Where The Benches Are Not Red

Did Ann Limb secure paid positions at academic institutions based on degrees that she did not hold? If so, then there is a big house for her.

But it is not the House of Lords, although she should be joining Michelle Mone in that as soon as possible.

In The Front

Even before his defeat in the ring, was Andrew Tate still popular with schoolboys? Teenage trends rarely, if ever, last that long. They are in far greater danger from the person and associates of Ivor Caplin, all bail conditions on whom were lifted last month despite his having tried to meet a 14-year-old boy for sex. And what associates Caplin has. He was a Whip at the time of the Iraq War, with Phil Woolas, and with Dan Norris, who was close to Caplin and whose proxy vote is still cast by the Whips. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote on Iraq. The then Chief Whip was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. She had also been Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Smith, yet she has said nothing about the failure to ensure that protection from unfair dismissal began with employment.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was only six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that Streeting will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North last year, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory.

Meanwhile, the Chief Whip of Caplin, Woolas and Norris has had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle, on the other side of which in the Corbyn years we vividly recall Phillips’s head cheerleader today, Emma Barnett, whose private education was paid for by the brothels for which her father did time. Emails were discovered between her and him, discussing his “whores”.

Not that Phillips or Barnett can define a woman. On that score, the Supreme Court would uphold whatever Bridget Phillipson put in front of it. When he has not been supporting David Lammy’s attacks on trial by jury and on the right of appeal, then Lord Sumption has been trying to tell you that the Court had permitted separate facilities on the basis of biological sex, but had not required them. “You have gender dysphoria,” I used to think, and even say. “I have depression, but that doesn’t mean the doctor should give me something to kill myself, never mind suggest it to me.” Part of resisting the second atrocity, against which Phillipson voted, is reversing the first. Phillipson is another one who wants to be Leader of the Labour Party, and thus Prime Minister. Yet without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. Anyone would think that such pursuit did not interest Phillipson, Phillips or Streeting.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it. What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Phillipson knows this. She needs to act on it. In the meantime, anyone wishing to be sent to one of Phillips’s reeducation camps should submit  to his Catholic school a copy of the recent Petrocchi Report into women deacons. As determined by a Minister who had openly had an abortion, the backlash would fill up the time until he was conscripted.

Peer Review

Yes, I do know what time of year it is. But I am amazed, and 48-year-old ex-cons are rarely amazed, at the inattention to the case of Ann Limb. 29 years ago, you could be removed as the Head of the smallest House at Durham for the mere suggestion of this sort of thing, although that suggestion was totally false.

Yet today, you can blithely and airily admit to it while still being wafted into the House of Lords that retained an absolute veto on any attempt to extend a Parliament beyond five years. This morning, Anna Turley managed to stun even Sir Trevor Phillips by refusing three times to rule out "delaying" the next General Election. Think on.

God Bless Us, Every One

It is almost impossible to overstate the cultural impact of A Christmas Carol. All adaptations, even by the Muppets, stick closely to the plot, and usually even to the dialogue. A green Bob Cratchit is not contrary to the book, in which no colour is specified.

In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, the late Fr Ian Ker proposed “a new way of looking at Chesterton’s literary achievement which has gone by default.” He sees the author of the Father Brown stories, and even of The Man Who Was Thursday, as “a fairly slight figure”. But Chesterton the non-fiction writer is “a successor of the great Victorian “sages” or “prophets”, who was indeed compared to Dr Johnson in his own lifetime, and who can be mentioned without exaggeration in the same breath as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and especially, of course, Newman.”

Fr Ker identified Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chesterton’s best work and as the key to understanding his Catholicism. “It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos that is the heart of Chesterton’s critical study.”

First, Chesterton’s Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living and even sheer being. He was originally a “higher optimist” whose “joy is in inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing,” because he simply “falls in love with” the universe, and “those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.” Hence the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, expressing both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who looks at the world in this way.

For, secondly, Dickens created “holy fools” such as Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, and the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens also “created a personal devil in every one of his books,” figures with the “atrocious hilarity" of gargoyles. In either case, since the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary and extraordinary things so much a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd.

