Alfred Markey

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University of León, Spain | Published: 15 March, 2013
ISSUE 8 | Pages: 53-64 | PDF | DOAJ | https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2013-882

Since the foundation of the Irish State, and particularly since the writing of de Valera’s 1937 constitution, the desire for the separation of Church and State has been a central concern for many of the country’s more prominent intellectuals.1  Chief among these was Sean O’Faolain. In his address at the May 1991 memorial service held for O’Faolain, Conor Cruise O’Brien, himself a notable critic of what he called “The Catholic State”,2 offered a nuanced picture:

Seán was often referred to as anti-clerical, but that is a misleading description. Seán was incapable of humping together so disparate a body as the Irish clergy, whether for the purposes of condemnation or commendation. What Seán was against was what Burke was against: abuse of power, whether by Right or Left, Catholics or Protestants, laity or clergy. In Seán’s day, the senior Irish clergy commanded a great deal of authority, even in what are thought of elsewhere as purely secular affairs and they sometimes abused that authority (1991: 95).

In this paper I wish to examine how O’Faolain contested the abuse of power of the Church while doing so with a view to stressing, in line with the subtle intellectual politics not of Burke but of Edward Said, the important role to be played by the individual intellectual in bringing about change, and the potential value of the utilization of a renewed language of humanism. By revisiting O’Faolain, and by invoking his presence in dialogue with Said’s humanistic idiom, we can reappraise the worth of his ground-breaking challenge to Church authority and consider it particularly in relation to ongoing tension in Ireland around Church and State relations and the consequent fallout with regards to individual and gender rights. To illustrate the character of O’Faolain’s interventions, a close reading, in the manner advocated by Said, will be undertaken of his article “The Priest in Politics” which was published in 1947 in The Bell, that key magazine often attributed with offering the first important challenge to the terms of national self-definition which had become hegemonic in the decades following independence.3

Following the above quotation, O’Brien went on to claim that it was in fact his own cousin, Owen Sheehy Skeffington, who had been the most aggressive in critiquing the abuses of clerical power before then recalling how O’Faolain himself had ended his memorial address at Skeffington’s funeral declaring: “you won, Owen, you won” (1991: 96). The words had been articulated in 1970 in relation to the broad mood of liberalisation which had marked the 60s and the perception that the “Catholic State” had, in effect, fallen to the secular tide of modernisation, part of which involved the increasing acknowledgement of a humanist charter of rights and liberties not modelled to the exclusive prerogative of the Catholic Church. In the light of the recent controversy in Ireland following the death from septicaemia of Ms Savita Halappanavar, and the subsequent claim from her husband that, according to The Irish Times, she had repeatedly asked for a termination of her pregnancy over a three-day period but was refused as there was still a foetal heartbeat, while also being told “this is a Catholic country”, the celebratory words of O’Faolain do perhaps appear somewhat premature (Holland and Cullen 2012). Indeed, O’Brien himself had been notably less sanguine than O’Faolain, remarking that following the results of the two referenda held in the 1980s, the words of victory would have to be spoken without the same confidence, while still concluding that “Yet basically, Seán was right” (1991: 96).

If the degree to which Ireland has moved away from a Catholic identity remains as issue of debate, it is unquestionably true that the change has been considerable since the mid-century period, and it is equally important that, particularly in view of the contemporary controversy, attention be placed once more on the seminal role played in promoting change by individual intellectuals who, in the parlance of humanism and the language of human rights, ‘speak truth to power’. Unquestionably, in relation to the current controversy, the perception exists that a primary influence on the perceived need to change current legislation on abortion away from one heavily influenced by Catholic teaching is the ‘negative publicity’ achieved internationally, but one feels that in view of the diffuse nature of public debate resulting from a globalized, digitalized world, and of the fractious condition of much popular debate in Ireland, it is salutary to reinvoke as exemplary the role played within Ireland by individual intellectuals in bringing about change in the past.

