Another aspect of our English heritage perhaps has little to do with institutional religion, but is strongly associated with the Englishman’s individuality and “homeliness”. But, don’t go to England and expect to find sixty million eccentrics. However, you might find more of that colourful breed in England rather than France, Germany or Switzerland.
One of my favourite characters was a man I have personally known, Fr. Quintin Montgomery-Wright (1914-1996), who is mentioned in the Valle Adurni blog. I spent several months with Fr. Montgomery in 1982. He was originally an Anglican, serving as assistant Curate in a north London 'spikey' parish during the war. He went with his faithful down the tunnels to the London Underground railway, which was used as an air raid shelter during the horrific bombings of the 1940 Blitz. He became a Catholic during the war and after a stint in the Westminster Archdiocese joined the Diocese of Bayeux. Why France? From what he told me, I don't think he found a good convert's welcome in the Catholic Church in England at the time! Most French know just about zilch about Anglicanism, though I have found them just as suspicious of converts as anyone else.
Fr. Montgomery was an amazing fellow. He had stacks and stacks of vestments, and did the liturgy the old Norman way, like Sarum. There were little blue dalmatics for altar boys, and I often sang as a coped Ruler at Sunday Mass at Le Chamblac. He vested on the Lady chapel altar (the church's south transept). The Judica me psalm was said at the Lady altar and in procession. He likewise said the Prologue of St John on the way from the high altar back to the Lady chapel. At the time, I though he was just being odd, but this was the medieval and pre-Tridentine way of celebrating.
English eccentrics come in every variety, from the monocled priest in Normandy, to the train spotter, to the gentleman who keeps his lawn immaculate, grows a handlebar moustache or wears an Edwardian frock coat, from the crazy inventor to people who might actually be in need of professional help. It is particularly associated with the idea of being out of the box! Edith Sitwell wrote:
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Sir Barnes Wallis (1887 –1979), Engineer and inventor of the famous Dambusters' bouncing bomb among innumerable other achievements
A point could be made for comparing the English eccentric with the Fool for God of Russian spirituality. He doesn’t care what others think, and differentiates himself from bourgeois convention. He is the ultimate non-conformist. They are often men (and a few women) of giftedness, genius and extreme creativity. The mind of this sort of person is original, anti-conformist and anarchical.
Some eccentrics are cranks, rather than geniuses. Others still have mental disorders like Asperger Syndrome that handicap one aspect of their cognitive functions and enhance another. Thus an uncommunicative boy is able to do calculations way beyond the mental abilities of many mathematicians! Some people put on an affectation of crankiness or dottiness to draw attention to themselves, whilst remaining untalented and sad individuals. I have no pretence to expertise in this field of human psychology, and some things are best left to the professionals.
The Englishman is wildly eccentric, or self-effacing, or just down-to-earth ordinary. Perhaps eccentricity is as hard to define as “normality” and toeing the line. Who are we to judge? Were not some of the greatest Saints eccentrics in one way or another – the Curé d’Ars, St Philip Neri, St Francis of Assisi and the Russian Fools for God I mentioned above?
It might seems a strange subject for The Anglo Catholic, but we might find that much of the creative genius of Anglo-Catholicism has been the doing of many an English eccentric.
Perhaps someone might compile an Observer's Guide to Great Anglican Eccentrics, the first edition of which could be presented to the Holy Father. I can think of a number of living clergy with a web presence who might appear in it.
I suspect that this blog and that of the New Liturgical Movement are evidence that eccentricity (particularly of the more elegant variety) is not confined either to Ecclesia Anglicana or to the United Kingdom. How could it be otherwise, when it is associated with independent and original minds?
Great article. I love the fools for God- such as St Benedict Joseph Labre. We need more of them in this bland serious world. Many of the Hasidic Rebbes were fools for God at times which has caused some modern writers to conclude they suffered from mental illness. However Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught about acting crazy and childlike is a part of the deepest spiritual descent called katnut d'katnut (littleness of littleness). My experience however of Catholics in the US is they don't get spiritual eccentrics at all- in fact unless one has a string of masters and phds then one is not even worth listening too. Can you imagine the reaction of these very pious and serious Catholics if St Xenia was around today.
I shall have to agree with Athol concerning American Roman Catholics. There are, at least in my experience, no eccentrics whatsoever. Their world, liturgical, musical, architecturally, and spiritually, is one great blandness. They are soooo boring.
Almost completely off topic – is that photo of Barnes Wallis playing himself in the film, next to Richard Todd as Guy Gibson?
Adding Screen Actor to his many talents!
I'm not sure. I chose this photo because it was from the film and showed that lovely manner of the perfect gentleman and inventive genius. As he was still working until 1971 or thereabouts, he invented some pretty snazzy stuff. But all that doesn't seem to go with the bouncing bomb and the Wellington bomber. The Dambusters is one of my favourite films of the 1950's, so innocent and so English.