And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his “pallid” contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and “Gothicists”, whose “subtlety and sadness” were in fact “the spirit of the present day” after all. It was Dickens who “had the things of Chaucer”: “the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England”; “story within story, every man telling a tale”; and “something openly comic in men’s motley trades”.

Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.” Dear reader, I trust that you will eat, drink and pray most merrily. As, indeed, will I. Yet let there be no talk of “Happy Holidays”.

After the emergence of Judaism, set out below, Hanukkah was historically a very minor festival until almost into living memory, and in much of the Jewish world it still is. But it does provide an opportunity to pre-empt this year’s round of lazy claims that Christmas is a taking over of some pagan winter festival. There is of course a universal need for winter festivals. But the dating of Christmas derives from Hanukkah, not from the pagan Saturnalia or anything else.

No British or Irish Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan continuation in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here. Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century. The Church has never stated that 25 December was the literal birthday of Jesus, but there is no record of the keeping of Sol Invictus on that date until Christmas had already been so for some time.

Furthermore, the dating of Christmas from that of Hanukkah raises serious questions for Protestants, who mistakenly exclude the two Books of Maccabees from the Canon because, along with various other works, they were allegedly not considered canonical at the time of Jesus and the Apostles. But in fact, the rabbis excluded those books specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity, and they are repeatedly quoted or cited in the New Testament, as they were by Jewish writers up to that exclusion. Even thereafter, the continued celebration of Hanukkah was thanks to books to which Jews only really had access because Christians had preserved them, since the rabbis had wanted them destroyed.

Indeed, far from being the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah in fact deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994), and so on. Hanukkah bushes, and the giving and receiving of presents at Hanukkah, stand in a tradition of two-way interaction both as old as Christianity and about as old as anything that could reasonably be described as Judaism. As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “It is hardly surprising that Jewish communities living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the surrounding culture.” There are many, many, many other examples that could be cited.

Those range from the Medieval adoption for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant editions; to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees had not believed in the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth; to the identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture technically different from, but effectively very similar to, those of Catholicism; to Medieval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian stories in their sermons. Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find it. We all know why not.

But the deeper point arises from the definition of the Jewish Canon in explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the Talmud. Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly, rather than its own, defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice, or which of their relatives was a polygamist. Judaism, I say again, is not the mother-religion. Rather, I say again that it is a reaction against Christianity, and specifically, like Islam, a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as there always have been, although they are increasingly allied to Islam.

Thus constructed, Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle, again like Classically-based reactions, for all sorts of people discontented with the rise of Christianity in general and with the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background. Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth. They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.

It is Christianity that refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple, Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Priesthood. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Sacrifice, the Mass. And it is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures. Including the two Books of Maccabees, the origin of Hanukkah. The true form of which, as of so much else, is Christmas, the Nativity of Him Who at Hanukkah, in the Temple, declared that, “I and the Father are One.”

Yet the New Testament begins with the genealogy of Saint Joseph, Our Lord’s stepfather. Why include that? It has always been recognised as clearly stylised. Three kings are omitted, and Jechoniah is counted twice, in order to give 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and 14 from Babylon to the Nativity of Our Lord, 14 being the numerical value of the three Hebrew consonants for David. Truly, the Messiah promised to and from the House of David is here, says the most Jewish of the Four Evangelists.

Sacred Tradition has of course always affirmed that Mary was also of Davidic descent, as indeed do even Her Talmudic defamers. Be that as it may, it is notable that only four other women are mentioned in these 16 verses, and all produced sons who then took their place in the line despite not being the progeny of their mothers’ husbands. Either illegitimate, or legitimised by the levirate law, they become sons of Abraham and, in the last case, a prince of the House of David, his natural father whom he succeeds and arguably even surpasses.