O’Brien provides a useful synthesis. In explanation of why he felt O’Faolain was basically right, difficulties notwithstanding, to declare victory, he clarified that:

The climate in Ireland today is far more liberal and open than was the case at the mid-century period. Partly, the change is due to outside influences. But outside influences alone could not have done it. There had to be, in Ireland itself, some powerful minds, deeply committed to liberal values and possessing the courage to court unpopularity by publicly defending them at all points where they were challenged or denied. Among those who did that, three names are foremost: Owen Sheehy Skeffington, Hubert Butler and Seán O Faoláin: an agnostic, a Protestant and a Catholic. There is a fitness about that (1991: 96).

Yet, there is, perhaps, an excessive neatness about O’Brien’s formulation which fails to register the extent to which, more than anything, O’Faolain defied categorisation. He did not easily fit into any clear mould or under any defining rubric. More protean than Catholic, when, in one of his last interviews, he was asked how he would react to being called a Catholic writer, his response was to exclaim: “That is very funny. I’m not a Catholic, I’m not anything in fact, I have no religion. How could I be a Catholic writer?” (Kennedy 1991: 5), before being explicit that such a condition would be incompatible with his vocation as an intellectual: “It is a contradiction in terms. You can’t have an Irish Catholic intellectual. There is no such a thing. The Church has too strong a hold on things. It is a small country. We need our anticlericals, they are healthy for the country” (6).

O’Faolain’s self-definition is thus best understood not in isolation, or in unchanging, finite terms, but in relation to the world and specifically in combative dialogue with the individuals and institutions which exercised hegemony in the Ireland he had returned to in 1933 following seven years in the US and the UK. As he notes in his autobiography,Vive Moi!, the advent of censorship had him feeling like a man left naked in the pillory to be pelted with rotten vegetables by his fellow citizens, pelted, in effect, by the sort of anonymous letters sent not only to himself but also to his wife and mother which contained the likes of what he termed “a typical effusion: ‘No detractor of Ireland’s fair name must whine because we Irish want to clean our house after dirty little dogs like you have dropped your filth on our clean carpet, as a pup is whipped so shall you be’” (1993: 268-269). It is thus no wonder that he could conceive of his engagement in the public sphere as a fight on a battlefield or that his oppositional vocation should lead him many years later to proclaim Sheehy Skeffington the winner in a vocabulary bordering on the pugilistic.

But, for much that O’Faolain’s engagement with the dominant powers and those whom he termed “stuffed shirts” could sometimes be expressed in terms of battles with winners and losers, his activity as a public intellectual was above all subtle, strategic and always nuanced.4 And so it had to be. Following his death, the ‘Protestant’ Irish Times paid homage, in its editorial comment, to the key role he had played in securing for Ireland a measure of spiritual freedom, while stressing the importance in this achievement of the recognition that what he had faced, and engaged with, was not just the boorishness of the peasantry come to power, but the sophisticated machinations of a new Catholic elite with a specific ideological agenda, and a determination to secure passive acquiescence from the population to a hegemony most clearly manifest in the uncomfortably close relationship between Church and State. The Times wrote:

Certainly O’Faolain was not the only writer to suffer under Irish censorship laws, but he was one of the few who clearly recognised these laws for what they were: not the ignorant fumblings of a philistine bureaucracy, but a conscious effort on the part of sophisticated ideologues in Church and State to impose upon a country still reeling from the horrors of civil war their vision of what life is and how it should be led. They wanted obedience; O’Faolain wanted freedom. If as a nation we have made any progress towards freeing ourselves spiritually, it was O’Faolain and a few like him who urged us on our way (1991: 15).

John Banville, writing specifically on the decade of the 50s, stresses how “docile” the population was, how “grimly accepting of the status quo” in a society which “seemed to me monolithic, impregnable, eternal. The structures of it appeared not man-made but the result of natural and inevitable forces before which the individual must bend, or break. This feeling of impotence was endemic … ” (2004: 25). Banville identifies as productive of such docility, “a kind of applied spiritual paralysis” which had its source in not only the failure of liberal intellectuals but more importantly “the triumph of will among reactionary intellectuals, led by the redoubtable corporatist politician and amateur mathematician, Eamon de Valera” (26). In broad consonance with The Times, Banville too recognised the source of the problem was not “small-minded ignoramuses” but reactionary ideologues “who knew exactly what they were doing” and who identified as of primary importance the protection of the people from foreign influences and “liberal tendencies within our own borders” (27).