I'm also reminded, when he does his experiments with his children at the beginning of the film, shooting glass marbles across a tub of water, that we English used to measure in feet and inches.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaOup7yLm_o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMv3RJDtJQA
As I heard someone say once – Don't give an inch, insist on Imperial!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKQHVdgCeXo
Sir Michael Redgrave played Barnes Wallis in the film. And the planes employed for the Dambusters' raid were adapted Lancasters. Too bad that the genius of Barnes Wallis and others could not have been applied to adapt the Spitfire for long-range escort so that Bomber Command could have concentrated on precision daylight bombing – and lowered the appalling casualty rate among the bomber crews and the civilians in the bombed German cities – but that's another story (and argument)!
The men loved the Wellington, and they found the Halifax shocking to fly.
'Feet and inches'! Careful Father, they'll stamp fuddy-duddy on your forehead. What next? Saying please and thank-you and removing your headphones when someone speaks to you?
Sorry, it's my GOMS – grumpy old man syndrome.
We still do measure in feet and inches, except for the BBC of course.
I've been living in France for a long time, but I still measure in Imperial except when taking a measurement for another person – ie. measuring a room and asking my wife to note the dimensions. On my own, I stick to Imperial as much as possible. I was in the last generation of schoolboys to learn the old money before that changed in 1971 – 12 pence to a shilling, 20 bob to the pound, 240 pence to the pound, so we had to do the sums on the bases of 12 and 20, and not decimals.
Imagine what it's like for my parents' generation (my father born in 1928 and my mother in 1930) – and older people than that!
I've been to America a few times, and they still have miles and gallons on the road and pounds and ounces at the grocery store.
Ah! The old politically correct BBC. George Orwell's "Room 101" is in Broadcasting House.
We've seen plenty of things come and go…
Adrian, it is Michael Redgrave, playing the part of Barnes Wallis.
Ah, thanks. I wonder where I was getting it from that he played himself? I think he had something to do with the film, advising perhaps.
Decimal reckoning only became advantageous two or three hundred years ago–whenever the majority of people got used to doing sums on paper or slates. Our more remote ancestors either used what we now call an abacus or piled and moved 'counters' or 'casters' (so called because they were used to 'cast' accounts). These might be just pebbles but were often old big pennies or similar metal disks–which is why we still use 'caster' for the ones we put under the legs of sofas or beds. In older houses in England (and, I'm sure, in France) one sometimes still sees kitchen or dining-room tables with lines scored in them for setting out the 'casters' to 'cast' the accounts. The French word for a caster in this sense is 'jeton'.
Conversation on our truly eccentric post is getting really interesting. But I think we do need to get a little nearer to being on-topic. There are aspects of English eccentricity that are more specifically religious and Anglican – and even spiritual. Barnes Wallice has been a bit of a red herring for us, and I don't even know whether that wonderful man and inventor of weapons of war (the Jerries had to be beaten somehow) was an Anglican or a believer.
It's an enjoyable diversion, but let's be careful not to go too far!
Let's not get too carried away – I think nostalgia about Imperial units of measure is all very well, but it does rather caricature A-C's as "more royalist than the King", etc.
While my father still speaks about feet, inches, miles, pounds – and thanks to him and my own mathematical mind I can understand this – the vast majority of my fellow Australians (and most everyone else outside the USA and UK) know only the metric system.
(Of course, customary measures persist – at the pub you still buy beer in pints.)
Let's not froth at the mouth because of the unfortunate French Revolutionary origins of the metric system: that's forgotten by all but those determined to remember, and – I speak now as a scientist – it is a very convenient system for calculations.
It parallels the way that Russian emigres stick obstinately to pre-Revolutionary Russian spelling, complete with the four letters abolished in 1917: і, ѳ, ѣ and ѵ. They don't represent distinct sounds from other letters, hence their abolition, and their use is very tricky to learn; yet some will say that the yat (ѣ) is "the white swan" of the alphabet, "the most Russian of letters" – which is dreamy bosh really.
Don't forget how a silly confusion between metric and Imperial measurements caused one of NASA's Mars probes to burn up in the Martian atmosphere, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars!
******
As Sir Patrick Moore (himself a famous and beloved English eccentric) notes, "eccentric" is a bit like an irregular verb: "I'm an independent thinker, you're eccentric, he's barking mad."
I do question rather if taking this topic too seriously may misrepresent A-C's and other Tiber-swimmers…
I agree with you. All this stuff can easily become a caricature and lead us away from essentials. Things like currency, weights and measures can change and be standardised without the world coming to an end.
That is why I wrote comment #12
Some of these discussions are fun, but only that – fun and entertainment.
Our attachment to orthodox Christianity and traditional liturgies is not eccentricity!
I wonder if the patrimony of eccentricity is an underlying respect for the concrete, the particular, the unique as opposed to a stress on the abstract, the general and the same. There is also something about Imperial measurement that puts man at the centre of things—how inches were measured by the distance between two knuckles on the finger, or example—rather than abstractions from nature.
I'm reminded of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, where he talks about the tendency to make things wholly rational, when the truth is not that simply whole. The earth is not a sphere, the heart is not directly in the centre of the chest, etc.
Deborah