After church a bunch of us went out to a Vietnamese place on Mott Street, not far from Chinatown, but on the Little Italy side of Canal; with us was an accountant sort of a fellow who had something to do with National Review, who asked me about my politics. When I said I supposed I was pretty much a libertarian he pounced, just like an Assistant District Attorney on “Law and Order.” “So,” he crowed in triumph, “you are an atheist!” Which is no doubt why I had been standing for an hour and a half on tired legs chanting in a dead language. Never mind.

The late Murray Rothbard never tired of pointing out that the Austrian philosophy of economics and polity, from which the libertarian movement emerged, continues the analysis of Scholastic philosophers of the early modern period, and Catholic (paleo?) libertarianism did not end with the Scholastic philosophy. Last April The Freeman, founded by Frank Chodorov, published a lead article entitled “Antonio Rosmini: Philosopher of Property.” In it, Alberto Mingardi sums up Rosmini’s libertarian impact in this way: “A thinker of great clarity, though not endowed with a clear writing style, Rosmini belongs to the pantheon of the great classical liberals of the nineteenth century. An admirer of Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Jean Baptiste Say, this Catholic priest understood better than many liberals the most important problem that endangers the survival of liberty in modern societies: the uneasy marriage between property and democracy.” Indeed, Mingardi points out that Rosmini, in his (very conservative) critique of Enlightenment perfectionism, nicely anticipates Hayek’s argument against economic planning.

Now Rosmini (1797-1855), a truly great and greatly neglected philosopher of liberty, was not only a theist, a Catholic, a priest, indeed, the founder of religious orders for men and women—and, since November 18, a Blessed of the Church, but one whose principal writings were on the Index Liborum Prohibitorum as long as there was one, the case against whom was finally dropped by the Roman Inquisition, I mean the Holy Office, I mean the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 2001. Then again the Cardinal Prefect, Dr. Ratzinger, now gloriously reigning as Benedict XVI, was a particular admirer of his, as was Ratzinger’s then boss and now venerable predecessor John Paul the Great, and just before him John Paul the Brief, too, for that matter, who had devoted a critical book to Rosmini’s theology and come to change his mind to a more favorable opinion. Even the Blessed John XXIII had devoted years to the study of Rosmini’s work.

But that does not explain why the Beato Pio Nono, formerly Rosmini’s friend and protector, suppressed his two seminal works, why the Jesuits obtained a posthumous condemnation, or why Rosmini was such a profound underground influence on the Church of the last century. It was surely not his metaphysics of Ontologism, which can be interpreted as a form of pantheism, but need not be, or even the fact that his last work was entitled Theosophy. It was because of his radical vision of the freedom and dignity of the human person, which threatened not so much the Church, as the State, particularly the “Enlightened” Christian monarchies which claimed a “divine right” to legislate in matters of religion and to appoint bishops to carry out their policies. His great enemy was Giocomo Antonelli, the last, or one of the last of the lay Cardinals, who had the ear of the trusting Pontiff, and accumulated enormous wealth as a secret agent of foreign monarchs.

Rosmini’s classic, The Five Wounds of the Church, was written in 1832 as a kind of manifesto for the beginning of the reforming (yes, reforming) pontificate of Pius IX; five years later Antonelli had it put on the Index, along with a book on the political condition of Italy. No explanation was ever offered, and the author gracefully retired to his home on Lago Maggiore, where he continued to write and to guide his spiritual family. The wounds in the Church which needed to be cleansed and healed were the lay folk’s not participating in the liturgy in any meaningful way, the bad education of priests, the tendency of the bishops to identify themselves with local or national elites rather than with the universal Church, the nomination of bishops by civil authorities, and government control over religious institutions. Indeed, not only did Catholic monarchs appoint their bishops, expect their obedience, and treat church property as their own, they exercised, well into the last century, a veto over the election of the Bishop of Rome. Like many liberals today, Rosmini favored the popular election of bishops, but for the opposite reason—because he wanted a hierarchy more loyal to the interests of the universal Church and less blown about by the winds of secular doctrine. Similarly, he wanted a greater emphasis on liturgy, not to make the Church more Protestant, but to make its faithful more Catholic.