In reaction to this reality it was above all intellectual freedom that O’Faolain sought. Although since his death critics have emphasised his revisionism and apparent anti-nationalism, it is, one feels, important to consider the degree to which we can establish as his metier the desire to promote, among a broad public, critical thinking. Such critical thinking, which would question dominant values, and offer alternative, often ‘foreign’ intellectual references, is perhaps best understood as intended to create a fertile, active sphere of public debate rather than as evidence of a particular hostility to the nationalist or indeed Catholic traditions within which we can, to varying degrees, place him at different stages of his life.Close reading of O’Faolain’s Bell pieces shows how inaccurate it is to understand his role as merely a critic of the supposed backwardness of Irish society and a defender of modernity but rather as that of a secular, humanist intellectual who takes up polemical positions from which to offer alternatives to the dominant discourses and their institutions which operated precisely in the fashion of military or religious communities in which the authorised hierarchy issued encyclicals without the expectance of dissent, precisely that which, by contrast, O’Faolain attempts to provoke. Let us examine closely, as an exemplary instance of his style of intellectual engagement, the stimulating January 1947 Bell contribution “The Priest in Politics”.5

O’Faolain’s key ideas with regards to the separation of Church and State and the need for intellectual engagement in relation to faith are here elaborated more explicitly and in a more nuanced fashion than in perhaps any other of his publications. What is noticeable from the outset is how O’Faolain attempts to deconstruct the priest as a primary signifier of Irishness in the nation’s historical narrative. The article begins as follows: “Although Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century the Catholic priest, without whom any picture of modern Ireland is unthinkable, does not occupy a central position in that picture until the 19th century” (1947: 4). Having questioned the figure of the priest, O’Faolain then proceeds to highlight how his contemporary prominence is due to “political influence” rather than to any quasi-natural historical role that automatically placed the priest at the centre of things in Irish life, noting that in the past monks rather than priests were of most significance (4). His provocation is further apparent as he points out that the latter were often not even Irish. Whereas official discourse in the early decades of the Free State emphasised the effective symbiosis between the Catholic Church and the nation, O’Faolain pointedly cleaves one from the other, so insisting that the Church had loyalty really only to itself rather than to the people or the nation.

It is thus represented as askew, as not synonymous with the nation but in part outside, its loyalty, its sense of belonging marked by coordinates that reach into the metropolitan centre. O’Faolain, making a rhetorical appeal to the emotional nationalism of his likely reader, highlights the Church’s collaborationist tendencies particularly during the penal century when “the constant policy of the hierarchy was to proclaim its loyalty to the Throne in the hope of winning at least some reliefs from the Penal Laws” (6). Equally, the hierarchy had actively condemned and sought to marginalise the rebels who had fought against the British presence and, as he writes: “A small, but telling, illustration of the Church’s indifference to ‘the Nation’ as such is offered by the Irish Language Revival” (20). The Church is not behind the language movement, and, as he says, “why should it be?” (20). Its loyalty is to itself as an institution rather than to the particular Irish circumstances it serves and certainly not to the liberationist movement which had brought about national independence. As he explains of the priest:

His secret is that of all the arcane professions. It is impossible to isolate … his personal from his professional elements. What the military academy does to the cadet, what the law-schools do to the law-student, the seminary does to the young cleric. Each one makes a sacrifice of his personal liberty, of the single-mindedness, or unity of his personality, in order to achieve the enlargement of power that comes with membership of a great professional caste (10-11).

