Interview with David Allen White

The Cornell Society for a Good Time shares this exclusive interview given by David Allen White, author of the recently published, The Horn of the Unicorn (Angelus Press), to Mr. Stephen Heiner of True Restoration. I can only imagine that different readers will find Professor White to be provocative, controversial, infuriating, intriguing and humorous. But since our Society specializes in promoting a rich culture of dialogue - called for by that renowned document of the Second Vatican Council, Molles nunc nos omnes - I hope that our readers will be liberal of their time in sharing their responses to this interview. Over the next week or so, this blog's contributors will offer their own responses in separate posts.

Dr. White, at the time of this interview we are still dealing with the after effects of Pope Benedict's Regensberg address. I have two questions: 1) What was your opinion of his remarks, and 2) What does the Muslim response mean?

In a way I was not surprised by the Pope's remarks insofar as he still views himself as an academic and an intellectual. I seriously believe he pulled out the quotation to prove his scholarly credentials and ignored his other role, if you will, as the leader of the Catholic Church. He did not consider the potential for anger erupting among the Muslim community. The Pope was probably as surprised as everyone else by the reaction of the Muslims to that particular remark that he made, but he shouldn't have been.

He has not yet directly apologized for it. But instead he is again trying to use the equivocation that connects with everything of the post-Vatican II Church, i.e., not making clear statements, not making a clear denial, even coming out and making the outrageous statement that Muslims worship "the one true God," which sounds to me like heresy. It certainly borders on heresy, but clearly he defends it, which means it's an equivocation.

The Muslims have right now what they call in football "Big Mo"–momentum. And for the leader of the severely weakened, apparently nearly-dead Catholic Church to provoke the Muslims at their moment of their great strength seems to me foolhardy, and I believe it was an act of foolishness.

I don't think the Muslim response was surprising. If you had been living in Medieval France at the height of the Catholic Faith and someone made a public statement attacking the Catholic Church–you'd expect a huge reaction. The Muslims have the energy, a faith, sadly, a heretical faith, they don't hold the true Faith by any means but they have a faith that they are committed to and they believe in. They actually believe in their religion to the point of dying for it. One would be hard pressed to find many 21st-century Catholics who would be willing to die for their faith. Would that the Catholic faithful would take offense on behalf of the Triune God, the true God, of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is insulted daily everywhere around the world!


It would seem that the Muslims are the lone real defenders of the principle "error has no rights."

That is absolutely correct. They are holding to that part of perennial Catholic doctrine. Sadly, they do not realize that they are indeed in error.


Let's go to the beginning of Pope Benedict's reign, when you were interviewed by Hugh Hewitt (The Angelus, April 2005). Two quotes that just jumped out at me were: "I have a number of quarrels with him (Benedict), in terms of certain things he said in some of his books, statements he's made. I'm not going into those tonight; it's not the time or place to do it." And the sentence after: "But I would say this. He went and studied philosophy in the modern German university as a young man. For a bright mind, the modern university is not the place to go." In the October 2006 Angelus, Bishop Williamson seemed to echo you: "…Like so many learned churchmen…he is learned in the wrong philosophy." Three quotes, two questions. First, what quarrels?

Again I think most of the quarrels I would have are already out there; there are remarks that are well reported and that have appeared in numerous books. Let me simply say insofar as he was one of the architects of the Vatican II church, the errors of the Vatican II church permeate his thinking. There are errors that came out of the unfortunate liberal intellectual training he got as a young man.

There is a refusal to deal with doctrine directly, clearly, and explicitly. Everything is ambiguous, everything can be interpreted in two ways, and there is a sentimental belief that God loves everyone: everyone is faithful, everyone goes to heaven, God is in His heaven, all is right with the world. This sentimentalism is detached from modern reality and the historical truths of the Faith, the eternal truths of the Faith as it has been handed down for two-thousand years.

One can only shake one's head in sorrow at the Pope's confusion, imprecision, and material heresy. It is not for me to comment on the interior state of his soul. But the comments he continues to make should disturb any faithful Catholic.


