatory. TWU’s covenant does not single out homosexuals. It requires everybody to abstain from sex outside of marriage. Homosexuals are a small percentage of the general population and one does not really expect that the student body of TWU would be any different. Therefore, the rule affects far more heterosexuals than it does homosexuals. Nor is the traditional Christian definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman discriminatory in that men who are attracted to men are not barred from marrying women and women who are attracted to women are not barred from marrying men.

Indeed, it is tempting to argue that what is truly discriminatory is the policy of the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society. (2) This argument, after all, is true. By banning graduates of the TWU law school from practicing law in Ontario and Nova Scotia over a school policy that has nothing to do with their students professional competence and which arises out of the University’s Christian faith, these legal associations are discriminating against TWU graduates because of the Christianity of their alma mater. This is religious discrimination and Jewish attorney, news commentator, and conservative Ezra Levant has superbly argued against it on these very grounds. (3)

I would put forward a different argument, however. I would argue that if we have come so far that two provincial law societies have voted against the accreditation of a law school because it is part of a university that holds to the faith that shaped so many of the traditions and institutions of our country, we have a bigger problem than discrimination to deal with. The problem is that the progressive campaign to stomp out racist thinking has expanded into a crusade against all sorts of other ideas that progressives consider to be bigoted and discriminatory. Just as the real enemy of progressive anti-racism has always been white people rather than a generic concept of racial hatred (black rappers whose lyrics are filled with far more hateful and even violent rhetoric against whites than Sterling’s remarks are not given the same treatment) so the real targets of the progressive campaigns against sexism and homophobia are the traditional family and the religion that shaped Western civilization. The left has declared an all-out war on Western civilization – its peoples, its culture, and its traditional religion. If we truly wish to defend the Christian faith in this war, we must reject the progressive doctrine of anti-racism upon which their successful campaigns have been built and the toxic anti-Western culture it has spawned.

(1) Auberon Waugh, “Unfit for Publication”, The Spectator, July 9, 1976, republished as “Che Guevera of the West Midlands” in Brideshead Benighted ((Little, Brown and Company: Boston and Toronto, 1986) pp. 153-156)
(2) The Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario) voted to reject the TWU law school’s accreditation on April 24th, The Nova Scotia Barristers Society voted the next day that they would accept the school’s accreditation but only on condition that the school abandon its Christian covenant.
(3) http://www.torontosun.com/2014/04/28/ban-on-christian-values

Three Cheers For the Supreme Court

Those who sit as judges in Her Majesty’s courts perform a role that calls not only for an extensive knowledge of the law but for the virtues of justice and prudence and above all else for wisdom. The higher the court and the more final its decision the more vital it is that that its member judges possess these qualities. It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that the Chief Justice of Canada and the eight Puisne Judges who with the Chief Justice make up the highest court in the land, be models of Solomonic wisdom.

I have not always been impressed by the decisions that our courts have issued. Indeed, decision after decision to give the perpetrators of serious crimes a slap on the wrist while allowing frivolous and expensive lawsuits by people whose feelings have been hurt or, even worse, who wish to use the courts to harass their ideological opponents, have often left the impression that the path to appointment to the bench starts in the monkey cage at the zoo.

This was not the case with the ruling the Supreme Court handed the Prime Minister’s Office last Friday. Asked to review the constitutionality of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals for reforming the Senate, the Supreme Court told him that any such reforms would require the consent of the provinces. To make major reforms he would need the consent of a majority of the promises, to abolish it outright would require unanimous consent.

In issuing this ruling, the Supreme Court did its job and did it superbly. It did not create new law by fiat, but reminded the Prime Minister – and the Opposition Leader who has been beating drums for Senate abolition – of what they should have already known, namely, that Canada has a constitution, with a formula for amendment, and that there are no shortcuts to amendment because changing the constitution is a far more serious process than changing the law and is not something to be done on the quick. This is something that Stephen Harper, of all people, should have known because he is leader of the Conservative Party, and respect for the constitution and an unwillingness to allow it to be changed at a whim is a fundamental Tory principle.

It is not a question of whether Senate reform is in itself desirable or whether or not the specific reforms proposed by Prime Minister Harper are good or bad. That the Senate is in need of serious reform has been obvious for decades. The need is there but it is not urgent, despite the recent media hype over how certain Senators have abused their expense accounts. The Prime Minister’s proposals were for Senators to be elected to office and for term limits to be set for them. While I can understand why he thinks these are good ideas they are not the kind of reforms I would like to see. I think that the Senate should remain an appointed body but that control over who the Governor General appoints should be removed from the Prime Minister’s Office and put in the hands of an appointment committee composed of representatives of the provincial governments. I would like to see the property ownership requirements for Senators be updated to reflect the inflation that has taken place since 1867 and their salaries either eliminated or reduced to an honorarium. Rather than impose a term limit on Senators, I would prefer to see the minimum age for Senate appointment raised to about fifty. I think these reforms are more appropriate for Canada than the Triple-E model that the Reform Party favoured but I would not want to see them brought in without provincial consent either. The constitutional amendment formula must be respected because to fail to respect that process is to fail to respect the constitution itself.