Rosmini’s influence on the Catholicism of today was once seen in the documents of Vatican II, and it is there, as it is in the great encyclicals of Pius XII and his predecessors which inspired the Council Fathers to a degree that traditionalists and modernists conspire to deny. But we can see it even more clearly in the initiative—call it a crusade—of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to recover Christian reason: to present an understanding of the faith which is an open invitation to the candid intellect, and to fight for a conception and methodology of reason which is open to the questions to which faith proposes answers. John Paul’s Fides et Ratio names Rosmini among the greatest of Christian philosophers:

74. The fruitfulness of this relationship [between philosophy and the Word of God] is confirmed by the experience of great Christian theologians who also distinguished themselves as great philosophers…, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Augustine… Saint Anselm, Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We see the same fruitful relationship between philosophy and the word of God in the courageous research pursued by more recent thinkers, among whom I gladly mention, in a Western context, figures such as John Henry Newman, Antonio Rosmini, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson and Edith Stein….

Not bad for guy still under suspicion—I mean Rosmini; three years later Cardinal Ratzinger was able to drop the charges against him, and last year, as Pope Benedict XVI, declared him “Venerable,” that is to say, a model of heroic virtue. In addition, beatification requires a miracle, God’s seal of approval. There was evidence of a miracle back in 1927, but it didn’t count until the question of Rosmini’s orthodoxy had been settled once and for all. Another one is required for full sainthood. Of the recent Western philosophers mentioned by John Paul, Doctor Edith Stein is already St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and Cardinal Newman is a Venerable. Pius IX, Rosmini’s friend and patron, who was turned against him by the sinister Cardinal Antonelli, had been beatified in 2000 along with Rosmini’s great admirer John XXIII. Each reflects Rosmini’s influence in his own way.

Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors was the declaration of war against the abuse of reason, freedom, and democracy by the Christopher Hitchenses of the previous century, abuses which enabled “enlightened” libertine Catholic despots to strangle the Church in the ways Rosmini so painfully described in a book that the Pope, a virtual prisoner of the Austrians, could not allow to appear. In this connection we may well read such alleged rightists as Bonald and de Maistre as afterbirths of the Enlightenment, inspirers of the Modernists, and precursors of our own neocons.

Here we must note a neglected aspect of the ideal of freedom of thought, conscience, and expression in civil society, which Rosmini’s metaphysics and epistemology of the human person do so much to support. Today we are skeptical of Jefferson’s optimism that such freedom favors the discovery and propagation of truth and we are tempted to cite the French Revolution as the classic case of what happens when freedom of expression goes too far. But the French monarchy had had one of the most efficient systems of censorship in the world, and that was part of the problem. Frenchmen who read books took the sillier propaganda of the Enlightenment as gospel truth because they had nothing to compare it with—dissenting voices were denied license to publish by the “enlightened” censors. And in the following century, nay, the following centuries, clever propagandists purveyed (and purvey) the same nonsense, only this time passing it off as Christian and conservative.

An ideology of reason, of science, of freedom which chokes off the questioning of the human spirit is a travesty. And so is the ersatz faith that walls itself off from the urgent quest of reason. This was the burden of Benedict’s Regensburg address, aimed not so much at those who follow Muhammad openly, but at those who call themselves Christians, but are to all intents and purposes Muslims. And this initiative did not start with Benedict, or even at Vatican II. It was, remember, Vatican I which formally anathematized all who claim that belief in God is a leap of faith rather than a reasoned conviction.

