‘Un habitant de l'empire romain disposait de 540 dollars de revenu annuel, en moyenne. Par comparaison, le revenu d'un Français en 1688 était de 900 dollars et en 2003 de 22 000 dollars. Nous sommes donc, aujourd'hui, quarante fois plus riches qu'il y a deux millénaires. Vous saviez ça ?
C'est Angus Maddison qui l'a calculé. Economiste britannique, 80 ans, vivant près de Compiègne, il nous a reçu avec du bon thé. Il est "la" référence mondiale des statistiques économiques historiques. Son travail, sa passion, est de mesurer, de recompter, de comparer, d'évaluer le PIB et le PIB par tête depuis la nuit des temps, pour offrir aux économistes des séries fiables sur des perspectives très longues. Angus Maddison a longtemps travaillé à l'OCDE sur la période d'après guerre jusqu'en 1979. Puis il a poussé ses recherches plus loin en arrière, au début de la révolution industrielle en 1820, puis jusqu'au Christ. Son prochain ouvrage s'intitule : Une interprétation quantitative de l'économie mondiale de l'an 1 à 2030....
Ses calculs permettent de réhabiliter le "capitalisme marchand" entre 1500 et 1820, pour montrer que la croissance y fut meilleure qu'on ne l'avait dit, sous l'influence du pessimisme malthusien. "Les progrès de la science, de la technologie maritime, de l'organisation des affaires et des institutions n'eurent pas d'équivalent dans le monde." Il s'élève contre l'école de pensée qui attribue la croissance moderne à "une révolution industrielle née à Manchester". "Le progrès de 1500 à 1820 a été sous estimé, poursuit le professeur. Cette école veut faire croire qu'avant, les hommes vivaient encore dans des cavernes. En fait, les racines de la croissance remontent à la période du capitalisme marchand." ’
Éric Le Boucher, ‘Le Monde’, 16 avril 2006. Full text at Le Monde website.
‘Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth contains no specific command of Jesus to baptize, and no account of the institution of the eucharist; neither rite is explicitly mentioned. Yet it has been held that there is more sacramental teaching in John than in the other gospels. John uses regularly categories of thought that might seem favourable to the development of sacramental theology. We find not only a notable use of symbolism, but also an insistence upon the significance not of the material as such but of the material circumstances of Jesus. The Word became flesh; flesh became the vehicle of spiritual life and truth, and history became charged with a supra-historical meaning. The incarnation was itself sacramental in that it visibly represented truth and at the same time conveyed that which it represented. This thought, fundamental as it is with John, needs only to be compared for a moment with the messianic categories of the Synoptic Gospels in order to appear at once as a promising soil for sacramental thought. Yet, paradoxically, the opposite conclusion might be drawn. If it is true that the Word of God became flesh, what room is left for minor manifestations of the divine in the material? Will not the great, the ultimate, sacrament drive out the minor ones? If John's thought provides suitable categories for the development of sacramentalism is it not the more striking that he does not refer to Christian baptism (in the sense of a rite to be performed after the resurrection of Jesus) or to the Lord's Supper? May it turn out to be true that John's thought so far from being favourable to the development of sacramental theology is in fact the negation of it?’
C. K. Barrett, ‘The Gospel According to St John’, Second Edition, Chapter 4, p. 82.
‘As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and mine must one day be.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 58. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 590).
‘ When it was fashionable to decry Cranmer’s liturgical rhetoric as overblown and repetitive, people often held up as typical the echoing sequences of which he and his colleagues were so fond. ‘A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction; ‘Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders; Spare thou them which confess their faults; Restore thou them that are penitent’; ‘succour, help and comfort all that are in danger, necessity and tribulation’; direct, sanctify and govern’; and of course, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The liturgical puritan may well ask why it is not possible to say something once and for all, instead of circling back over what has been said, re-treading the ground. And in the same vein, many will remember the arguments of those who complained of the Communion Order in the Book of Common Prayer that it never allowed you to move forward from penitence to confidence and thanksgiving: you were constantly being recalled to your sinful state, even after you had been repeatedly assured of God’s abundant mercies.
Whether we have quite outgrown this reaction, I’m not sure. But we have at least begun to see that liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines. As the late Helen Gardner of this university long ago remarked, liturgy is epic as well as drama; its movement is not inexorably towards a single, all-determining climax, but also – precisely – a circling back, a recognition of things not yet said or finished with, a story with all kinds of hidden rhythms pulling in diverse directions. And a liturgical language like Cranmer’s hovers over meanings like a bird that never quite nests for good and all – or, to sharpen the image, like a bird of prey that never stoops for a kill.
The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word’s light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a ‘last’ word. ‘The world itself could not contain the books that should be written’ says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms.’
Rowan Williams at a service to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, 21st March 2006. Full text at the website of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
‘The novel is a fixed thing: a block of paper and binding, held in two hands, resting in the lap - solid, graspable, immediate. Its type is set; its pages cut and numbered; its end is white space. A book is an object, a piece of property; the act of reading is drawn forward by human attention and understanding. That is another model for our responsibility in life, and in love. Just as our gaze moves over words progressively (in advance and accumulation), scanning them, registering them, and determining meaning, so we are encouraged by the fact of the book to see, identify, grasp, and choose. Books teach us to talk, to think, to be literary; thus novels school us through the lives of characters.