The proposals for Senate reform that I just suggested differ from the Triple-E model that the Reform Party advocated and which is the basis of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals in that they are not based upon the assumption that making the Senate better means making it more democratic. The equation of good government with democracy is a very modern and very erroneous idea which lies beneath both the desire for an elected Senate on the part of the supposedly right-wing support base of the old Reform Party and the desire to abolish the Senate on the part of the left-wing NDP. The reforms that I would prefer to see are based upon respect for Canada’s parliamentary monarchy form of government and the tradition from which we obtained that form of government. They take into consideration both the current problems with the Senate, the role the Senate was intended by the Fathers of Confederation to play in government, and offer suggestions as to how to get fix as much as is possible the former and help the Senate to perform the latter that are consistent with the history and tradition of our constitution.

The problem with the Senate is that it is used by whichever party happens to be in power in the lower House as a means of rewarding people who have served the party by providing them with a cushy position that comes with a large salary and fat expense account and a minimal amount of responsibility. When Canada’s Fathers established the Senate, modifying the House of Lords in the British parliamentary model to fit the Canadian situation, they intended for it to serve as a sort of brake on those in power in the lower House. The Senate would review the legislation they passed and provide a “sober second thought” so that the party which commanded a majority in the lower House could not simply rush through legislation that might ultimately be to the detriment of the country. Needless to say, the Senate cannot very well perform this function if it is constantly being stacked by the government to which it is supposed to act as a brake.

Removing control of appointments to the Senate from the Prime Minister’s Office would prevent the Prime Minister from being able to stack the Senate and use it as a rubber stamp on whatever he wants thus enabling it to serve its original function better. Updating the property requirements for Senators and removing the perks of the position would help insure that Senate seats are filled by public minded and spirited people rather than those hoping to grow fat off the public purse. Raising the minimum age for Senators would help make sure that the Senate does provide the needed “sober second thought” because wisdom, contrary to the folly of the youth-worshipping zeitgeist, comes with age.

All of these reforms would be superior to just making the Senate more democratic. The ancients recognized that just as there are good kings and bad kings, and an elite may be either a wise and public spirited aristocracy or an arrogant and selfish oligarchy, so democracy can be both good and bad as well. Therefore, they reasoned, the best constitutional arrangement would include a king, an aristocracy, and a form of democracy so that each of these elements of government would check the tendency towards the bad in the others and bring out the tendency towards the good. This is, of course, what we have in the parliamentary monarchy system that we inherited and adapted from Britain. The desire to democratize the non-democratic elements misses the point altogether and replaces the wisdom of the ancients with the folly of the modern.

Reforms that respect the constitution and the tradition on which it is based are democratic in another sense of the word, the best sense of the word, that of which G. K. Chesterton wrote when he said that he wanted a democracy that does not exclude members of a society from the franchise on the grounds that they are no longer among the living. It is tradition to which he was referring, the only kind of democracy that can give a vote to all members of a society, the dead and the unborn as well as the living. In this sense of the word democracy, the will of the people is not to be equated with whatever the majority of the populace can be persuaded to say they want at any given moment. This concept of democracy suits our constitution well for in it, the task of representing the people as an organic whole, including past and future generations as well as the present, is assigned to an office that is above elections and the political process, the office of the Queen.

The Supreme Court, by insisting that any government wishing to make significant changes to the structure of the Senate must follow the amendment procedure in the constitution, has declared that the government must respect the constitution and the tradition upon which it is built. Critics of their decision may complain that the Court is standing in the way of the will of the people and of democratic reform, but it is in keeping with the Chestertonian “democracy of the dead” which is the best form of democracy and perhaps the only one truly worthy of honour.

So three cheers and kudos to the Supreme Court. This time, at least, they did their job well.

The Unsolved Riddle of Affordable Health Care and the Medicare Mystique

Imagine that you are suffering from chronic pain due to a condition that can be alleviated by fairly simple surgery. You schedule the surgery but are told that it has recently been re-classified as elective or cosmetic surgery and so is no longer covered by your health insurance. If you want the surgery you must now fork over thousands of dollars.

Or imagine that you live in a rural community that is only a half hour drive away from the second largest city in your province. You have a condition that is fairly common but the city close to you does not have any of the specialists who treat that condition, despite having a decent sized general hospital and several smaller clinics, and so twice a year you must travel half way across the province to see a specialist in the capital city.

How about this scenario? Your spouse has an irreversible, progressively worsening, mentally debilitating condition that requires round-the-clock supervision and extremely expensive medication. As your savings disappear paying for the expensive and ineffective medication you find that you are now figuratively chained to your spouse because the health care system seems unable or unwilling to provide you with relief from the duty of watching over your spouse 24/7.

Suppose you are a young, expectant, mother on the verge of giving birth. You are staying with your family in a rural community that has its own, modest, health centre. When your water breaks you contact the local health centre and are told to go to the hospital in the nearest city which is approximately an hour’s drive away. So you hop in your pickup truck, the father of your child takes the wheel, and off you go but you do not have time to make it and give birth along the road.

Let’s say that an elderly loved one was discharged from the hospital in a particularly harsh winter, taken home by taxi, and later found dead on his porch. What would you think if the provincial health minister were to try and pin the blame for this entirely on the cab driver?

