CYCLE FORTY-FOUR

1. Classical music (in the strict sense of that term) signified form over content, and thus adhered, within a broadly religious framework, to cultural norms. Romantic music, by contrast, signified content over form, and thus adhered, within a broadly secular framework, to increasingly barbarous norms which, in the twentieth century, were to culminate in the atonal cacophony which is the hallmark of modernism.

2. If Classical music aspired towards God, then Romantic music plunged humanity back towards the Devil and the cacophonous Hell of content-dominated modernism.

3. Most twentieth-century music, including Jazz and Rock, was content-dominated to a degree which made it virtually dependent upon drums and/or a variety of percussion instruments, and thus synonymous with cultural barbarism.

4. Folk music, the traditional ally and source of inspiration behind much of the better Classical music, is much less prone to the domination of content than, say, the musical avant-garde or Modern Jazz, and for this reason it remains in the vanguard, paradoxically, of cultural progress.

5. It is difficult to imagine a more cultural type of music than that which utilizes, in the best Irish traditions, uilleann pipes - not even Classical music, which, despite its adherence to form at the expense of content, remains suspiciously 'civilized', and hence middle class.

6. Urban civilization is at such an artificial remove from nature, these days, that it is inconceivable how a person of Catholic sensibility, for whom nature is the bedrock of phenomenal subjectivity, could possibly be at home there ... in what is, to all intents and purposes, an environmental manifestation of the Protestant heresy.

7. If there is blasphemy in the modern age, then it must surely take the forms of the industrial and traffic pollution that we witness about us in the smoke-choked streets of our major cities - living proof of contemporary man's lack of spiritual self-respect!

8. Crime, as generally understood and portrayed in the Western world, is to some extent a crude reflection of the legal crime upon which contemporary civilization is built, a proletarian mirror, as it were, to the bourgeois face of commercial exploitation which worships power and wealth.

9. So long as people can be commercially exploited by morally unscrupulous predators, crime will continue to exist as a mirror image, so to speak, of the legal criminality which makes a God out of power and a false Heaven out of wealth.

10. One cannot solve 'proletarian' crime while the self-righteous commercialism of 'bourgeois' criminality remains legal. So long as we continue to live in an immoral society, a society in the grip of commercial exploitation, 'populist' crime will persist in the face of all attempts by the Establishment to eradicate it. In order to tackle crime properly, one should first of all put an end to the bad examples 'from above' which, in temples of Mammon, directly or indirectly perpetuate it. Social measures alone are hardly adequate!

11. Just as, from a divine standpoint, nature/the world is a context of 'sin', the phenomenal subjectivity which hinders the development, through culture, of noumenal subjectivity in God, so, from a diabolic viewpoint, civilization/purgatory is a context of 'crime', the phenomenal objectivity of which militates against the development, through barbarism, of noumenal objectivity in the Devil. Yet both 'sin' and 'crime', being phenomenal, are subject to constraint and correction, the former through the grace of God, and the latter through the punishment of the Devil. For rest assured that where God is very firmly behind the salvation of sinners to grace, the Devil is just as firmly behind the damnation of criminals to punishment, since 'crime and punishment' are no less complementary, in their respectively objective fashions, than 'sin and grace' complement each other in their respectively subjective fashions - the former category in each pair phenomenal and the latter category noumenal.

12. Hence while sinners, who are of nature, can be saved to the heaven of grace by God, criminals, in their civilization, can only be damned to the hell of punishment by the Devil. The former in culture, the latter in barbarism.

13. One should speak, echoing the above contentions, rather more of the criminality of Protestants with regard to civilization than of their 'sinfulness' with regard to nature, which, by contrast, is the traditional failing of Catholics. Protestants may not be as guilty of sin as their Catholic counterparts, but they are far guiltier of crime, the crime of commercial materialism and its exploitation, and even desecration, of nature and the world.