Tranfer this formula to the movies, and strange things begin to happen. The ‘thingness’ of a movie is largely absent for the audience. It is a phantom imprint of light so powered that we feel our own insignificance. The show turns over without us. We cannot lay hands on it. Because it keeps moving on, we are under no burden to recognize, grasp, identify, and choose. We can let it wash over us, just as a voyeur need take no responsibility for the things he can see. And because our conscious decision-making power is less involved, so another part of ourselves emerges - passive, pliant, thrilled, fantasizing, drawn to witness wild, dangerous, impossible things, and to be thrilled by the rare advantage we have gained over physics, consequence, and damage. Not really there.
We are, therefore, less inclined to fix upon the means of choice in love and marriage than yield to the parade of dreams that are more likely to become glamorous and sexual, as opposed to matters of character and context. We have found another level of consciousness: to pass through shared reality well enough, but to keep a special private room alive behind our eyes, the one where anything is permitted, the one where every dutiful husband may be a Bluebeard. More than that, we may be inclined to give up on the old real life because of the infinite glories of the fantasies, the dreams.’
David Thomson, ‘The Whole Equation’, pp. 234-235.
‘{Walter} Hussey suggested the theme of the Eucharist, and approved Finzi's eventual choice of words by Richard Crashaw (he had considered going back to Vaughan's ‘Up to those bright and gladsome hills’). Crashaw's ‘Hymn in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament’ is a translation of ‘Adore Te and ‘Lauda Sion salvatorem’ by St Thomas Aquinas, and contains ‘involutions and obscurities not found in the original 13th-century Latin’, as Finzi wrote in the programme note; he selected verses from both poems to make his composite text, where Crashaw reaches ‘an ecstacy hardly surpassed in English poetry’. Plainly Finzi was not drawn to the poem for its Christian content, but for its intensity, imagery, and passionate language. He matched it with glowing, rapturous music.
He began with lines taken from the last three stanzas of ‘Lauda Sion’, the picture of the final sacrifice - ‘On which all figures fix't their eyes’. After the hushed introduction, the chorus enters unaccompanied with quiet concentrated awe, the sound fanning out from a low-pitched unison; the lightened texture and the super-imposed fifths on ‘ransomed’ are curiously austere, as is the Phrygian harmony. Many of the motifs are related by pitch or rhythm, unifying the whole work, but the variety of texture is striking. ...
Finzi's image for the sacrament of communion (...‘drink the same wine’ ...) seems to dissolve tonality and time: pedals and bass outline a whole-tone augmented fifth, alto voice and keyboard move in canon up and down a syncopated major arpeggio. A harmonic echo of that passage, now sensuously relazed, underlies the calls ‘Come Lord, Come Lord’. (Finzi would have known Crashaw's poem, if not otherwise, from this passage in the third of Vaughan Williams's Four Hymns.) ...’
Diana McVeagh, ‘Gerald Finzi: His Life and Music’, p. 148.
‘ "You see I have so many things here ... of so many kinds, and all, as the neighbours think (but they know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that's why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I can't abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do they know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill name of Chancery." ’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 5. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 70).
‘ Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his party, who has known what office is, and who tells Sir Leicester Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see to what the present age is tending. A debate is not what a debate used to be; the House is not what the House used to be; even a Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He perceives with astonishment, that supposing the present Government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new Ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle - supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the Leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock), because you can't provide for Noodle! ’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 12. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, pp. 189-190).
‘ He had been eight years at a public school, and had learnt, I understood, to make Latin Verses of several sorts, in the most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the Verses, and had learnt the art of making them over and over again, unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 13. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 197).
‘ he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon - a sort of Young Love among the thorns - when the Court of Chancery came in his way, and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but, as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 15. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 253).
‘ Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
A band of music comes, and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog - a drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four; can't remember where he left them; looks up and down the street, as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise, as to awakened assocation, aspiration or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 16. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, pp. 258-9).
‘ I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great; unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.
‘Why, good gracious’ said Miss Flite, ‘how can you say that? Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of England, in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every sort, are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and consider. You must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don't know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in the land!’
I am afraid she believed what she said; for there were moments when she was very mad indeed.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 35. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, pp. 569-570).
‘ The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 39. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 621).
‘ if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle's making the timely discovery, that if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 40. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 638).
‘ His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable, that it had long touched me to the heart.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 51. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 785).
‘ Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but, as yet, such things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams, like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up, and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hill-tops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic, and abandoned in fell hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 55. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 839).
‘Part of me worries that the contemporary Church is losing aspects of its wide and generous memory and therefore condemning itself to become a ‘swimming pool church’ - one that has all the noise coming from the shallow end. In such a paddling pool it will be easy to say ‘easy’ and mysterious to say ‘mysterious’. ’
Mark Oakley, ‘The Collage of God’, chapter 1, p. 10.
‘Beckett had such a strong vision of his own work, and he found working so hard – he had to pull it out of himself every day. He really found writing an awful task. He hated it, it was really an unpleasant, lonely, alienating experience for him. But it was his vocation, and because of that he put his whole being into it. He felt: this really has to be worth something. He kept plugging away at it. So his plays are probably more finished and polished than most modern plays.’
Conor McPherson, Channel Four interview. Full text at the Channel Four webiste.
‘The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, Chapter I, p. 16.
‘‘Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!’ Mr Skimpole gentrly reasoned with him, as he made a little drawing of his head on the fly-leaf of a book. ‘Don't be ruffled by your occupation. We can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual from the pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in private life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a great deal of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be conscious.’
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’, chapter 6. (Penguin Classics 1996 edition, p. 97).