All of these scenarios are real. Two of them are taken from stories that made the news here in Manitoba during the last six months. One describes a situation within my own family. One describes something that friends of mine from church have had to deal with. One is a story that was relayed to me by these same friends.

What all of these scenarios have in common is that they point to the fact that our publically funded health care system is overburdened and unable to meet the demands upon it or the medical needs of Canadians.

That the publically funded health care system is overburdened is not exactly news. For years now Canadians have had to put up with waits to see their family doctor, followed by longer waits either to see a specialist, to have lab work done or both, followed by yet another wait until they actually receive treatment. These waits can be months or even years long, even if the condition is serious enough to require urgent treatment. It is openly acknowledged that there is a problem here and there is also a pre-packed, knee-jerk, pat answer to the question of what the solution is. That answer is to say that the government needs to devote more resources to health care, to put more money into it.

That is the wrong answer but to point that out in Canada is to be like the boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story who observes that His Imperial Majesty is strutting around naked as a jaybird. This is because it is the only answer that is consistent with the prevalent Medicare mystique.

By Medicare mystique I refer to the ridiculous but popular idea that our single-payer health care system is not only superior to all other systems but a glorious national institution, Canada’s pride, joy, and crown jewel, and that its monopoly on the provision of health care services must be protected against competition at all costs, lest we become like the Americans. I have often heard this mystique put in these words “our health care system is what makes us different from the Americans”.

I wonder if those who put it this way realize how utterly stupid it makes them sound? On the national level, universal, single-payer, health care dates back to the Medical Care Act passed by Parliament in 1966. Not that the Pearson Liberals invented it from scratch. It developed over the course of a couple of decades as the provinces, starting with Saskatchewan under the socialist government of Tommy Douglas, developed provincial public health insurance programs, and the federal government, under both the Liberal and Conservative parties in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, began to provide funding. Something that is less than fifty years old in its present form cannot be what defines us as a nation and makes us distinct and different from our nearest neighbour. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy and a federation of English and French provinces, formed out of colonies that had remained loyal to Britain when the Americans rebelled and by Loyalists that had fled persecution in the new republic, which developed as a country within the British family of nations rather than through revolt and rebellion. This, and not Medicare, is what distinguishes us from the Americans. I will not dwell on this point further, however, because I am writing about what is wrong with our health care system not what is wrong with our educational system.

The way the system works, each province operates its own public health insurance plan with a large part of the funding coming from the federal government. The province issues a card with a health number on it to each of its residents which they show to the hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. The provincial health plan is then billed for the services.

Public health insurance systems like Canada’s were created in response to the rapid and exponential rise in the cost of health care over the last century brought upon by such factors as the explosion in the development of new health technology. The rise in the cost of health care put it beyond the reach of many people and so public health insurance was developed with the goal of making sure that everybody who needed medical care had access to it and that families did not have to clean out their savings, take out a loan, or go into bankruptcy to pay for life-saving surgery.

This was and is a laudable goal but the problem with public health insurance is that it is an answer to the question how can we make somebody else pay for our health care rather than to the question how can we make health care more affordable overall. Indeed, if we think of the expense of health care as being the problem, public insurance adds to the problem rather than decreases it. Health care that is paid for by public insurance is not free because we pay for it with our taxes, but by separating the payment from the use, it creates the popular illusion that it is free. This in turn leads people to use the system more often than they would if they had to pay per use. When you increase the demand for any commodity you drive up its price and so public health insurance increases the total cost of health care even though you don’t pay for it at the moment of use.

If this sounds like an argument for private health insurance of the sort that we ordinarily associate with the United States, think again. Private health insurance also increases the overall cost of health care, albeit for different reasons. Look at how much the Americans spend on health care every year if you want evidence of this.

If both public and private health insurance drive up the cost of health care then it seems like we are trapped between a rock and a hard place. Paradoxically, however, countries that have both seem to have better overall health care than countries that have only one or the other.

Several decades ago, in an interview that was published in the Paris Review, British novelist Anthony Burgess remarked that despite his loathing of the State he conceded “that socialized medicine is a priority in any civilized country today”. To this, he added that “there’s no reason why a private practice shouldn’t coexist with a national health one”. This, he noted, was how it was set up in England, and then remarked on how the difference in treatment is indistinguishable, except that “the State materials (tooth fillings, spectacles, and so on) are inferior to what you buy as a private patient.”

What Burgess was describing is what exists not only in the United Kingdom but in every other first world country other than Canada and the United States. Canada and the United States do have a mix of public and private in the sense that the United States has had public health insurance for the elderly and low-income families since the 1960s and Canada allows private coverage for procedures not covered under the public plan. In the UK, Europe and Australia, however, a universal public health system exists alongside competing private systems and the health care is generally superior, both in quality and affordability, to that of the North American countries that have taken the more extreme routes of either relying mostly upon private companies for health coverage (the United States) or giving the universal public plan a monopoly (Canada).