Second, why is the modern university not the place to go for a bright mind? A number of traditional faithful seem to think modern university and college is a non-negotiable norm for men and women.

I have spent my entire life in modern universities. I first entered the university in the fall of 1966 as an undergraduate and I hope to retire within the next year or two, so it has been an entire lifetime. All I can say is that in the modern university there are a few un-stated, unofficial functions that they pursue above all others:

(1) First and most importantly – to destroy any corpuscle of true faith that might reside in any young man or woman.

(2) To render those same young men and women incapable of even dealing with questions of faith, goodness, truth, and beauty, to render them incapable of dealing with those questions in any serious way.

(3) To distance them from and destroy any respect they might have for family, nation, superiors, and any authority figure whatsoever.

(4) To indoctrinate them with liberal social doctrine and make them little machines that will make them spout automatically the liberal dogmas that are pounded into them every second they are in a modern university.

(5) And, finally, to lead them into corrupt personal behavior that will sink them so in sin that they will be incapable of self-knowledge, self-analysis, and any kind of self-reflection that could pull them out of the degenerate pit that surrounds the modern university.

Under no circumstances whatsoever would I recommend anyone send any child to any modern university.


That's certainly unequivocal.

If I could expand on the topic, there is a book – it is shocking and should only be read by serious adults who are aware that there are scenes in it that go beyond the bounds of taste and decency. But it is the single best representation of the modern university. It is a novel by Tom Wolfe called I am Charlotte Simmons. Mr. Wolfe captured with absolute accuracy the truth of the modern university to such a degree that that book was crushed instantaneously upon its publication so that no parents anywhere could read it and find out what is actually going on in the colleges and universities.

Mr. Wolfe, as Hamlet says, "held the mirror up to nature," and gave a perfectly accurate rendering of the modern university in America, in our time. That honest depiction is now preserved in art to our shame, and it should disgust and horror the parents of students and college-bound students themselves.


I have not read it. I know that it is particularly lurid…

It's not that exactly. The artist has two functions, to instruct and to delight.

It is very difficult to delight now because the other thing the artist must do is hold the mirror up to nature. Any real artist has to record accurately the age in which he lives. Tom Wolfe is doing that in holding up a mirror to the modern university, and he is being brutally honest in setting down what is going on there. To be quite honest, I do think in some ways he keeps his novel from being called pornographic by making those scenes clinical, cold, analytical, by just reporting what is happening. In some ways from what I observe going on in the modern university the situation is even worse. He is selective in his details and he moderates to an extent what he is showing but he is absolutely accurate.

There was a terrible incident at the Naval Academy that received national attention over the last few months. The quarterback of the Navy football team was accused of rape, he went to trial (and it was a military trial), and the facts came out which were there:

(1) The young female midshipman had been out in town that night with friends. She drank three rum and diet cokes, two shots of tequila, two shots of Southern Comfort, and a Kamikaze.

(2) She then went back to the dormitory and at 3:30am called her boyfriend to come and "cuddle" with her. He refused, he was sleeping. She then called the Navy quarterback and invited him over. He came.

(3) They then proceeded to some unedifying activities with her roommate in the room. And then she passed out, and he left. Some days later she accused him of rape.

That is at the Naval Academy and it is on the record, and all I can say is, sadly, that it was not an isolated experience. Wolfe in his novel is rendering artistically and creatively (but accurately) similar situations going on in universities from coast to coast.


Going back to Pope Benedict for a moment, you also said: "I'm hoping that God will use the heart of this man much more than necessarily the intellect." Has this statement borne out, and have you seen evidence for the use of either?

I have seen no evidence of it yet, but I do see God's Providence in action, particularly in the reaction of the Muslim community, which I am sure has caught the Pope off guard. He is intellectually unequipped at the moment to deal with what is happening to him. His response to the outrage of the Muslims and the subsequent actions of the Muslims, which seem to prove the truth of the remark he made by simply stating "this shows we need to open dialogue." Meaning intellectually, God's grace has not yet touched his mind. However, as events continue transpiring, I think the Pope may be in the same state as one of the characters of Flannery O'Connor – forced to confront grace when it comes in a shocking manner through unexpected violence.


