Postscript
Furniture
P. J. Kavanagh
T think I stumbled recently on one of 'those Great Divides which make people with one set of mental furniture forever unable to understand the conclusions drawn by those who possess another set, however hard both try.
`It has always struck me as odd', said my philosopher friend (a professional philo- sopher), 'that in Shakespeare's history plays they are always going on about the Divine Right of kings and are always deposing and killing kings, so they clearly didn't believe in Divine Right at all.'
That belief in one direction and be- haviour in another direction proves the non-existence of the belief would have never have struck me, and does not strike me now. It could be described as a Secular way of thinking, and cannot be more than a couple of hundred years old. For my part I could easily imagine believing that divinity hedges a king while at the same time wanting to topple him and take his place. Apart from anything else a coronation was (is?) a religious ceremony, a king is anointed, and when that happened to me I would be given the divinity. A primitive way of thinking, certainly, but it is precisely at that point we have to step carefully. We know a great deal about our thought processes but very little indeed about the other processes that go to make up our thoughts.
I replied with a story told me by some- one whose brother was a Jesuit priest in New York. Every so often this priest was visited by men in dark suits who blind- folded him and took him to some secret place where he was invited to hear the last confession of a gangland prisoner. Then he was driven home blindfolded and the unfortunate victim was presumably en- cased in concrete and thrown in the East River.
`Oh,' said the philosopher, 'that was just insurance. They had been told something by their mothers when they were young and were behaving in that way just in case it was true. They didn't really believe it. We are what we do.'
That last is a good remark (though it smacks of the hanging judge) but I remain unconvinced about the motives of the gangsters. Perhaps they were thinking of their victim. At least those New York Italians, or Irishmen (they were unlikely to be WASPs) were allowing something larger than themselves to enter their trans- actions.
I am not trying to prove my philosopher friend wrong (I couldn't if I tried). He was merely trying to be reasonable and I was trying to suggest an element of unreason in our affairs. We are right to trust our reason but if we do so exclusively we shut the door on too much. To take an absurd example: I cannot honestly say that I believe in fairies but I would be delighted to discover them at the bottom of our garden. The trouble with the secularist approach is that it would forbid us to admit their existence even when the Little People were belabouring our ankles with their shillelaghs.
I don't believe in fairies but I do believe in ghosts. Not the sheeted and gibbering kind with clanking gyves around their ankles; these are surely post-Reformation pro- paganda; before that apparitions were cheerfully mischievous, with names like Robin Goodfellow. I don't — I say this with hesitation and the sense of unnecessarily shutting a door — believe in apparitions, on the not very adequate grounds that I have never seen one, do not expect to and have never heard a credible account of one. But I do believe we are surrounded by invisible influences whispering, if you like, in our ears; voices from the past, dead souls with whom we have had some vital connection, and so on. And if we stick our fingers in our ears we shut out much that is good as well as much that is delusive. 'We are what we do' indeed, but we are other things besides; we contain apparent contradic- tions of which we need not be ashamed, they could be our glory. Thinking is not tidy, like good housekeeping. It is difficult to believe in an improbable thing but to believe an impossible thing — six before breakfast — is easy, and exciting. I find the Secular furniture too drab.
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