Technically it is the provinces that give their public health plans a monopoly, although the Canada Health Act of 1984, one of the last bills passed by the Trudeau Liberals, provides strong incentive for them to do so. While this monopoly was successfully challenged before the Supreme Court in Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005) it has not yet been broken. The refusal to allow private insurance to compete with public insurance is downright stupid and is the single biggest reason why the public system is failing. It is also the sort of thing that outside Canada only exists in Communist dictatorships. Unsurprisingly, it is also the aspect of our health care system that is most protected by the Medicare mystique. You may recall that in the 2000 general election the other parties ganged up against Stockwell Day of the Canadian Alliance and accused him of wanting to Americanize the country by introducing “two-tier health care”. Day’s response was to hold up a sign in the leader’s debate that said “No 2-Tier Health Care”. There is irony in the fact that two-tier health care would have given us the British/European/Australian model and not the American model but this irony is lost on the type of people who, with the twisted reasoning of egalitarianism which in a wiser age was known as Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, would rather have all Canadians waiting in long lines to receive more expensive, poorer quality, health care, than to allow Canadians who can afford it to opt out of the public system and pay for private care, thus relieving the burden on the public system and allowing it to operate better.

As long as this mystique prevails, the burden on our health care system, especially in provinces like Manitoba where the socialist NDP government is determined to cling to the public monopoly even as it finds itself closing rural emergency rooms and obstetric wards across the province, will continue to grow, and the riddle of affordable, quality health care, will go unsolved.

The Reform Party, Then and Now

I was six months shy of being able to vote in the Canadian federal election of October 1993. Nevertheless, I followed the election closely having had an interest in politics for as long as I can remember. The results did not please me. The Liberal Party, for which I have never had anything but the deepest loathing received a large majority of 177 seats. The party that came in second and thus, ironically, became Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, was the Bloc Québécois, a separatist party. The socialist New Democrats were reduced to 9 seats but it was difficult to rejoice over this when the Conservatives had been reduced to 2 seats.

Although I was not old enough to vote for them I had always thought of the Conservatives as my party. Undoubtedly part of the reason for this was that my parents had supported them in 1984 and 1988. I had deeper reasons than this, however. The Conservatives were the party of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald and they were the party of John G. Diefenbaker. Then as now, I thought of Diefenbaker as the statesman who embodied all the political principles I believed in. He was a Canadian nationalist, who believed in a united Canada whose place was with the United States and the free world in the fight against Communism but not at the expense of her own identity and sovereignty, a Tory who supported our parliamentary tradition, our monarchy, and our ties to the rest of the British family of nations in the Commonwealth, and a Western, rural populist who hated the way the companies and politicians of the big Ontario and Quebec metropolises tended to think they could walk all over the other provinces and the rural communities of Canada.

Yet, despite my instinctual Toryism, when the next general election came in 1997, it was the Reform Party for which I voted and in which I had actually taken out a membership. The Reform Party had been the other big winner in 1993, after the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, having won 52 seats, just two short of tying with the Bloc. This was the part of the outcome of the 1993 election with which I was most satisfied. This was not an indication of a change in my political principles, although the title of the Reform Party would suggest a spirit of impatience for change that is the very antithesis of conservatism. It was due, rather, to the conviction that on a number of important issues the Conservative Party was no longer interested in standing for conservative principles and presenting Canadians with a real alternative to the positions of the Liberal and NDP parties. The Reform Party, on the other hand, seemed to be that alternative.

It had been founded in 1987 at a conference here in Winnipeg, but the movement that gave birth to it had been years in the making. The arrogance of the Trudeau Liberals towards Western Canada (not just to the Alberta oil industry) had generated a lot of resentment towards Ottawa in the West. The Mulroney Conservatives had not helped things when, in their efforts to solve the constitutional crisis that Trudeau had dumped in their laps, they gave every appearance of wishing to appease Quebec at the expense of the Western provinces. The Reform Party was founded as a vehicle to take to Ottawa the message that the West had had enough. This was a message that I firmly believed Ottawa needed to hear and was long overdue to receive.

What I did not realize at the time was that the grievances that had given birth to the movement that gave Western populism its own party had also transformed Western populism into something that was quite different from the Western populism I admired in Diefenbaker. In Diefenbaker, as you can read on almost every page of his three volume memoirs One Canada or his These Things We Treasure(the best short expression of traditional Canadian Toryism out there) his refusal to stand by and allow the urban elites of Ontario, Quebec, and Ottawa to trample over the rest of the country, especially the rural, West where he had grown up, was inseparably joined to a deep Tory love and reverence for the traditions and institutions of his country, Canada. In the Reform Party, however, Western populism was frequently wed to a thinly veiled, if veiled at all, contempt for Canada, her history, traditions, and institutions, and a desire to replace these with ones more resembling those of our republican neighbours to the south. Had I fully realized this twenty years ago, I would not have touched the Reform Party with a ten-foot pole.

I did not realize it at the time, however, and the Reform Party, under the leadership of Preston Manning, an evangelical Christian, was taking all sorts of stands that I agreed with. It was opposed to abortion, to easy divorce, to same-sex marriage (although this was barely on the radar twenty years ago) and to the basic replacement of what had been the social and moral norms throughout most of Canadian history with the values of Hollywood. It was opposed to the approach to criminal sentencing that elevates fairness to the perpetrator of a crime over justice to his victim. It opposed the long-gun registry which was an expensive and obnoxious way of appeasing feminists by harassing farmers. It rejected the absurd idea that robbing Peter to pay Paul through high taxes and ever-expanding social programs was a form of Christian charity, compassion and generosity rather than the bribing of people with their own money. It wanted lower taxes, more fiscal responsibility on the part of government, and a friendlier general atmosphere towards business and job creation.