Meaning…

As she says, sadly in the modern world, the only way God's grace can get through to people is through a shock or a violent action. We are so desensitized, we have lost our ability to reason. It seems that charity won't do it, so God in His infinite Mercy sends violence.

It's the title of her final novel– The Violent Bear it Away –"From the beginning of time until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

Violence is allowed – it often seems to triumph. But God permits violence – we know He can bring good out of it, and He may even permit violence as an avenue for grace because it may be the only avenue available to closed-off rigid modern men.


Well–tying together your remark on the Wolfe novel with what O'Connor says here: violence and vile behavior – what is the antidote? Charlotte Simmons – the everygirl – has been duped into this life. It is everywhere.

In one sense the major doctrinal tenet of the false faith of the last centuries has been the lie of progress.

We all believe in the modern world: life is getting better, we have to "look forward," each individual can make his contribution, we'll all leave the world a little better off when we leave than when we entered it, we are all building towards a glorious tomorrow. The universities and colleges have become the temples of progress. That is the place where progressive ideas can be formed, new visions can be created, good hearted, noble minded individuals can be given the tools to go out and turn the world into a better place. And everyone has bought this lie to some extent. No one can believe that the universities and colleges can be destructive, soul-destroying, that they are not temples of progress, but dens of iniquity–mentally, morally, and spiritually.

It seems very clear to me that until we return to the very real vision of man as a creature possessed of original sin who needs God's grace, who falls and repents and keeps on falling, who is a pilgrim on a journey toward Heaven, flawed, stumbling, and often helpless on his own, there can be no restoration of the intellectual life, serious education, or culture as a whole.

Modern schools are founded on a big lie. Until that lie is broken and swept away the insanity will continue.


One of my colleagues called it "university professors in the robes of a false priesthood" after what she saw in opening ceremonies at an Ivy League college.

It is very interesting in a way. The way in which they play this game – it is the temple of progress because it is the temple of science. And the one area that you can still get an actual education in modern universities is in math or the sciences. They are taken seriously, they do research, they are indeed making discoveries in the natural world. Though, I fear, they are crossing boundaries that we are not meant to cross because, in their pride, they have no humility and, being full of themselves and their progressive notions, they don't know that they too are touched with Original Sin. But it is true, they are the priests in this temple, this house of heresy.

If science at its best is the exploration of the natural world given to us by God, then the humanities are the study of man in his supernatural nature. Literature, music, fine arts, philosophy, should tell us something about what it means to be human, live and die in this world as a complex human being possessed of both body and soul. At its highest, it should teach us the Catholic truths. What has happened with the poisoning of the humanities, is that as with everything else in this increasingly satanic world, the humanities have been overturned and are removing everything human from students and teaching them that they have no soul, they have no immortal life, they have no morality, there is nothing in the world worth learning, the great literature is nonsense, the great art is drawn by monkeys, music is banging on a hollow log with a stick, and philosophy isn't worth their time. The humanities have become poisoningly inhuman.


Well, this begs the question, "Doc White, what do I do with my smart kids who want to go to college? How are they supposed to get ahead in this world?"

I've said this before and I'll say it again: send them to the local community college or maybe if necessary a state school where they can hide among a mass of humanity.

First, don't send them anywhere without full body and soul armor.

Second, send them to the local community college or state school where they can hide in their anonymity.

Third, they should absolutely stay at home. Don't let them near a dormitory.

And fourth, keep in mind that in the modern world a college degree is a piece of paper that represents nothing other than that you "served your time." It is the equivalent of a "get out of jail free" card…


Except it comes with a lot of debt…

Except it comes with a huge amount of debt but no employer will be interested in anything other than that you have the piece of paper. If it means you can't get into one of the Ivy League grad schools, then that is an additional blessing.


We are just a few weeks after the erection of the new Institute of the Good Shepherd. Before we get to this, I think it's helpful to revisit Campos. In your Open Letter to the Priests of Campos, I noted that in response to the idea that the Campos priests were now "in perfect communion with the Church" you said: "I never knew you left." In leaving Tradition to join the Conciliar Church, what have these priests gained, and what can we glean from three years of reflection on this event?

