By JAMES BARESEL
The Wit and Wisdom of Father George Rutler, published by Sophia Press: 2020, available in paperback and on Kindle at amazon.com.
Evelyn Waugh once wrote that one of the authors whom he read most frequently was Msgr. Ronald Knox, from whose books he could, at one and the same time, receive both spiritual edification and literary pleasure. Even in an age when that combination was not uncommon, Knox was able to achieve it to a truly rare degree, surpassed in English prose only by St. John Henry Newman. Today that tradition is largely a matter of history. Largely.
There remains one Anglophone priest who has maintained it, whose works are at least the equal of those from the pens of all but its greatest exemplars and can even be spoken of in the same breath as those of his handful of superiors and who is, moreover, the greatest contributor to that genre the United States has ever produced — Fr. George Rutler.
Like most of the priests in that tradition, Rutler is a convert from the Anglican Communion’s quasi-Catholic Oxford Movement. After undergraduate studies at Dartmouth University, he moved on to Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary, an Episcopalian school that shared faculty with Cambridge and Oxford (where Rutler spent his summers).
This formation had a single but very pertinent advantage over that usually found in Catholic seminaries. Some provide only the theological education necessary for ordinary priestly work. More elite formation is aimed at specialized academic scholarship, canon law, or the Vatican diplomatic service. A solid grounding in literature and the arts was, traditionally, considerably more common among Anglican and Episcopalian clergy, perhaps because they often had strong social ties to the broadly educated and cultured gentlemanly segments of society.
It is an advantage of which Fr. Rutler has made full use, one which has allowed him, like Knox before him, to become both a prominent popular preacher and a leading influence on writers and thinkers among the laity.
Anyone not yet familiar with his works will find an excellent introduction to his thought and style in Sophia Press’ The Wit and Wisdom of Father George Rutler. Those whose familiarity with his writing is already extensive will find many of his most incisive and penetrative insights at their most memorable, amusing, and pungent best.
Even the form of the volume is reminiscent of the earlier, more thoughtful, and more elegant age out of which Fr. Rutler seems to have stepped. Rather than a volume of essays, it provides a series of short extracts in the manner of the “commonplace books” within which people used to record apposite quotes on every imaginable topic.
Of course many of the selections in Wit and Wisdom concern central issues in the spiritual life, truths of the faith and the current state of the world, pithily and memorably summing up points with which most of us are probably familiar, or just getting to the heart of the matter in a few brief words:
“No one becomes a saint by wanting to be one; it happens by loving God.”
“Some time ago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen . . . more people went to see the empty space than when the painting was there. I suppose we could have that as an analogy with the philosophical conceits of our modern age.”
“Only the ignorant think ignorance is bliss.”
Others, perhaps the most uniquely useful, are those that touch on aspects of Catholicism and of life less regularly examined, gems including:
“It is hardly a tribute to the glory of God’s creative power to be bored with what He has made. . . . Christ excited many different reactions in those who encountered Him. . . . But there is no record of anyone saying that He bored them.”
“The example of growing old gracefully is another gift of a monarch — in contrast to mere celebrities who use the limelight to create an illusion of agelessness.”
“Vianney was not a backslapper. One young nobleman was surprised by the courtliness with which he opened the confessional door; no trained footman could have done it more elegantly.”
And there are lines enjoyably merely because they serve as amusing commentary on a lighter side of life too rarely written about in age whose multitudinous evils can become a preoccupation:
“In a perversely affluent culture where thinness is an outward sign of wealth, getting fat is not necessarily a way to humility, but it does guarantee humiliation.”
“Being a New Yorker, I go to the top of the Empire State Building about once every thirty-five years.”
“I have never been able to play background music since Auden came . . . to a . . . party I gave him [at which he would have been expected to recite from his own poetry] and he bellowed over my Victrola, ‘Do you want to listen to me or to that?’”
Wit and Wisdom is ultimately a book about the whole of Catholic existence on this side of the grave, at least that form of Catholic existence appropriate to all but some special souls, one primarily focused on the spiritual life, one aware of the evils of the present age without becoming fixated on them, but also one able to step back from the higher things to enjoy the good things of the world God gave us.
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