This is what drew me to the Reform Party and I am still fundamentally in agreement with all of this today. Liberals, NDP socialists, and left-of-centre Conservatives, have all suggested that these ideas were products of the American Right, alien to traditional Canadian conservatism and imported by the Reform Party. Unfortunately, many within the Reform Party shared this idea and joined it with their obnoxious anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism. The idea is pure nonsense. There is a world of difference between the Disraelian social safety net traditionally supported by the Conservative Party in Canada and the bloated welfare state that is, ironically, itself largely an American import built up by the Canadian government following the lead of the American Democrats in the 1930s and 1960s. The idea that the Reform Party’s positions on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and other social and moral issues were foreign to traditional Canadian conservatism is even more worthy of ridicule. Until very recently support for these positions could be found even in the centre (Liberal) and left (NDP) parties.

I let my membership in the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it had become, lapse in 2003 prior to the merger that created the current Conservative Party. The merger could have blended the best of both parties, such as the old Conservative Party’s nationalism and support for our traditions and institutions with the Reform Party’s right-wing economic and social views. I suspected it would be far more likely to blend the worst of both parties, i.e., the Conservative Party’s willingness to capitulate to the centre and the left on economic and social issues and the Reform Party’s disgusting anti-patriotism.

Perhaps that says more about my tendency towards cynicism than anything else but I find myself reflecting on all of this after reading Warren Kinsella’s column in yesterday’s Sun entitled “Reform fades into history”. (1) Kinsella’s argument was that today, twenty years after the Reform Party became a force to be reckoned with in Canadian national politics, it is Ottawa that has changed the Reformers and not the other way around. Kinsella pointed to several old Reform Party positions on which their heirs in the current Conservative Party appear to have flip-flopped. I will only comment on two of them.

The first thing Kinsella mentions is that the Reformers “arrived opposing gay rights” and today “are indifferent to, or supportive of, gay rights.” Kinsella’s choice of words does not quite do justice to the change he is referring to. The phrase “gay rights” could suggest the idea that homosexuals have the same legal protection of their lives and property and the same rights to legal counsel, a trial before a jury of their peers, etc. as heterosexuals. The Reform Party was never opposed to this, however. It could also mean something like the right to engage in consensual sexual intercourse with another adult member of one’s own sex in privacy behind closed doors. This too, doesn’t quite fit the discussion. Homosexuality had already been decriminalized by the time the Reform Party was founded and while one or two Reformers might have had the idea that it ought to be recriminalized this was never part of the party’s policy and platform. What the Reform Party did oppose, and presumably this is what Kinsella meant by “gay rights”, was the addition of “sexual orientation” to the prohibited bases of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and changing the legal definition of marriage so that a man could “marry” a man, and a woman could “marry” a woman.

Twenty years ago, when the governing Liberal Party declared its support for adding sexual orientation to the CHRA and redefining marriage it assured us that the rights of other Canadians, particularly religious Canadians, would not be adversely affected because these rights were already recognized in Canadian law. These assurances were pure boloney. The courts, both the kangaroo “human rights” tribunals and the real courts, have taken the position that to protect homosexuals against discrimination Christians must either do things that violate the ancient teachings of their religion or face heavy fines and/or the loss of their businesses and livelihood. The Reform Party saw this coming twenty years ago. The fact that their successors seem to have backed down on the matter is not to their credit.

A few paragraphs into his column, Kinsella referred to the “Blue Book”, i.e., the Reform Party’s official policy book, and says that it “declared the Reformers opposed anything that would ‘alter the ethnic makeup of Canada.’” This, Kinsella told us, means that they “wanted to keep Canada as white as possible. It was indisputably racist.”

Indisputably? Not exactly. What the Blue Book actually declared the Reform Party to be opposed to was “any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada”. One does not have to dislike people of other races or even just the people of any particular race to see that massive, large scale, and quick demographic change is seldom if ever good for a country. Furthermore, immigration policy that is purposefully designed to bring about such change is indicative of a government that holds its own people in utter contempt.

The Liberal Party brought in just such an immigration policy early in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. No subsequent government has reversed that policy – Mulroney’s Conservatives, if anything, made it worse – in part because the Liberals accused anybody who opposed the policy of being a bigot. They particularly liked to accuse rural Canadians and Western Canadians of being ignorant, uneducated, racists which helped fan the flames of resentment in the West against the arrogance of the Liberal Party and their support base in Ontario and Quebec. This, as we have seen, led to the creation of the Reform Party and the Reformers were right to declare their opposition to a policy that treated Canadians with such disrespect.

Kinsella claimed that this policy attracted “Nazi” support to the Reform Party and then gave himself a big verbal pat on the back for the help he gave Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper in purging the party of these. Whatever amount of truth there may be to this story, and, no matter how many books on the subject he may write, I am not inclined to put any stock in Warren Kinsella’s accusations that so-and-so is a Nazi, he is certainly right that the current Conservative Party of Stephen Harper has jettisoned the Reform Party’s original position on immigration and adopted one virtually indistinguishable from that of the Liberal Party and NDP.