What they gained was the approval of the world. And sadly the temptation now is to seek the approval of the world rather than the blessings of God Almighty. To be a traditional Catholic in the present time is to be an outcast, to be scorned, to be spat upon, to be lied about, to be humiliated. To try to understand why many of the priests of Campos went along with this agreement, I would have to, out of human sympathy – many traditionalists are tired – and therefore weak. And once you compromise with modern Rome and are accepted back into the fold, which is really patrolled by wolves disguised as sheep, the world will give its approval. Conservative Catholics will sing your praises, you will get to be on EWTN, certain newspapers will trumpet your great wisdom, you'll get to go to Rome and be wined and dined; you'll feel as if you've come home. But sadly it's as if the prodigal son forgot where his real home was and goes off to the wrong house and is welcomed by false parents and any feast which is thrown for him will turn to ashes in his mouth.


Regarding this new Institute of the Good Shepherd, what is the point of this group when the Society has 450 priests? The larger scope of that question is really twofold:

1) What is the purpose of this group, which is already facing large scale resistance in its "home diocese" in France in the person of the Vicar General; and

2) What does it bode for "negotiations" with the SSPX, recently reannounced just this week as "still ongoing" by Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos in an I-Media interview?

1) The purpose of the group is to show traditionalists very clearly that even if they try to compromise, the real princes of the Church, the bishops who are in control, will not even permit a teeny, tiny move towards Tradition and will block any such effort. You have the bishops in France turning on Cardinal Castrillon and basically telling him and his superior, the Pope, how things are going to be–this is clear evidence of the destruction of the hierarchy, and it is clear evidence that any traditional group that tries to reconcile with Rome is going to come to grips with overwhelming opposition from the conferences of bishops, who are the ones who are really in control of the Church right now. I think the reaction stands as a clear warning: "Don't be fooled and don't bother."

2) There is a quotation from the Archbishop which I don't have at hand, and he gave it near the end of his life, and he stated it simply as he saw it: there was no point to further negotiations until Rome returned to the Catholic Faith of Tradition. I would just stand with the Archbishop on that.


So I took you back to 2003 and Campos; let's step back further to January 2002 and an article you penned called "Verbicide." In it you say that you reversed your previous position on television being a semi-useful instrument and had only one prescription for it: death by firing squad. Can I take this a bit further? I run a book and movie review website, and am often asked why I am cooperating with Satan by supporting Hollywood implicitly by viewing and reviewing these movies. Have movies occupied the same place as television? Why or why not?

Movies are the granddaddy of television, and, speaking objectively, created the world of images that its grandchild television then brought into every home. Having said that, I am a man that grew up going to movies two times a week, I have a deep love for movies, and I see them as part of my past. I learned certain profound lessons from them when I was young that prepared me to receive the Faith later on. I am of two minds here. I still believe the medium is extremely dangerous–I no longer go to movie theaters to see movies, I find them to be junk. I do, however, still watch the great films of the past, especially those of my two favorite directors, both Catholic: John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.

I find even now that my time is not wasted by returning to those great films of those great Catholic filmmakers because there are some profound truths held within them. So if you wish to compromise, and I might understand why some might still want to watch movies, then get your TV a good DVD player and a complete set of the John Ford films and the Alfred Hitchcock films and satisfy that gnawing hunger with the best art that the medium has produced.

I do believe that movies, as much as I love them, are a second rate art form because they are totally dependent on technology, and when the day comes, I imagine sooner than any of us imagines, when the "plug is pulled," that art form will vanish completely and forever.



Well, let's get the top three picks for both directors while we are on this topic.

John Ford: 1) The Searchers, which is a great American work of art that I will mention in the same breath as Moby Dick, the greatest work of American literature; 2) The Quiet Man; and this isn't fair, because it's a trilogy, but anyway, 3) The Cavalry Trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande. Those are the films that lead me to call John Ford the American Homer. He created the Western art form, he understands the basics of combat, of men in combat, of the conflict of families in combat. I was on an Alaskan cruise recently lecturing on the Iliad, and as I was lecturing on it, I kept drawing parallels with this trilogy.

