My recent posts on the subject of “falling towers” prompted this comment from a friend: “No city, not even Rome, is eternal, and the Church goes on in the human heart and soul, not in stone and mortar.” This is my response:

As ever, you and I are kindred spirits. My only difference with your comments about mutability and mortality concerns Rome. As a physical, time-bound city, Rome is as temporary as any other city (ultimately), though its physical longevity is astonishing, and its impact on the development of western and Christian civilization is nothing short of miraculous. Nonetheless, Rome, as the Eternal City, is not mutable (by definition). It is the everlasting embodiment, or Incarnation, of Christ’s Mystical Body. Thus, when we speak of Rome as the Eternal City we are not speaking of bricks and mortar, nor of ruins and mortality, but of something essentially imperishable. When we speak of Rome as the Eternal City we are not thinking of a physical place on the Tiber in Italy, any more than we are thinking of a city in the middle east when we speak of the New or Heavenly Jerusalem.

Descending somewhat from the unfailing towers of the Eternal City to the falling towers of England, I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Rudyard Kipling:

“If England was what England seems, And not the England of our dreams; But only putty, brass, and paint, ‘Ow we’d chuck ‘er- but she ain’t!”

For any true Englishmen, the England he reveres is not the tawdry remnant that is squatting on the “green and pleasant land” but the essential and immortal England of Bede and Beowulf; Arthur and Alfred; St. Edmund and St. Edward the Confessor; Thomas Becket and Thomas More; Chaucer and Chesterton; Shakespeare’s heroines and Tolkien’s Shire; the forty canonized martyrs, the eighty-five beatified martyrs, Crashaw, Cobbett, Newman, Hopkins, Waugh, Tolkien, et cetera, in aeternum. This sceptred isle, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England will never die but will be taken up into heaven and perfected there. As with all other good things it will be assumed into God’s eternity and will be perfected through the purging of all imperfection. In short, the sanity of true England will find its fullness in the sanctity of the Eternal City where Rome and Jerusalem are One.