Judge for yourself, but I think that Kinsella has pretty much proven my cynical assessment, ten years ago, of what the outcome of the merger would be, to be justified.

(1) http://www.torontosun.com/2014/04/21/reform-fades-into-history

A Harrowing Experience

The Nicene Creed was drawn up at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century AD in response to various heresies that had been troubling the church. It has since served as the basic statement of orthodox Christian doctrine as well as the confession that is liturgically recited during the service of the Eucharist. The origins of the Apostles’ Creed are a bit more obscure, but it too is an ancient confession of Christian faith, from the days before schism divided the church and it has become the traditional confession for use in baptism. Thus these two creeds have for most of Christian history been connected with the two sacraments ordained as such by the Lord Himself. They have a similar structure and wording, and for the most part the differences consist of places where the Nicene Creed goes into more detail about what is stated more succinctly in the Apostles’ Creed. There are a couple of places, however, where the Apostles’ Creed contains something that is not present in the Nicene. The example that is of particular interest to us today, on Holy Saturday, is the phrase that occurs between “Was crucified, dead, and buried” and “The third day He rose again from the dead”, between Good Friday and Easter so to speak. That phrase, as rendered in the Book of Common Prayer, is “He descended into hell”.

More recent English renditions of the Apostles’ Creed usually substitute a phrase like “to the dead” for “into hell.” This might please squeamish people who don’t like talk about hell, but it makes this phrase redundant as it no longer expresses anything that was not already covered by the phrase immediately preceding it. Worse, it removes from the creed explicit reference to a doctrine hinted at by Scripture, required by sound theology, taught by the fathers of the church, medieval theologians, and the Reformers, traditionally part of the liturgy for Holy Saturday of both the Western and the Eastern churches, affirmed in the third of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church and which is a familiar image in medieval Western and Byzantine religious art. The traditional English name for this doctrine is the “harrowing of hell”.

The name of this doctrine requires some clarifying explanation otherwise it could be very misleading. Today the word harrow refers to a piece of farming equipment that is hitched to a tractor and pulled over a field to smooth out the soil. Where you would use a hoe and a rake on a small garden plot you use a harrow on a large field. As a verb to harrow now refers to the act of using this implement. This is not what “harrow” means in the harrowing of hell, however. The orthodox doctrine is not that Jesus went down to the underworld and prepared it to grow flowers and vegetables. In the older form of English that was used when this doctrine was given its name, to harrow meant to ravage, plunder, despoil, and lay waste. It described the actions of an invading army.

The word hell also needs to be explained. I do not mean that it needs to be explained away, as much modern theology tries to do. I mean that because Christian theology uses the word hell to describe two overlapping, but nonetheless quite distinct concepts pertaining to the afterlife, we need to be clear as to which one is meant. The first of these concepts is that of the place of punishment for the unredeemed wicked after death and the Last Judgment. Putting aside the question of whether the punishment referred to is everlasting conscious torment or annihilation as irrelevant to this discussion, this is the place Jesus refers to as Gehenna and which is described as a lake of fire burning with brimstone by St John in the Apocalypse. This is not what the creed is referring to when it says that Jesus “descended into hell”.

The other concept described by the word hell, and the one which the word’s etymology suggests, is that of a dark underworld, where the spirits of the dead go, regardless of their righteousness or wickedness. This is what the Hebrew word sheol that is used in the Old Testament referred to. It is what the Greek word hades refers to. The Greeks named the underworld after the deity they believed ruled it, Hades, whom the Romans called Pluto, and who won the underworld when he and his brothers Zeus and Poseidon overthrew the Titans and divided the universe between themselves. The Scandinavians and Germans had a similar concept of the land of the dead, and they too named it after the deity to whom they ascribed its rule. This was Hel, daughter of Loki. The English word hell is derived from the Norse word and just as the writers of the New Testament adapted the word hades as a Greek equivalent of sheol, so English Christians adapted the word hell. This is the hell to which Jesus descended between the cross and the Resurrection.

It is important that we be clear on this. Christ’s descent into hell was not, as some have mistakenly taught, for the purpose of submitting Himself to the torments of the damned. Christ did indeed suffer for our sins, the innocent for the guilty, but this was His work on the cross which He finished with His dying breath. His entrance into hell was that of a victorious conqueror ransacking a defeated foe and setting its captives free.

The way the doctrine was traditionally taught, the souls of the Old Testament saints and the souls of the damned alike went to hell (sheol/hades) where the souls of the saints awaited the coming of their Redeemer. Jesus, after defeating sin and death on the cross by taking the former upon Himself and embracing the later, descended into hell as a victor, breaking the gates into pieces and smashing the infernal stronghold, where he announced to the saints that the long awaited day of their release had come and brought them up out of hell, leaving only the devil and the damned behind. In art this is typically depicted in one of a number of ways, such as Jesus leading a procession of the redeemed out of the hellmouth, meeting Adam and Eve and other recognizable Old Testament saints in limbo, or standing with the gates of hell broken beneath His feet. (1)

This doctrine is not spelled out for us as such in the New Testament, although it is inferred in several passages, most notably that which the Book of Common Prayer assigns as the epistle reading for Holy Saturday, 1 Peter 3:17-22. This lack of explicit statement has led some modern Protestants to deny the doctrine, which denial, had the sixteenth century Reformers been able to foresee as the outcome of their teaching of Sola Scriptura, would undoubtedly have caused Martin Luther to throw an inkpot and curse profusely and John Calvin to burn someone at the stake. Sound Christology is incomplete without this doctrine.