Alfred Hitchcock: 1) Vertigo, my absolute favorite; 2) Shadow of a Doubt, which was Hitchcock's own favorite; and 3) Psycho, because it is a terrifying and frightening and devastating look into the dark reaches of the human soul worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

I'll add a fourth – for the clearest expression of Hitchcock's Catholic faith – I Confess.


In that same article "Verbicide," you lament the movie Gladiator. Since this article is no longer available in print, can you summarize why you don't like it, and why you think it's a bad movie?

My problem with Gladiator is that there was no narrative. From the first ten minutes I had a sense of everything that was going to happen afterwards, and it all seemed to be proven correct. There was nothing to watch. The sign of absolute crisis in modern films is that you no longer have narrative, you no longer have directors who know how to tell a story. The stories are trite, predictable, and as a result, completely uninteresting. They try to dazzle you with special effects…

My favorite example of this–I go back to John Ford again–I sat through this dreadful movie years ago, it was hugely popular and brought to the Naval Academy hundreds of new people who all wanted to fly, called Top Gun. It was about Naval aviators. About a week after I saw it I saw an early John Ford film called Airmail, which was about the early days of the airmail service in the United States. In the first ten minutes of Airmail John Ford used the entire plot of Top Gun and then went on and had a real story to tell.


Why is narrative so essential?

Narrative is essential because we have a longing for stories. Stories teach us about life–but they also provide an ordering mechanism by which we can view life in a more serious way. Aristotle in his Poetics defines tragedy as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. My students always chuckle when they read that, and I have to explain to them that it is a profound notion. It suggests there is movement in action from an initiated episode, through complications, to a final resolution. And the more complex that vision is the closer it can come to life itself.

One problem with modern film is that the puny, malnourished narratives suggest how little we understand of the world we live in, and these movies can give us virtually nothing to hold on to, explore, or learn from.


That's certainly true for movies. As for books, why don't people read anymore? Your most recent work, The Horn of the Unicorn, was written in this milieu of non-reading insofar as you wrote much of this book in "soundbite" format. Is this what authors will have to do in the future, or are there other practical measures we can take to read more, or frankly, read at all?

The actual statistics are that only 20% of Americans read one book a year. And of that 20% who read one book a year, 80% read one work of bestseller fiction. That means nobody is reading.

I sincerely think that the publishing industry will soon downscale itself to the point of non-existence. The reading public will be gone forever. We are getting an indication of this from the fact that young people no longer read newspapers. And if they don't read newspapers they certainly are not reading books. They read on the Internet, but what they read is comprised entirely of their insipid instant messenger conversations or each other's blogs about what they did yesterday at some party.

Even in many institutions of so-called "higher learning" book collections are disappearing. There is a debate at the Academy right now. They are about to build a new library because after 40 years the present library has become outmoded. They don't have room for all their special collections that they've had donated throughout the years. So the question is, do we just get rid of them or do we find some place else to keep them? The new library that they are talking about, of course, will have many more computers, will be much more electronically oriented, so that again, when the power goes out, God let it be soon, not only will movies disappear but those books that were put online will be gone as well.

Let me say this, and I think this is a good measure of the crisis. Two years ago, with my plebes – the freshmen at the Naval Academy – I had a class who had tested out of the first semester of freshman composition, so they were bright. They were very good students. I assigned Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a 500-page novel, one of the great works of our age. I could tell they were falling behind in the reading. I told them that I could tell that they were behind and that I wanted to work with them so that they get through it. And when I posed this to them, the best young student replied: "Doc, to be honest, I cannot read for more than ten minutes at a stretch." All of the other midshipmen agreed with him.

This was the best young student we had created – a student with a ten-minute attention span when it comes to reading. In a world filled with a thousand distractions that take no effort at all, we know it is all too easy to not bother, because reading demands concentration, focus, thought, and attention.

The simple fact is that Gresham's law of economics and currency–"bad money drives out good money"–applies to the reading young people do today: bad reading drives out good reading. They've been raised with soundbites. If one communicates with them it will have to be through sound bites or images. It doesn't bode well for the future. God has His purposes.


