Tom Shakely

Ruth Gledhill reports that the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace will host the first Catholic service since the 1550s:

Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Nichols will celebrate Vespers and the Bishop of London, Dean of the Chapel Royal, will preach in Henry VIII’s chapel, built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the early 16th century but taken from Wolsey by the King and rebuilt.

Henry VIII broke with Rome and established the Church of England after Wolsey failed to secure his annulment from Catherine of Aragon. …

A spokesman described it as “an unprecedented coming together of the Catholic and Anglican churches on such an historically important site”.

The Vespers will be dedicated to St John the Baptist, remembering the origins of the chapel as built by Cardinal Wolsey on the site of a former chapel of the Knights of St John Hospitaller. Members of the public will be able to take part in a ballot for a stall or boxed pew at the service.

The music will be performed by Harry Christophers and his ensembles The Sixteen and Genesis Sixteen and will include Thomas Tallis’ Magnificat, William Cornysh’s Salve Regina and John Taverner’s “Leroy” Kyrie.

Before the service, Cardinal and Dean will take part in a “conversation” on “Faith and the Crown” in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. They will debate the role of the Chapel Royal in maintaining elements of Catholic worship to the present day.

I remember the Queen and Pope Benedict XVI being friendly, and some speculation about what that might mean about a decade ago. Mark Woods wrote a few years ago that the Church of England is “lucky to have a believer at its head:”

At its head is the Queen, the many-times-removed successor of Henry VIII in that role. He was recently named as Britain’s worst ever monarch by a panel of historians; she, because of the near-faultless way in which she has navigated her role in a democratic society blown every which way by the winds of social change, has some claim to be regarded as the best.

We have all been lucky to have her. The Church of England, though, has been particularly fortunate. Previous monarchs have been murderers, adulterers, meddlers and fools. Their attitude to religion has sometimes been sincere enough, as long as it didn’t inconvenience them too much.

In Queen Elizabeth, however, the Church has someone at its head for whom the Christian faith is not another layer of ceremony but a living reality.

In recent years she has worn her faith more openly, as we have seen in the Christmas broadcasts in which she speaks directly to the nation. Last year she said: “For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, whose birth we celebrate today, is an inspiration and an anchor in my life.” In 2012 she said: “This is the time of year when we remember that God sent his only son ‘to serve, not to be served’. He restored love and service to the centre of our lives in the person of Jesus Christ.”

The previous year she said: “God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general…but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.” Forgiveness, she said, “lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.”

Today, Queen Elizabeth passes Victoria’s record as our longest-serving monarch. We should be glad of her example of loyal service, and glad that she is not ashamed of the gospel. What sort of spirituality her successors will bring to their role is open to question…

The Catholic Anglicanism that the Queen demonstrates seems unlikely to survive her reign. I imagine that it goes against every instinct of hers to even imagine it, but if there is going to be English monarch in the modern era who could initiate a return to Rome, it seems like it would have to be her.

Joseph Ford Cotto reviews Ben Novak’s “Hitler and Abductive Logic: The Strategy of a Tyrant.” I helped Ben deliver the manuscript to Lexington Books, and am glad to see Ben’s scholarship on abductive logic continuing to earn coverage. It’s a form of logic that may give rise to new heroes and villains alike, and it’s important to understand. Cotto writes:

While the facts about why Hitler did what he did are often discussed, the question of how he was able to attain stratospheric political, economic, military, and, in the broadest sense, societal power typically goes unanswered. Ben Novak, who retired from practicing law to begin a new career in historical scholarship, seeks to provide an explanation.

In Hitler and Abductive Logic: The Strategy of a Tyrant, he writes that the aforementioned despot had a most unique ability “to ‘scent out’ the fundamentals of political power and to imagine and inquire in an extraordinary way, quite unlike what ‘normal’ people do.” Novak argues that this sixth sense of sorts allowed Hitler to utilize a seldom-mentioned concept called ‘abductive logic.’

First identified by Charles Sanders Pierce, a nineteenth century Johns Hopkins University professor who Webster’s Biographical Dictionary deemed “the most original thinker and greatest logician of his time,” it is — per Stanford University’s philosophy encyclopedia — “the stage of inquiry in which we try to generate theories which may then later be assessed.” Pierce described abductive logic as “the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea”. He also said that it pertains to “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered”.

Novak believes that Hitler used abductive logic to, above all else, capture the hearts and minds of millions who, when confronted by other power-seekers, would not have been nearly as receptive. Laying out in painstaking detail how Hilter put abduction to work for the Nazi Party, Novak delves deep into the dictator’s life story, long before his infamous altercation in a Munich beer hall, let alone ascension to Germany’s chancellorship. …

Novak, in tracing Hitler’s childhood and rise to power as an adult, more than ably disseminates a story of how the lowest depths of humanity were reached. From Hitler — an unremarkable, unsuccessful farm boy gone to the big city — channeling his deep personal rage into political power to the ease with which throngs of voters rallied to his cause to how he attained stomach-wrenching domestic order primed to liquidate not only those within but abroad, nary a stone is left unturned.

Especially astounding is that, for all of the power he attained, Hitler never delivered typical campaign promises, like pragmatic solutions to pressing popular concerns. Instead, he cast such a spell over those around him that Nazi supporters were willing to pay admission so they could be present at their party’s gatherings.

“Hitler was no ordinary demagogue who merely flattered the crowds, played on their emotions, and told them what they wanted to hear,” Novak specifies at the end of his book. “Rather, he acted on a plan he created in advance completely in his mind, and then, in a very short period of time, methodically put each element of what he had only imagined into place. Perhaps, what is most astonishing is that he did it, as he himself admits, ‘against all factors of human reason,’ by doing the opposite of what both his opponents and contemporary observers expected him to do, and by being prepared to take advantage of the opportunities he imagined would result.”

That Hitler followed this course of action yet found success for years on end reveals a terrifying truth regarding human nature. Hitler and Abductive Logic is not bedtime reading or any sort of literature for those who, even while learning about catastrophe, expect silver linings to grace the clouds. Nonetheless, it is an immensely powerful work which not only researchers of World War II should read, but anyone who is prepared for an education in how raw power is coveted, worked toward, obtained, and sustained for purposes so horrific that they roam beyond what words can describe.

When people write off villains like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. as simply “madmen,” they are ignoring the fact that the clinically insane end up on the street—not in the halls of power. What Ben tries to point out is that tyrants often rise for specific reasons, and through the force of a specific logic, and if we don’t understand that logic and how to counter it, we’re more likely to see more tyrants.