The picture painted for us in the Scriptures of Christ’s activity beginning with His Incarnation in His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and culminating in His Ascension into heaven and sitting on the right hand of the Father is of a journey that takes Him from the highest place to the lowest, from the zenith to the nadir, and then back again. When Christ re-enters the highest place, the glory in heaven that He shared with His Father from eternity past He is crowned with even greater glory for having made the journey. The first part of the journey, the downward path is called His Humiliation. The second part of the journey, the upward path back to Heaven, is called His Exaltation. Both are explicitly taught and emphasized throughout the New Testament and this picture would not be complete had the journey not taken Him to the lowest place, possible, i.e., hell. Consider the words of St. Paul in the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians. “Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth.”

Paradoxically, the descent into hell has historically and traditionally, in the teachings of the church fathers, the medieval scholastics, the eastern and western churches, and the most orthodox of Protestant theologians, not been regarded as the final aspect of Christ’s Humiliation but as the first stage in His Exaltation. This does not negate what we just said about the descent being necessary to complete the picture of a journey from the highest place to the lowest and back again. The inclusion of the descent in the Exaltation, the upward part of the journey, rather than the Humiliation, the downward part of the journey to which it would seem more logical to place it, is due to the nature of Christ’s entrance into hell. Again, He did not enter hell in defeat to suffer the torments of the damned, but in victory, to break the stronghold of the enemies of God and man – sin, death, and the devil – which He had defeated on the cross, and to rescue from their clutches those of His own who had preceded Him there.

The descent into hell is needed not only to round off the picture of Christ’s downward and upward journeys but to present His saving work in its fullest, most heroic, aspect. When we speak of what Christ did for us in His sacrifice on the cross we speak of Him paying our debt of sin or of His bearing the judgement for our sins as our substitute. All of this is perfectly sound theology but the language of banks and courts cannot do aesthetic justice to Christ’s saving mission. For that we need the old doctrine of the harrowing of hell.

We should not be so quick to “update” the Creed to get rid of words and concepts that offend our modern sensibilities. They were put there for a reason and if, in this case, they are inferred from Scriptural references to Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison or His statement that He would be in “the belly of the earth” for as long as Jonah was in the belly of the whale, they are good inferences. Their absence would leave a gaping hole in both Christian theology and Christian art and we would be the poorer for it.

(1) One of the most famous examples is the fourteenth century fresco by Andrea da Firenze on the north wall of the Spanish chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. In this painting, Jesus is standing on the broken gate of hell, which has fallen on a devil and trapped him, while He reaches out His hands to an old man, presumably Adam, at the head of a crowd of haloes saints, while hiding in a cave in he corner the demons glare at Him.

Making “Saints”

The word saint means “holy one”. It can refer, as it frequently does in the Holy Scriptures, to all of God’s people. The word “holy” denotes the state of being dedicated and set aside for the use of God. In the Old Testament, God called Israel out from among the nations and consecrated her to Himself, and the covenant He made with her contained both moral commandments, which forbade behaviour that was wrong and demanded behaviour that was right, and ceremonial commandments, the purpose of which was to separate her as a people God had set apart as His own. Old Testament saints, therefore, were Israelites, keeping in mind, of course, St. Paul’s remarks that “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” (Rom. 2:28-29). New Testament saints are all those, Jew or Gentile, who have been baptized into the church, the body of Christ, in which the wall of regulations separating Jew from Gentile has been torn down. St. Paul’s distinction between outward and inward circumcision, of course, can be applied to baptism as well, and the true New Testament saint is the person who believe in Jesus internally, in the heart. It is in this New Testament sense of the term that the Apostle’s Creed speaks of the “communion of the saints”, i.e., the mystic union and fellowship of all believers, here and in Heaven.

There are other ways in which people can be specially dedicated and set apart for and by God than by merely belonging to His people or His church. This is why from the earliest days the church has used the word saint to honour those that she has regarded as being particularly holy. In early centuries, local churches would honour their martyrs, those who had been persecuted and killed for their faith, as saints. Later, the catholic or universal church decided that the recognition and honouring of saints should be standardized throughout Christendom. This required that a canon, or list, of recognized saints be drawn up, which in turn required that the church define what it meant to be a saint in this sense of the term and that criteria be stated by which saints can be identified.

A consequence of this, as you may imagine, was that the concept of the saint within Christendom developed somewhat differently among the churchgoing populace than it did among the theologians and ecclesiastical authorities. You might call the one the popular concept of the saint, and the other the official concept of the saint.