Where do you see hope?

There are two great and blinding indicators of hope: 1) God has seen to it through modern saints that the Catholic Church with all its truth and glory as the ark of souls will sail forward. 2) It is also clear that He is about to send great suffering. Those of us who claim to have the Faith will soon have a chance to prove it by going through suffering that is unimaginable just as the sinful nature of this world is unimaginable.

Pope Pius XII said in the late 40's, that at that time, the world was in a worse state than before the Flood. If you look at the evils unleashed in the last half century, then imagine how much greater our suffering must be than that of those who went through the first great Chastisement. Because the Catholic Church has continued and we know will continue, because we know Our Lord is still with us in the sacraments and has been nourishing us even as Rome herself tried to remove those sacraments from us, then we must be prepared for our own personal Way of the Cross, ready to mount Golgotha and be nailed to that wood, and be grateful to God that He has given us the chance to, as St. Paul says, fill up the sufferings of Christ.


What were your biggest surprises in writing The Horn of the Unicorn?

I think there were two surprises. The first was the discovery of a major theme of the book that I didn't know I was going to put down. As I worked on The Horn of the Unicorn and looked at the life of Archbishop Lefebvre, I kept writing the same sentence over and over again, which was "But God had other plans." I became aware at some point in writing his life story that The Horn of the Unicorn as a reflection of the life of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre is really a book about the workings of Providence.

God knows what He intends for each of us to do in this world, even if we don't. Often as we are disappointed in what He gives to us, or forces upon us–if we accept it with all humility at some point we will end up at the place He intends us to be, doing the work He intends for us to do. And there can be no one who shows forth this better than the Archbishop.

The second was that I knew I was writing a work about a great man, but what became increasingly clear to me was that I was writing a book about a modern hero, and for someone who has taught literature for a lifetime I didn't think there could be modern heroes. I had only one name on my list, and that was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And I realized that Archbishop Lefebvre was heroic in much the same way. That's why there is one place in the book where I put quotations from these two men side by side. One, a great secular hero who was still teaching some great lessons that God wanted him to give to the world, and the other, a great saint of the modern world, who stands as a tower of strength and inspiration for those who have the faith and as a reproach to all those who have compromised it.


Solzhenitsyn strikes me as someone who is not normally read by the average reader. Can he be recommended broadly?

Yes, he can be recommended broadly if you find the right venues into his works.

First and foremost, the work that brought him international fame, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, can be read by any reader. It is short, it is clear, and it contains all of the major themes of the larger works.

Secondly, one of the most beautiful short stories ever written by anyone in any time is called "Matronia's House", and I recommend it to every reader. In fact, one of the great bits of news in the literary world in the last few years is that Solzhenitsyn, now in his late 80's, has begun writing short stories again.

I would also recommend very highly his later novel, Cancer Ward, where the only off-putting problem is the Russian names. However, that problem crops up for anyone trying to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy as well.

I've said this repeatedly, and I do believe it: the great work of our age is the Gulag Archipelago, and Solzhenitsyn himself said that readers should feel free to flip through pages until they find passages they want to read in it, so one does not have to read that book the way one might read Scripture.


Frame Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn for the Catholic mind.

The traditional Catholic should have a profound understanding of why the great literature of the last two centuries has come out of Russia. We know for a fact, because we were told by our Blessed Mother herself, that the signal event of world history and the sign of the restoration of the Church is going to be the conversion of Russia. Eyes have been turned to Russia because of its great artists for the past two centuries. The messages they have been giving to the world are messages the Church has been neglecting: man has a soul, modern atheistic attempts to arrange a utopia on earth will fail, the greatest good that can come to us is suffering because from great suffering comes great wisdom, and that curiously enough, Russia herself will play an important role in the future of the entire world.

This is particularly true of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoy is a special case, and while he is a great writer, he is a lesser thinker and doesn't quite convey the same lessons as those two giants.


Give us a must-read from both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

The must-read from Tolstoy is Anna Karenina, which indeed is a profound moral work that gives a brilliant vision of 19th century Russia.