It is claimed that our age is a time of conflict of civilizations, as if all civilizations are fundamentally equal. Some who speak this way are ignorant, but many are dishonest. Ours is a time, like any other, of constant warfare between Christendom and barbarism within and without. Barbarians are those who advance an inhuman humanism, a rationalism which is irrational because kills the freedom of intellectual inquiry by forbidding our most fundamental searchings. Barbarians are those who advance a faithless fideism which refuses to see the intelligible universe as the creation of the intelligent Word, or to revere the mind of man as the living icon of the Word of the Father, or to celebrate the civilization of Christendom as the continuing incarnation of the Word in Christ and His Church, or to see the other great civilizations as built on intimations of the pre-incarnate Word, their peoples groaning for the Gospel of the Incarnation.

Historians of the distant future will look back on the papacy of Benedict XVI, growing out of that of John Paul II, as the beginning of the great renewal of Christendom, one which all the genius of the Renaissance, all the fervor of Reformation and Counterreformation, adumbrated but failed to achieve. And they will see the quiet, humble, loving, erudite Antonio Rosmini as a true Father of the Church of the Third Millennium. It is a privilege to live in the times that he blesses.

I am on Facebook and my daughter, 24, doesn’t like it; she thinks I should act my age and not hang out on a website created for high school and college kids and recent graduates — never mind that I am, among other things, a college reviewer by trade, or that I was thinking of doing an article about the phenomenon. Since then there has been a Newsweek cover story, and, more recently, a realization of how pro-life libertarian Ron Paul has used such social networking services to get his message out and raise needed funds, and the news that the Burmese military has had to shut down access to the Internet because of the use supporters of the dissident monks were making of Facebook in particular.

Now there are two things you need to know about Facebook. The first is one noted by Danah Boyd of the “apophenia” blog: compared with MySpace, Facebook is where the elites meet to greet. Until recently, you needed a college or high school email address to get on it; only the better high schools ever gave out student email accounts, and the low end colleges can be stingy with them. Where the United States military has banned MySpace, they have left Facebook alone, presumably because grunts use the former, officers the latter. The second thing, the one that concerns us here, is that Facebook is home to numerous groups of highly intellectual and educated young people far to the right of what you would expect. Not only libertarians and generic conservatives, but paleocons, reactionaries, Jacobites, legitimists in general, and Medievalists.

Facebook’s social networking is based on association, as identified by the member’s email address, so that there are networks for schools and companies, and also on location, so there are networks for the region, town, or neighborhood the member claims calls home. There are also affinity groups, for, well, just about… anything. For example, there is a group, admittedly small and mostly English, dedicated to “HM King Francis II — our rightful Monarch” — Franz, Duke of Bavaria, senior descendant of Charles the Martyr. Were it not for the Inglorious Revolution and the infamous Act of Succession, “HM” would be living in Buckingham rather than Nymphenburg Palace. He is no doubt happier in Munich; I know I would be. Of course but for the Inglorious and Infamous Revolution and Act, King Henry IX Benedict would have been a statesman rather than a churchman and left behind generations of royal Stuarts rather than passing his claim on first to the house of Savoy, now Wittlesbach (by way of Habsburg), and eventually Liechtenstein. A slightly larger group proclaims, “Prince Charlie Was Overrated, But I’m Still A Jacobite,” which seems fair enough. “Return the House of Stuart to the Throne!” demands another, sadly, despite the exclamation point, for, as I have noted, that House passed into history with the Cardinal Bishop of Frascati and Duke of York. The more modestly named group of mere “Jacobites” seems more reasonable.