Our Lady is the new Tamar, preventing the extinction of her people. Our Lady is the new Rahab, rescuing her people by her faith in the limitless power of God. Our Lady is the new Ruth, her Magnificat echoing Ruth’s expression of gratitude to Boaz. Our Lady is the new Bathsheba, bringing forth the new Solomon, Whose wisdom is as infinite as His judgement is universal. And in order to be so, she and her Child are placed under the protection of, as Saint Matthew calls him in the concluding verses, the “just man” who stands at the conclusion of those 42 generations of personally imperfect, but nevertheless continuous and strictly legal, patriarchy and monarchy.

Long before anyone knew anything about X and Y chromosomes, the Church Fathers held that God had made up whatever had been lacking in order to make it possible for a woman to bear a male child without any male human involvement. The view that miracles are absolutely impossible is not compatible with agnosticism. Nor with science, which is purely descriptive. What if a miracle did occur?

Forget the assertion that until the nineteenth century, people thought that heredity was purely on the paternal side. The Greek urban, homosocial leisure class thought that. But the Hebrew writers seem to have been unaware that any such fantasy even existed. Well, of course they were. They were working farmers who spent their time with their wives and children. Accordingly, their purity and incest laws presuppose a biological relationship with both parents. I employ the present tense because those laws are still in daily use, and may be read in the best-selling book in the world.

There is an old standby of middlebrow, pub bore professional atheism, that the Virginal Conception has numerous mythological parallels. Nothing could be further from the case. What occurs over and over again in mythology is the impregnation, by otherwise normal sexual means, of a woman by a god; a god, therefore, with a physical body. Exactly that does not happen in the Gospels.

However, it is held in Mormonism that this was how Jesus was conceived, one among many reasons why the enormous popularity of the Mormons within American religion – numerically third only to the Catholics and to the Southern Baptists, and the clear direct or indirect originators of numerous ideas such as “Manifest Destiny” – raises very serious questions about whether the American Republic is a bulwark of Christianity. Not unanswerable questions. But very serious ones.

Both Jews and pagans made all sorts of contrary claims, but one was completely unknown to either, namely that Jesus had been the natural child of Mary and Joseph. No such suggestion was ever made by anyone in the first 18 centuries of Christianity’s existence. Even the Qur’an has the “Prophet Isa” born of the “Virgin Mariam”. Apart from that partial retelling in the Qur’an, the Biblical account is unique, and could not be less like any of the parallels that are routinely alleged.

That Islam – a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire – depicts Jesus as both virgin-born, and the Messiah foretold by the Hebrew prophets, is an important insight into the debate as to whether or not the circumstances of His Conception described in the New Testament really are the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.

Of course, had there been no expectation that the Messiah would be virgin-born, then there would have been no reason for the Evangelists to have invented it. And that would have been just as strong an argument in the doctrine’s favour. But the Islamic view, staunchly Semitic and anti-Hellenistic, adds considerable weight to the belief that the Virgin Birth is, as the New Testament maintains entirely matter-of-factly, the fulfilment of the words of the Old Testament prophets.

It is often contended that it is not clear that the prophecy in Isaiah actually refers to a virgin. But it certainly does in the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and, contrary to what used to be asserted, first century Palestine is now acknowledged to have been profoundly Hellenised. So either the Septuagint prophecy is indeed being fulfilled explicitly, or else there was no expectation that the Messiah would be virgin-born, and thus no reason to make up that Jesus had been. The doctrine works either way.

“Christ Is King” is a meaningless assertion apart from this vast body of doctrine. Moreover, among the Colours Raised over the summer was the Holy Mandylion of Edessa, which is certainly not a Crusader flag, as anyone raising it would know. Spotted on 18 August, where was this, because something very notable is happening there, and among people who must regard either or both of Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigration as not entirely bad?

August was quite a month for the Holy Face. On 28, The Times excited the excitable with the dismissal of the Shroud of Turin by Nicole Oresme. The Church had been proclaiming the Resurrection for 13 centuries before that turned up, and She has never expressed any view as to its authenticity, permitting devotion to it by those who find that helpful, but emphasising that it had no bearing on the Teachings of Jesus or on any point of doctrine. The Times and its tendency, however, seem to have discovered Oresme as an authority.

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing.

Buy the book here.