Consequently, the priest’s participation in the public sphere is always circumscribed by both the demands and protection afforded by the institution to which he belongs, “The priest, like the soldier, will always explain his public acts in professional terms, never in merely human terms” (11). Implicit in this suggestion is the idea that such professional loyalty, like that of the cloistered academic, involves turning a blind eye to inhuman practices and abuses. This loyalty would not in itself be of consequence were it not for the huge influence the Church has wielded in Irish society particularly since the Act of Union with these values spilling over into the public realm, so much so that, as he notes, even as influential a figure as Daniel O’Connell often found himself forced to hold his peace and to dissent only in private (11). Availing of military metaphors to emphasise just how effective the Church could be in silencing dissenting voices and, in a manner which recalls the military disciplining of colonial subjects of the sort he reveals in his autobiography to have been key in his own upbringing, O’Faolain concedes that “the artillery of argument against him is colossal; not to mention the deadly power of such fragmentation bombs as the cry of ‘anti-clerical,’ ‘anti-God,’ ‘Red,’ ‘Leftist,’ ‘lay-bishop,’ and that most devastating bomb of all, on which is chalked  —   ‘Yah! Intellectual!’” (11).

What O’Faolain perceives is that the intellectual is cast as the anti-priest, he who is inalterably in opposition and effectively rendered as other, as an outsider whose alien values and opinions can, from the Church’s perspective, be legitimately censored and silenced. Indeed, as he states in “The Pleasures and Pains of Ireland”, the climate of hostility towards the intellectual was such as to allow him to consider the country “a hell for the intellectual” (1944: 369). By contrast, the intellectual is here shown by O’Faolain as more in tune with the liberationist ideas through which the collective nation achieved its freedom. This is achieved through subtle recourse to rhetorical strategies designed to accentuate in the public mind a sensitivity to, and regard for, individual liberty expressed in universal human, or humanist terms.

Fundamental to the intellectual project of O’Faolain is the breaking down of the barriers that seek to copper-fasten power within elite institutions and discourage the traffic of ideas and knowledge between the broader public sphere and the space of the institution. O’Faolain explicitly critiques the tendency of the Church to exclude or censor those whose public pronouncements are not strictly doctrinaire, a fate both he and the majority of the country’s creative writers then suffered. Edward Said offers some reflections on institutional power in his late work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. These are suggestive when considered in relation to O’Faolain and particularly with regards to our understanding, in the context of Ireland’s current debates, of the potential benefits of interpreting the humanist legacy in a radical manner which, in effect, ‘dialogues’ with a broad public constituency and not a set of elite practitioners of any particular faith or doctrine. Said asks the salient question: “Is it necessarily the case that a belief in humanism as an educational and cultural ideal must be accompanied by reams of laundry-list exclusions, the prevalence of a miniscule class of selected and approved authors and readers, and a tone of mean-spirited rejection?” (2004: 21). His answer is emphatic:

I would say no, since to understand humanism at all, for us as citizens of this particular republic, is to understand it as democratic, open to all classes and backgrounds, and as a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation. I would go so far as to say that humanism is critique, critique that is directed at the state of affairs in, as well as out of, the university (which is certainly not the position adopted by the carping and narrow humanism that sees itself as an elite formation) and that gathers its force and relevance by its democratic, secular and open character (21-22).

Clearly, the kernel of Said’s idea is that the contemporary intellectual should not be at odds with humanism per se but with the sort of interpretation of it that is reactionary and aimed at closing off its sphere within elite institutions such as the academy or the Church. As O’Faolain points out in his own defence of a humanistic liberty in relation to the figure of the priest, this reactionary turn involves keeping the public at bay, disqualified from engaging in debate. O’Faolain shows that the Church in Ireland has a very clear history of keeping the people and its potential interests at a distance and in a very secondary position to that of the needs of the Church itself, while he, by contrast, above all attempts to put it into dialogue with the lay mind, to have it engage with ideas from the secular sphere, to create a traffic of exchange between interconnected and not strictly separated realms. His project is consistent with Said’s valuable insistence that:

…there is, in fact, no contradiction at all between the practice of humanism and the practice of participatory citizenship. Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present (2004: 22).

