Are Miracles Outside the Boundary of Good Taste?

I'd never read anything by Scottish author Bruce Marshall before. I'd never even heard of him. But when the good folks at Cluny Media offered to send me a novel entitled Father Malachy's Miracle, a novel about the working of a Loretto-inspired miracle in Scotland and the unexpected chaos that, no doubt, will follow such a miracle as the modern world attempts to squeeze the life out of it by fitting it into preconceived notions of science and reason - the lawsuits, the equivocation, the crass commercialism, the reaction of all those liberal Anglican clerics who don't really even believe in the Resurrection - I was intrigued.

Shortly after beginning to read, I encountered this glorious piece of writing; "Canon Geoghegan said nothing, but went on picking at his fish, methodically, earnestly, as though he were disemboweling Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" This is when I was hooked. This Marshall fella writes.

Marshall clearly has a great deal of familiarity with English Christianity and parodies Anglican clergy with an accuracy so painful it brings me back to my seminary days with the Episcopal Church.

I've always been susceptible to vanity. I take pride in sartorial excellence, having the best taste in music, the most insight into fine food, being well-read. I'm sure it's beyond annoying and I've taken drastic steps in recent years to curb the habit, because, of course, it's a terrible vice on the charge that pride is a deadly sin but also because I literally have nothing to be proud about. I'm not that great. The vice isn't good for my soul or the souls of those around me – but it also begs the question of true class. A gentleman never feels the need to brag, is never flashy and attention-seeking. There's a fine line between genuine aestheticism, which is modest and welcoming, and bad taste, which is egocentric and, essentially, a veiled attempt to gain status and power.

John Henry Newman, for instance, defines a gentleman as follows:

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him, and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself.

His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them.

The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;--all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make everyone at their ease and at home.

I was first intrigued by the Episcopal Church, and more widely the Anglican tradition, because of aesthetic concerns. I was a painter who liked pageantry and yearned for beauty. I liked that the Anglican clergy of the high-church tradition were better dressed than the Roman clergy, that they offered sherry after Mass, paid a schola of professional singers and their parishioners all wore bow-ties. One parishioner I knew earned his spot on the vestry by tracing his lineage back to John Adams. The churches had rood screens. The clergy were all Ivy Leaguers. The tradition of high-church Anglicanism to which I was attracted was always in the best taste. Until it wasn't.

The cracks began to form as the pressure of modernity weighed ever more heavily upon the poor Anglican tradition. The sparkly veneer peeled away, and it turns out that underneath all the surface beauty there was nothing left. No theology, no principles, no philosophy. The beauty itself, deprived of truth to adorn, began to fade and is descending into carnival and caricature. Rainbow stoles, hideous art installations, over-the-top displays of theatricality. The Anglicans have tons of money, though, to keep the show going. It's all so very ungentlemanly. So ugly.

This is the underbelly of modernity that Marshall so deftly exposes. It's a hideous creature.

In such conditions, beauty doesn't stand a chance. Pretension to good taste is all that's left, but good taste is contextual and doesn't make for great art. Good taste doesn't take risks, doesn't yearn, and doesn't possess the love required to create real beauty.

In such an environment, how would a miracle be received? A beautiful intervention by the hand of God?

Well, the Anglican reformers abolished sacraments centuries ago, set spies to murder Catholic priests, whitewashed the great Cathedrals, and regicided Charles I. When I was in seminary, some of us believed Jesus Christ was Our Lord and Saviour, others in my class weren't quite sure Christ even existed. What's more, they didn't really care. Arguing about such questions was considered vulgar.

You can see, then, that miracles, because they press the question, are unfashionable. They're awkward. Better to avoid them entirely.

Stick to social programs, fundraisers for the choir, and dinner parties in the rectory. Such is the reaction to Father Malachy's miracle. Perhaps when Bruce Marshall wrote his novel, he'd witnessed such displays of false gentility and saw right through them. Or perhaps he had an uncanny accuracy of imagination to intuitively understand that the miracle simply wouldn't do.

The stuff of modernity is hot off the presses in the newspapers. It's dancing girls, consumption, intellectual vapidity, being respected by all the right sort of people. It whirls and whirls like a giant, pointless menagerie in which we're all trapped from birth to death. The miraculous is the key to the door of the cage, but walking over the threshold takes courage.

At the still place at the center of it all, the one sane and beautiful space still left for people to inhabit, is the Mass, which is the greatest, most miraculous, perfect poem ever written. Father Malachy knows this, which is why this shabby priest in the ill-fitting suit is the greatest aesthete of them all.