The great Dostoevsky work is, of course, The Brothers Karamazov, but I have a special place in my heart for Demons. There you will find many predictions made which align with the prophecies of Fatima.


Continuing with reading, there is an Angelus (December 1990) "Ambrose Observes" which discusses Brideshead Revisited. That's not the only time we've heard you speak about that work. Let me ask a threefold question for our readers who may not be familiar with Waugh's work: 1) In a sentence, what is the greatness of this work?

Let me quote the author himself, who can say it better than I can. Waugh stated he wrote the book to show the operation of God's grace even in the modern world.


2) What are two or three major lessons or themes to be thought well upon?

I have trouble with this one, and I'll tell you why. I've just been teaching Flannery O'Connor's short stories to my Midshipmen, and I read to them a commentary she made once in which she gets upset when someone asks her what the theme of her stories is as if it were a string holding a sack of chicken feed together–and if you could pluck that one string then the whole sack of chicken feed would open up to you. As she would put it, "the meaning of the story is the whole story," so I hate to do this, but I have to say the major themes of Brideshead Revisited exist in the whole book.


3) Who should read it?

I believe everyone should read it. Certainly Catholics should know the great works of their own time. But I have been blessed by God to see a number of young souls into the Church and into Tradition during my teaching years at the Naval Academy. Among the first books I would hand them was always Brideshead Revisited because it reflected much of the world they lived in, and the exact place they were coming from, in that the narrator himself is an agnostic atheist who is abandoned by all those around him who should have guided him.

It has been for me the single greatest instrument of the conversion of the young–but I fear that the world may now have even moved beyond Brideshead.


Well, in thinking of your thoughts above on universities, I think of Vile Bodies…

It's a magnificent work. I've been teaching it lately, in fact, and my students recognize themselves in it, even though the book is decades old. It is not about universities, it's about young life completely out of control.

For the Catholic reader I would follow up with his two great directly Catholic works: Helena, which is a fictional life of St. Helen, finder of the True Cross, and his great biography of St. Edmund Campion. I would certainly recommend Vile Bodies, and then I would recommend his great WWII work, Sword of Honour. You can get all three novels in one volume. It is one of the few novels to come out of the war that tells the truth about the war, which is that it was a great victory for the Soviet Union and a great defeat for the West. But even beyond that, Waugh has beyond that experience, which he puts in that novel, a sense of the dark time that lay ahead for all Catholics.

There is a horrible scene in which the hero goes to Confession only to find out later that the priest is a spy, and has passed on things said under the seal of the confessional. He didn't even tell him things of a military nature. It's just that the priest is a spy and much more concerned with spying than his priestly duties, meaning, he's more concerned with worldly politics than the care of souls.


That reminds me of Ingmar Bergman's masterful Seventh Seal in which Death hears the protagonist's confession so as to cheat him in the chess game. I think one of the very first tapes I heard "against" rock music was yours–I don't recall when you gave it. What's changed since then?

This will sound very odd, but my sense is that rock music has become even more isolating for the young people who listen to it. At the time I made that tape there were 12-15 big name rock groups that had huge records sales that all the young people were listening to. And I never heard any of them, but I knew all their names because I heard all my students talking about them endlessly. What I've discovered now is, that as with protestant sects, the number of rock bands keeps multiplying over and over again, and now each individual rock listener has a favorite rock band of his own and there is very little communal connection even among those young people who listen to rock. The society we live in is becoming more and more atomistic. We are individual tiny cells whirling around all by ourselves, and it seems to be that even rock is helping in this isolation.


So much sound and fury, signifying nothing, delivered directly to your always-in-your-ears iPod.

Precisely, with your own favorite group. It's crazy. The basic nature of rock has not changed.


Some have expressed a great desire for you to teach at a traditional Catholic school. Could you ever be pulled away from the plebes?

Let me just say that the greatest joy and consolation in my life is that I know I have been right where I was supposed to be doing the work God intended me to do. I have been fortunate enough to see many of my students come into the Catholic Church and become strong proponents of Tradition. I've also taught for 36 years, and I am worn out. I am looking forward to some quiet time, and I hope God allows it to me. But I just wrote a book about a man who thought he was going to retire also, and then the major work of his life began…so let me just say "man proposes, but God disposes."


