A few weeks ago, Ed posted a comment asking me if I found it difficult to adjust to life in the New World because of the relative absence of history: “Do you, or did you ever find it hard to adjust to life here in America, the ‘new world’ (with little to no past) versus your ancient homeland, Britain, old Albion, full and rich with history?”
I replied:
Regarding the “newness” of the New World, I do find the absence of a deep past difficult. I’ve had castles and ruined abbeys as neighbours in England. Walmart’s not quite the same!
Seriously, one of the attractions of South Carolina, after living for several years in Florida, is the relative presence of the Past. People in this neck of the woods are rooted. Deo gratias!
This brief response does not really scratch the surface of the problems caused by the absence of the past.
In many ways, architectural ruins, such as the castles and abbeys that I once had as neighbours, are only relics of the past. Their presence is not really the presence of the past in any full or satisfactory sense. They are only present in so far as they represent the reminder in the present of something that is gone. In this sense they are not even relics, in the sense that Catholics understand the word. The relics of the saints contain real power in themselves. They are not present as mere reminders of the saint but as things that convey the living power in the present moment of the saints themselves. The relics are in some sense alive because the saints are themselves alive and we are in communion with them.
The walls of a castle or even those of an abbey do not possess the power of a relic, unless the walls are themselves holy relics, places in which the saints lived and died.
The most important presence of the past is in the continuum of civilized minds across the centuries. It is the presence of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas in the minds of ourselves and our neighbours. It is for this reason that progressives know the importance of destroying the past. If they can break the continuum, so that nobody knows the minds of those who forged the civilization that we have inherited, they will have a blank page on which to write their own socially engineered agenda. The past is the biggest obstacle to the progressive agenda. It is the presence of the wisdom of the ages, the voice of the elders. Progressives worship a mythical Future. They see the past as full of pride, prejudice and superstition. The future belongs to the Youth, to the immature and the inexperienced, who have been kept ignorant of the wisdom of the past so that they may be made to bow before the gods and idols of the zeitgeist.
Human society can be likened to a car. The steering wheel is the wisdom of the ages, the brakes are traditions, the gas pedal is innovation. The Progressives have their feet on the gas, have thrown away the steering wheel and refuse to use the brakes. As such, we have nothing to expect in the future except the inevitable crash.
The absence of the past is not merely regrettable, it is perilous.
Thank you.
It’s for reasons like this that I keep reading you. I’ll admit to finding your response to and embrace of Thomas Banks’ position on monarchy, our Christian past, and forms of government to be less than satisfying, in fact I was quite saddened that you thought highly of his position, it was little more than what a Francophile Belloc would have said. Yes there was sickness in old Christendom before the hell of the Revolution was unleashed. But it is silly to suggest that we truly benefited from its destruction. A sick man needs to be healed, not disposed of. Old Christendom was not so far gone that it could not be revived, not by a long shot. How was the Church in a better position by having it’s world taken from it, and that same world (that it had long labored to make) turned, in a satanic twist, into the Enemy’s territory? The history of the West after the fall of Christendom is one of draculeon inverse. Everything loved and praised and zealously fought for by that old Christian world is now despised, hated, and zealously fought against. Everything despised, hated and zealously fought against by that old Christian world is now loved and praised and zealously fought for.
As for government forms, sorry libs (classical or otherwise), Monarchy is the natural form of government, universally recognized throughout time, and consistently recognized as such by the Church (until Vatican II, sadly). Democracy and Republics have been tried and found wanting time and again, but Monarchy will always remain. Yes, I would venture to say that the Faith is better served in a better government, especially one better suited to it. A hierarchal religion like ours is strongly benefited in a hierarchal form of government like Monarchy, on that point alone one could write scores of books. A King is representative/symbolic of God/Heaven/the very order of the cosmos themselves in such a way that a president or prime minister could never be. Monarchy helps create an environment better suited to God and His things than a republic can, just ask the Greeks (they were well aware of the societal rot and tyranny that democracy has the bad habit of bringing). A sacral order, that’s what we had. Once the Kings were beheaded, the noble beaten, the Church was next on the chopping block. Even today our Pope’s no longer act like the Monarchs they are. Today, everything everywhere has been liberalized and democratized, and we wonder why God has no place in it. There is no room for Him in the Republic of Heaven.
The Kingdom of Heaven is where God reigns.
To put it simply, I’m a Monarchist because God is a Monarchist.
On my last two visits to the ruined monastery of Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, England, I have been fortunate, upon entering the Nave of the abbey (the only part to escape the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry V111) to meet some of the current parishioners. On both occasions I was shown a model of the Abbey in it’s former glory. The sense of loss felt by the parishioners was palpable.
Joseph, your description of that sense of the past in the South is so well articulated. It’s why I could not live in Florida. I tried, but failed. It was like trying to live in a Holiday Inn.
The saddest thing about England is not what she has done to her Catholic Christian past, but that she’s destroyed the soil. I mean–if you have a magnificent ancient forest, and you cut down all the trees, level it, it’s not beyond replanting. But if you turn up the soil and saturate it with pesticide to kill any seedling germination left, the forest can’t be restored. You may plant organized tree farms, and even list them in the National Trust, but the great forest is gone forever. It’s what the best of the romantic poets knew–and didn’t know they knew.
Too late, one may question the reason for the irrevocable destruction, maybe record in history that the forest was infested with some kind of noxious weed, but the truth is that the intolerable trait of the forest was that it was natural; i.e., not of one’s own making.
And yet– Isn’t all of this a parallel to what our Lord said about Jerusalem? The small aperture of consolation can be a great portal to deeper, greater Presence than the forest could ever have contained. You cannot kill holiness. It resurrects in hearts and minds and lives anew. The evil in the destruction is swallowed up in time, which arrives and leaves. Eternity remains. The same, unchanged and forever. Only closer now, newer, and ever more indestructible with each proud fool who believes he’s victorious over it.