This issue of critique is important and has led to some misunderstanding of what Said’s relationship to humanism actually is. In reaction to his Orientalism, he has been criticised, for example by James Clifford, for a “relapse into the essentializing modes it

1. In his contribution to a June 2012 Irish Times series “Catholicism Now”, historian Diarmaid Ferriter emphasises that the 1932 Eucharistic Congress was the key event which cemented the relationship between Church and State. Anxious to seek favour with a hierarchy which had previously excommunicated him and his fellow anti-treaty “irregulars”, de Valera very enthusiastically supported the mass event, so preparing the ideological parameters for the 1937 constitution.  [↩]
2. In States of Ireland, one of the signal texts on Irish culture and identity published in the second half of the twentieth century, O’Brien dedicates a chapter to “The Catholic State” that evolved after partition, and while he notes that it was never officially called a Catholic State, he indicates the extent to which “the oppressive pieties of the Catholic State” were eventually to become apparent (1972: 110). He also wrote of O’Faolain as a “Catholic writer” in Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Catholic Writers. Among the other writers in the study are Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and François Mauriac.  [↩]
3. Although The Bell more than any other periodical is associated with the challenge to the values of official Ireland, earlier periodical publications did, of course, engage in debate over the terms of national self-definition. Evident dissent to the new Catholic hegemony was to be found in George Russell’s Irish Statesman, while, as Diarmaid Ferriter has noted, the satire of Dublin Opinion was very popular, notably its lampooning of national self-glorification (2004: 346-347). Both of these publications achieved substantial circulation figures. Other significant periodicals include The Capuchin Annualwhich prioritized high culture over religious content, and Ireland To-day which, although it lasted for only two years, served almost as a precursor of The Bell, including as it did, contributions from O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor in which Daniel Corkery’s nationalist vision was challenged. Ferriter indicated that its aim was to critique “an outdated and narrow national identity” (2004: 375).  [↩]
4. “The Stuffed Shirts” was one of his more famous editorials in The Bell. In it he berated the Catholic and Gaelic ideologues determined to shape the nation to their very limited imaginings. In his final Bell editorial, “Signing Off”,  he admits to some weariness with his role of taking to task the “Bourgeoisie, Little Irelanders, chauvinists, puritans, stuffed-shirts, pietists, Tartuffes, Anglophobes, Celtophiles” (1946: 1).  [↩]
5. A slightly modified version of the polemic constituted the chapter “The Priests” in O’Faolain’s The Irish, which he described as “a creative history of the growth of a racial mind” (9). Originally published in 1947, the same year as the article in The Bell, the chapter was revised in 1969 to include two further pages in which he attributed the lack of an ecumenical element in the Irish Church to “the Conquest in Ireland” before going on to recommend the introduction of divorce to Ireland, while lamenting that intelligent discussion on the issue was greatly hampered by the lack of “independent periodicals” and the fact that Radio and Television were “firmly controlled with quiet caution by the State” (119-121).  [↩]
6. It is worthy of note that Newman can here highlight the importance of both literature and science, a turn illustrative of a humanistic spirit that refuses specialism, values similar to those Said defends in his Representations of the Intellectual Reith lectures, namely those of the amateur, secular intellectual. Newman’s defence of both literature and science is also reminiscent of Vico. In particular as a result of the dominance of Cartesian thought, Vico sought to revalorise literary language which would serve as a critique to the scientific method.  [↩]
7. Said suggests in his “Gods that Always Fail” Reith lecture that: “Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side” (1994: 88), and “Those gods that always fail demand from the intellectual in the end a kind of absolute certainty and a total, seamless view of reality that recognises only disciples or enemies. What strikes me as much more interesting is how to keep a space in the mind open for doubt and for the part of an alert, skeptical irony (preferably also self-irony)” (89).  [↩]
8.  Said writes in Representations of the Intellectual: In and of itself religious belief is to me both understandable and deeply personal: it is rather when a total dogmatic system in which one side is innocently good, the other irreducibly evil, is substituted for the process, the give-and-take of vital interchange, that the secular intellectual feels the unwelcome and inappropriate encroachment of one realm on another. Politics becomes religious enthusiasm  —   as is the case today in former Yugoslavia  —   with results in ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and unending conflict that are horrible to contemplate (1994: 84-85).  [↩]