An Essential Corrective

Richard is on manoeuvres, of course. But still, it is welcome that Gordon Rayner writes:

A former Conservative Party chairman who was tried and acquitted by a jury has said Labour must not leave the fate of innocent people solely in the hands of judges.

Richard Holden MP told The Telegraph that his own experience cemented his faith in the jury system as an essential corrective to the insular world of lawyers and judges.

After a week-long trial in 2018, a jury took 15 minutes to acquit him of a false allegation of sexually assaulting a woman at a party.

David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, wants to abolish jury trials in England and Wales for most offences but Mr Holden believes Mr Lammy does not understand that even allegations that would not warrant a long sentence can be life-changing for those in the dock.

He said: “It’s all very well for a politician sitting in Westminster to think that charges that carry maybe a two-year sentence are not that important and don’t need a jury.

“As far as I was concerned this might as well have been a trial for my life because for anyone of good standing, a criminal trial means everything. You’re not a repeat offender on their 50th charge of shoplifting, your entire life is on trial because it affects your job, your family, your friendships, everything.”

Under Mr Lammy’s proposed reforms, Mr Holden would have been denied access to a jury trial because he was charged with an “either way” offence, which can be tried by magistrates or a jury, depending on the defendant’s choice.

Mr Lammy wants to scrap the option of a jury trial for current either way offences that carry a maximum sentence of less than three years, though a leaked memo suggested he might be considering setting the threshold even higher, with only crimes that carry a maximum sentence of more than five years being heard by juries.

Mr Holden, who was 31 years old at the time, was working as a special adviser at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) when a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her at a party in December 2016. He lost his job at the MoD because of the allegation and struggled to find work while he was awaiting trial.

He said: “I was apprehensive ahead of the trial because I was worried that the jury might take against me for reasons that were nothing to do with the case. I was a Tory being tried at Southwark Crown Court in London, which is a Labour heartland.

“But they clearly took their duties very seriously, and they perhaps could imagine what it would be like to be in my shoes. What struck me most was the questions they asked [via notes passed to the judge].

“They asked the questions I would have asked, like what might have motivated the accuser to make the accusation if the assault never happened, which they had not been told because it was not part of the legal argument for either side.

“It showed they were able to cut through the legalistic approach of the barristers and get straight to the heart of it.”

The senior trial judge told Mr Holden that he could leave court “without a stain on his character” and she hopes he could “resume his career from where he had left off”.

His solicitor told him that he had never seen a case of sexual assault go to court on such thin evidence, which made Mr Holden wonder whether there was pressure within the Crown Prosecution Service to charge him to avoid accusations of bias towards a government adviser.

He was also told that the Crown’s decision to hire a Queen’s Counsel to prosecute him was also unheard of for an offence of that nature, which added to his belief that the system was rigged against him.

He said: “You end up asking yourself whether the system is fair, and the closest you get to a guarantor is the wisdom of a group of 12 ordinary people.

“In my case, those people sat in judgment over me and I could trust them to see the evidence, ask the right questions and get beneath the surface of the legal arguments. There is nothing more important than those people who look you in the face day after a day in court.”

Mr Holden, who is currently the shadow transport secretary, said Mr Lammy would also devalue Britain in the eyes of businesses and foreign investors if he went through with his reforms.

He said: “I have visited a lot of countries in the course of my work and wherever you go they talk about the British legal system as one of the main reasons they feel safe doing business here.

“Contracts are written under English law for companies operating all over the world because it is seen as being better than any other country’s legal system. If you start to abolish jury trials, you are sending out a signal that is going to erode that trust.”

Mr Holden sympathises with Mr Lammy’s goal to cut court backlogs and reduce the length of time awaiting trial, both for defendants and for victims whose lives end up on hold, sometimes for years at a time.

However, Mr Holden said the result of having more trials in magistrates’ courts would result in more convictions being appealed, which will only shift the backlog to the appeal courts rather than Crown courts.

He said: “If you look at the statistics, 90 per cent of cases are dealt with at magistrates’ courts, and of the 10 per cent that go to Crown courts, three quarters plead guilty. So you are talking about one in 40 cases being heard by juries, and the cost is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of public spending.