The harder edge of Facebook reaction is represented by “Il Partito di Fascista di Facebook,” which is what one might expect, but also by another group, which I will not name, as it is not open to the public, headquartered — virtually, no doubt — in Neuschwabenland, Antarctica, the officers listed, in order of rank, as a Caudillo, a Voivode, and a Capitanul. While there may be an element of good, clean fun here, some of the names listed as “Inspiration” show signs of considerable if faintly disturbing erudition. (Bring up the Miskatonic University fight song.) Julius Evola has pride of place, of course, and some of the usual and less usual suspects follow, of whom Blake, Emerson, and Nietzsche are the most mainstream, and Coomaraswamy, Guenon, and Schuon represent what is usually understood as Traditionalism, along with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, formerly of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Islam is represented by Mansur Al-Hallaj, one of the founders of Sufism and by Ibn Arabi, its great metaphysician—but also by Dawud al-Sini, a contemporary theologian educated in Europe, who praises the terrorists of 9/11. Similarly, Hinduism is represented not only by Shankara, India’s great philosopher, but by Hitler’s European sycophant Savitri Devi as well, and deep ecology by Finland’s Pentti Linkola, and by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski. Oswald Spengler stands for the philosophy of history, but so does the implausible Francis Parker Yockey. Yukio Mishima and Ernst Jünger are mainly literary figures who can probably be described as Fascist without upsetting anyone duly. On the other hand, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was a Fascist right out of central casting, the sort who gives liberals (and conservatives) nightmares, and Mussolini a bad name. Another group displays a Byzantine style icon of Codreanu, halo and all.

These people are of course not conservatives in any sense of the term, a term which for the most part they despise. But they correspond to the Left’s fantasy of the Right, and it is important to note that there is a place on Facebook even for them. But of course they are few in number in comparison with what might be called the real Right.

Facebook hosts fan clubs for such traditional thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, Robert A. Taft, Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Murray Rothbard, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Joe Sobran, and Sam Francis. (None for Richard Weaver or Erik, Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Not yet; give me time.) Other groups promote the work of ISI, ISIL, YAF, the Federalist Society, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Cato Institute.

One interesting feature of Facebook is the ability of members to create Causes, allowing other members to make tax deductible donations to anything recognized by the IRS as a charity. The function is connected to an online database of such groups, which is not governed by political correctness. For example, anyone who wanted to enable Facebookers to contribute to the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the Occidental Quarterly, could do so in less than five minutes (I searched the database for the most politically incorrect of charities). I myself have set up such a conduit for the good people who organize the Village Hallowe’en Parade, just to see how it is done. More seriously I recently joined one for keeping alive the memory of the Armenian genocide. The most important function of these Causes is not fundraising, but continually reminding people of the issues.

Looking at today’s collegians, some of them, I am reminded of the early days of the Conservative movement, of the Conservative Club (Edmund Burke Society) of Earlham College in the late ‘60s, and the even earlier Party of the Right at Yale, and of the campus speakers and summer schools of what was then the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. This is as remarkable as it is refreshing, given what has come in between. There was the sexual revolution, heterosexual in its first stage, and the reaction to it, homosexual to a certain degree, which tinged Conservatism somewhat for some time. There was the capture of the anti-War movement by the Maoist faction and the marginalization of the libertarians and localists not only within that movement but also among the (other) Conservatves. There was the temporary eclipse of traditional Catholic philosophy and morals in the wake of Vatican II, and the embrace of New Age spirituality and the Great Society social gospel by the organs of the American hierarchy. There was the Nixon regime and its wholesale corruption of young folks who called themselves Conservatives into the service of the New Deal Welfare/Warfare State. There were the Paleocon Wars: the successful attack on Mel Bradford by the supporters of William Bennett and the Kristols, the drawn battle of Podohoretz and Neuhaus against Chronicles, and the redefinition of Western civilization by Alan Bloom and others to discredit and even to exclude traditions tainted by remnants of the Christian religion. And finally there is the myth of September 11 as the opening battle of a clash of civilizations demanding the utter destruction of the Arab nations and the Muslim religion, and the repudiation of whatever in our own heritage of personal freedom and limited government stands in the way of our masters’ ruling the world.

I would like to say that the new generation has put all that behind them, but in fact, they know little of it, which may be just as well. Even 9/11 is but a distant memory to today’s freshman, already a third of a life ago. And the youngsters are in command of a technology which can connect them with kindred spirits throughout the world without submitting to the censorship of the old media of mass communication, or more seriously, censoring themselves according to their ideas of what communications might pass inspection by the thought police. American higher education is the great school of this self-censorship, which ISI, among others, fights with the old media of books, lectures, and campus newspapers, all of which can provoke harassment of greater or lesser severity and lasting consequence. The Internet’s social networking goes under the radar of the Blue Meanies, and, given the libertarian sympathies of the vast majority of techies, will probably continue to do so—apart from occasional tournaments of Pin the Tail on the Pedophile. And, unlike more capital-intensive media, it won’t be so liable to corruption and intimidation by Republican Party hacks and flacks.