The writers of literature have drawn upon both concepts for inspiration. In Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess presents a fictionalized version of the history of the twentieth century as told from the perspective of Kenneth Toomey, a successful gay novelist who is reviewing his life in anticipation of writing his memoirs. He is doing so in part at the request of the Roman Catholic Church who have asked for his assistance in the canonization of the last pope, who had been a close friend of his and whose brother had married his sister. The Church approaches Toomey, because he had been the only witness of certain miracles that had been performed through the late pope and proper certification of miracles is part of the canonization process.

That miracles are performed through saints is common to both the official and popular understandings of the term, and in Fifth Business, the first of his Deptford trilogy, Robertson Davies introduces us to Dunstan Ramsay, a scholar who has made popular folklore regarding saints the object of his life’s studies. The novel is narrated by Ramsay, who, like Burgess’s Toomey, is telling the story of his own life, and in the telling Ramsay explains what lies at the bottom of his unusual line of expertise. He had experienced a miracle performed through a woman who had been driven out of her wits in an unfortunate incident in which he had been an unwilling participant as a small boy and over which he felt terrible guilt. He had become convinced that she was a saint, although few others were willing to share that conviction.

George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, reminds me a bit of the fictional Dunstan Ramsay in this respect. He was convinced that his favourite twentieth century thinker, Simone Weil, was a saint. His biographer, William Christian, quotes him as saying that Weil was “both a saint and a philosopher…She was a saint in the sense that she gave herself away to the divine charity.” (1) Like Mary Dempster, the character that Ramsay believed to be a living saint, Weil was an unusual candidate for sainthood, albeit for different reasons. Neither the fictional character nor the living philosopher-mystic would have met the church’s official requirements for canonization.

Had she been born a couple of thousand years earlier, Weil might have qualified as an Old Testament saint, for she was born of Hebrew stock to the wife of a Jewish doctor in 1909. This is an honour she would have rejected for herself, however, for she disliked the Old Testament and regarded Judaism as a barbaric religion. Needless to say, when she later embraced the Christian faith in her twenties, her theology was something less than orthodox. The great litmus test of Christian orthodoxy, the Nicene Creed, had been drawn up by the church against the early heretics who claimed, among other things, that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same God that Jesus Christ declared to be His Father. Weil expressed admiration for heretical groups like the early Gnostics and especially the later Cathari who rejected most or all of the Old Testament. This, and her persistent refusal to receive baptism despite the pleas of her friend and spiritual advisor Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin, her letters to whom explaining this refusal were later published under the title Waiting For God, (2) would surely raise a few eyebrows among any ecclesiastical authorities asked to consider her for canonization.

Having said that, remember what I said earlier about how St. Paul’s distinction between inward and outward circumcision applies to baptism too. While under ordinary circumstances the persistent refusal to receive baptism would be a sign of unbelief, Weil’s reasons for so refusing were anything but ordinary. If she cannot be so easily written out of the “communion of the saints” in the creedal sense of the term, neither should her heterodoxy be regarded as disbarring her from the company of the particularly marked, holy ones to which Grant and several others believed she belonged. The ability to pass a theological exam is hardly the first thing that is looked for in considering a person for canonization. Indeed, Weil’s heterodox view of the Old Testament and admiration for the Cathari is itself an example, albeit a clearly misguided one, of the very characteristic that was perceived as being most saintly about her.

Weil was a lifelong sympathizer with the weak, the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, the voiceless and the downtrodden. This is a trait which can be very admirable but which can also be very easily taken to an ugly excess or diverted down unworthy channels. It is this trait that led Weil to condemn the religion of the Old Testament as condoning the abuse of power and to sympathize with the Cathari as the victims of power abuse. As a young teacher she was led by her desire to take up the cause of the downtrodden into political activism of various sorts, most of which were highly misguided at best. In this, she was hardly an atypical intellectual. What set her apart was her willingness to pay the price of her idealism personally. Her death from consumption in 1943, for example, seems to have been at least partly due to a refusal to eat enough to keep up her strength out of solidarity with those starving in Nazi-occupied France.

Indeed, Weil seemed driven by an insatiable desire to share in the sufferings of others. She herself tied this desire to her Christian faith. After her early radicalism she had come to a mystic version of Christian faith, grounded in her personal experiences with God, such as when she felt compelled to pray in a Catholic basilica in Assisi or when she felt “Christ himself came down and took possession of me” while reading a poem by seventeenth century metaphysical poet and Anglican divine George Herbert. In a fascinating comment in one of her letters to Fr. Perrin she remarked that “every time that I think about Christ’s crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy”.

A remark like this can really only be explained in one of two ways. Either she was out of her mind, or God Himself had marked her out for Himself and placed within her this holy, almost superhuman, desire to take up the cross.

If it is the latter, then what better word could there possibly be to describe such a person than the word saint?


(1) William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 228
(2) Most of the books attributed to Weil are compilations of her writings put together after her death. In the case of Waiting For God it is letters to a priest that are compiled into a book, in the case of Gravity and Grace it is excerpts from the notebooks she had written while staying at the farm of Gustave Thibon early in the war and which she had left in his possession. The notebooks have more recently been published in an unabridged format. Of her best known writings it is The Need For Roots which actually reads like it was composed as a monograph for publication. This is because it was originally written as a report for the French Resistance.