“Anyone who is making the case for scrapping jury trials doesn’t understand how important guilt and innocence are to people’s lives.”

I Am Not Out On A Limb

Family aside, over half of my Christmas card list is made up of priests, while over half of the rest is made up of people who hold at least one doctorate, and sometimes two. Not featured is Dame Ann Limb, whom Keir Starmer has nominated for a peerage despite the falsehood of her claims to hold a PhD and a Master's degree. Even I hold a Master's degree. But I have never given £50,000 to the Labour Party. Although is that all? Unite gave one thousand times that much. For what?

I have never attempted to become Dr Lindsay, and I always correct people who so address me, but I have been making that correction since September or October 1996. In one order or the other but I cannot remember which, I received a letter addressed to "Dr David Lindsay" from Jimmy Goldsmith, of all people, and a letter addressed to "The Reverend Dr David Lindsay" from a Reverend Doctor who, at almost exactly the same time, admitted me as an undergraduate for the next year at the Durham college of which he was Principal. Sir James was corrected, although he continued the correspondence even once he knew that I was a 19-year-old barman, but my other correspondent left both his position and this country very soon afterwards. To this day, I have never met him, so I can only assume that he thought that there were two David Lindsays at this address, presumably a father and son.

Goldsmith is the only person without a doctorate ever to have assumed me to have held one, but people with their own have done it with remarkable frequency. For example, the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham innocently listed me among its members as "Dr David Lindsay". I have no idea why, but academically distinguished people read my work and just assume me to be a PhD. As for the Reverend thing, an old lady from South Shields did once ask me, "Are you David Miliband, Father?" I explained that I was neither, and that it would have been impossible to have been both. Apart from that, though, the only people to have assumed me to have been ordained have themselves been ordained. Again, I am not, I have never claimed to be, and I have never attempted to be. Yet, among other things, I have had "Dear Father Lindsay" from bishops and from Vatican officials, both of whom one might have expected to have been in a position to check. I cannot explain it, but I always correct it.

I might let "Dr Lindsay" go among my own people, variously conceived, if it were to arise spontaneously among them, in the manner of the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Other than that, I would tolerate objections to it only from people who would never have said or written either "Dr Paisley" or "Dr Angelou". "We hand this woman, Margaret Thatcher, over to the Devil." "I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size." Dr Lindsay would be happy to give his most favourable peer review to that vintage Dr Angelou and to that vintage Dr Paisley, in that order.

"Father Lindsay", on the other hand, is of a different Order. Like each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, like each and every member of Durham County Council, and like each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle recognises that I am factually and morally innocent of any and all criminal charges that have ever been brought against me, as do each and every member of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, and each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team.

Canopy Growth?

Donald Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean is obviously not against drugs, Tony Blair may still turn out to be his man in Gaza, and Trump never tires of telling us that Keir Starmer is his man in Britain, but he does provide some grounds for the unrequited infatuation of Richard Tice who wants to legalise cannabis, of Nigel Farage who wants to legalise drugs across the board, and of Lee Anderson who signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Justice Department to accelerate the reclassification of marijuana, a move framed as expanding medical research without federally legalizing the drug.

The order follows weeks of sustained lobbying by cannabis industry executives, including Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers, and would shift marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, easing federal restrictions while leaving recreational use and criminal penalties unchanged. Shares of major U.S. cannabis companies rose on the announcement, with firms like Canopy Growth climbing nearly 12 percent in one day. Canopy Growth is up more than 60 percent this month since Trump began to weigh rescheduling.

The move follows steps taken under President Joe Biden, who issued mass pardons and ordered federal records for marijuana possession offenses be expunged, while stopping short of broader legalization.

At the signing, Trump said he had been inundated with calls urging the change, citing its potential to help patients. “We have people begging for me to do this. People that are in great pain,” he said.

The journalist Saagar Enjeti alleged Thursday that the administration privately undercut its public rationale for the move, claiming officials on an internal call acknowledged weak evidence for medical marijuana while conceding the rescheduling would deliver a significant tax benefit to large cannabis donors.