See you online. Oh, wait, that’s where we are already!

A year or so ago the notorious paleo Catholic John Zmirak sent me a notice about a political discussion to take place at the Columbia Law School, and the name of the moderator, Lorenzo Albacete, caught my attention. A magazine called Triumph had been an important part of my political, intellectual, and even spiritual life in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and a young astrophysicist of that name had been a frequent contributor. Dr. Albacete was now Msgr. Albacete, and national coordinator of a movement called Communion and Liberation, about which I had become intensely curious after a friend of theirs had been elected Bishop of Rome. As for Triumph, founded by Brent Bozell (the father) and Frederick Wilhelmsen, it was paleocon before paleocon was uncool. Its fidelity to the magisterium of the Catholic Church was absolute, and its critique of the imperial warfare state, uncompromising, even extending to a properly qualified sympathy for Black Power in the inner cities. The stand I recall most vividly was in favor of the brave Air Force officer at a missile base who had earnestly requested transfer to a combat missions in Vietnam because as a Catholic Christian he could not in good conscience give the order to incinerate innocent civilians, however ungodly the government that ruled over them. The Air Force discharged him as mentally unfit to serve his country.

Of course it was America that was mentally and morally incompetent, groveling before the idol of child-eating Moloch, unfit to serve the living God, and the “radical feminists” had nothing to do with it, at least at first. Roe v. Wade would come, inevitably, later. But it was Catholic America that cried out with Miss Ayn Rand that the only good Commie is a dead Commie, that every last man, woman, and child, every dog, cat and field mouse must be exterminated, and if the Holy See objects, let Rome thank God that we protect them. To think otherwise, to question the moral legitimacy of strategic nuclear weapons, was to be a pinko, a traitor, if not necessarily a Jew, then probably a homosexual. Now as far as I know the advocates of nuclear disarmament were no more poofters than, say, Francis Cardinal Spellman — not to mention J. Edgar Hoover — but the stereotype stuck, and we live with the results. When the remnants of human decency are stigmatized for a generation as “gay,” eventually people of homosexual inclination will assume positions of moral authority over the rest of us, and the “straights” among us will cheerfully revel in their own inferiority, as the purveyors of popular culture do now. We started out before the middle of the last century with the idea that innocent civilians are to be wiped out because of the wickedness of their rulers, and after fifty years our culture has become so hostile to human life that those of us who are openly attracted to the opposite sex are held up to ridicule as “breeders.”

It is pointless to be obsessed with foreign policy or domestic politics when it is the whole culture that is sick, sick unto death, our own death and the death of the world, and when our sickness is a sickness of the spirit that is not of today or of yesterday, but a progression measured in decades, nay in centuries, the centuries since what some are pleased to call a “Reformation,” if not, indeed, since the schism of 1054. The healing of this sick culture cannot even begin until we stop trying to placate the Puritans, the godless sex-crazed Puritans as well as the sex-denying sanctimonious ones, and reach out for reconciliation with the other remnants of traditional Christianity, that is, with Eastern Orthodoxy, with Oriental Orthodoxy, and with the even more ancient Church of the East, now threatened with extinction by America’s allies.

My own desire for reconciliation brought me to the East Village a little more than two years ago. I was at a little Orthodox church of the Carpatho-Russian jurisdiction, listening to the actor Peter von Berg read from something he had found on the Internet:

“The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgement and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter… The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration. Isn’t the same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the Trinity of Rublëv? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be shared.”