What do you think are the pros and cons of the Internet?

The one great advantage of the Internet is that you can find obscure information quickly.
I remember going into class one day, needing a copy of Pope Benedict XV's encyclical on Dante. I had one in my office but I couldn't find it. I was able to pull it up on the Internet in about two minutes. I have a colleague that was ill, and I agreed to teach her class on Tennyson, and the poem she had them read was "Tithonus." I knew it very well, hadn't seen it for ages, couldn't find my copy of it, and pulled it up on the Internet in 20 seconds. That's the great advantage of the Internet.

The disadvantage of the Internet is that it makes each man feels all-powerful. It gives us a sense of god-like powers–all knowledge is at our fingertips. I can communicate with everyone, everywhere. My voice will be heard by those in the far reaches of the world–this is terrible temptation towards pride.

It also allows people to pull up dreadful, corrupting material as quickly as they can pull up a papal encyclical on Dante or a poem by Tennyson, and we know in fact that the vast majority of Internet use is for those darker purposes.

And as I mentioned earlier, more and more printed material is now assumed to be online so we don't need to keep it in books anymore, we will have it at our fingertips so that when the power goes out, it will vanish, which is why we might be getting close to the point of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451. It's not my favorite novel, but it is an interesting novel. I think it might be useful for traditional Catholics to memorize a piece of poetry, a drama or a novel, or some philosophy, theology, or history, so that when the power does go out, we will have insured a way to preserve it.


Well, this is the third time you've mentioned it, so let me ask, what do you mean "power going out"?

Well, here is Doc White's crackpot theory. To my mind one of the great essays written in my lifetime is Solange Hertz's essay "Hell's Amazing Grace." In this essay she talks about electricity itself as a satanic invention that stands in opposition to God's true light. If the universe began with "fiat lux," then God is the creator of light, and that light was given to us through the sun, which defined day and night, allowed the crops to grow, and gave us the seasons. It connected us to nature in a profound and beautiful way.

But the invention of electricity has allowed us to turn night into day, winter into summer, and summer into winter, with air conditioning and heating. It has allowed us to feel as if we have the world at our fingertips. It's a brilliant essay. It occurred to me recently that we are now totally dependent upon power and electricity for every aspect of our lives. All that Satan needs to do is turn out the power, and then his false son can step forward to perform the great miracle of restoring the power to us if we fall down and worship him.

And I think even many good souls, perhaps even traditional Catholics might be tempted to worship him if it meant they could get their garage door opener back and have the fridge back, so the beer will be cold again, and have their TV and Internet back.


That is not a crackpot theory.

Well, it seems to me that we are getting increasingly close to that.


It's been five years since 9/11. What are your thoughts and reflections, especially someone who lives so close to an area that was attacked?

This may be a mark of age but politics has ceased to interest me altogether. I find it a cacophony and yammering of confused voices, all shouting the same message in different dialects. I believe politics is a serious study and a serious endeavor, but as with most serious endeavors in the modern world it has been reduced to nonsense, and I find it difficult to take seriously any longer. It seems to me, the direction we are going, whether we choose path A or path B, we are going to wind up at the same place….


A short route to Chaos, as Robert Bolt put it.

Yes. A place of severe chastisement, justly merited.


Thanks for your time, Dr. White.

A pleasure, likewise.



Conducted by Stephen L.M. Heiner, in St. Paul, Minnesota, September, 2006. Stephen L.M. Heiner runs a tutoring and test prep company in Overland Park, Kansas. He spends his weekends in St. Marys, Kansas, where he goes to the Latin Mass and writes freelance articles in print and on the Internet.

The Cornell Society for a Good Time now holds the rights to this interview online as it devolved to the interviewer, Stephen L. M. Heiner, who then granted it to us. We would appreciate being contacted concerning any reproduction of this interview in its entirety at cornellcatholiccircle at gmail dot com.

The photographs with this post are owned by Stephen L.M. Heiner. Please see TrueRestorationPhotos.blogspot.com for more information.




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