Our little group proceeded to a game of Guess the Author. A man who knows the Islamic tradition very well from the inside said that these had to be the words of a great Sufi master. The leader of one of the smaller Orthodox denominations suggested that great and good man Philip Sherrard, with whom I myself had been privileged to study, though all too briefly, and indeed it seemed like something he might have said, though for him, perhaps, even Bach would represent the egoistic assertion of Latin Christendom. Von Berg let us discuss this for a good while before he announced something that I already realized, that these were the words of the man the Catholic Church had recently elected Pope — though certainly not the Panzerkardinal depicted by the aggrieved media in the style of World War I posters of the Kaiser. They were addressed to a Meeting for Friendship Among the Peoples at Rimini, the very name, I must admit, having unpleasant associations with the late Mrs. Roosevelt.

The Rimini Meeting turns out to be an initiative of Don Liugi Giussani and his friends, indeed, the chief public manifestation of the Communion and Liberation movement he founded. Or inspired. Or something. If that seems a little vague, well, it’s a movement, not an organization, though it includes organizations, one or two of them living in community without vows. The main activity of the movement seems to be weekly discussion groups called School of Community. Since making contact at Columbia Law I have been going to one where the Upper East Side blends into Spanish Harlem, a block and a half from the great mosque. There is rumored to be one that meets in the Pope’s private apartment in the Vatican, and it is good to know that he and I are on the same page. Literally. (Cardinal Ratzinger had recruited his personal staff from a CL community and brought them with him into the Vatican. Nobody makes strudel like his pastry chef, and heroic efforts had to be made to get it to him for his birthday, which fell during the interregnum.)

Josef Ratzinger revealed himself to Communion and Liberation at Rimini in an intimate manner that could not be imagined from his official pronouncements. As John Paul II entered the hospital for the last time Ratzinger found himself in a very public light indeed, for he had been appointed to preach at the funeral of Father Giussani, a media event which many have compared to a state occasion. There he struck the same note:

“Fr Giussani grew up in a home—as he himself said—poor as far as bread was concerned, but rich with music, and thus from the start he was touched, or better, wounded, by the desire for beauty. He was not satisfied with any beauty whatever, a banal beauty, he was looking rather for Beauty itself, infinite Beauty, and thus he found Christ, in Christ true beauty, the path of life, the true joy. ”

Who was, who is, this Luigi Giussani? To be brief about it, Don Gius (“Don Juice”) was a seminary professor of Byzantine Slavic theology who became a high school teacher because he found Italian kids of the ‘50s to be depressingly clueless. They might be good Catholics from good families, but they had no idea whatever of the vital human questions to which Christianity proposes Jesus Christ as the answer — except for the handful of Communists, who were stuck with a package of wrong answers, but at least were relatively alive. Christianity was dead in Europe because what was left of our common humanity had no place in the culture of the elites or that of ordinary folks. Sound familiar? Don Gius started a Christian youth movement based on the candid discussion of vital human questions, often provoked by the great works of literature, music, and the visual arts. Don Gius had found that it was the Romantic poet Leopardi who touched his own humanity in a way that made the Gospel meaningful to him. (Yes, Leopardi was on the Index, along with Manzoni, another favorite, and, of course his beloved Rosmini.) Communion and Liberation grew up among former students who wanted to keep the conversation going after graduation, in some cases, long after. Numbers are hard to estimate except for a small Fraternity, which is recognized as an Association of the Faithful of Pontifical right under the patronage of St. Benedict, the Father of the West. Even there the edges are blurred, because a priest drops his formal affiliation with the Fraternity when he is made a bishop, but remains connected to the movement in a vague but vital way; and a number of these men are high in the hierarchy these days, as we shall see later.

As far as I can tell, CL was brought to America by Italian university graduates, and Giussani’s basic approach has been greeted with enthusiasm by a number of veterans of the old Conservative movement who did not go along with the neocon putsch of the Reagan years. I will not name names here, because the movement leaves people free to do their own thing without any central coordination beyond setting the text for School of Community. People who know each other through the movement find themselves collaborating on various projects on their own initiative, perhaps inspired in one way or other by the vision of Don Gius, which of course each interprets in his own way. More significantly, people who have found their vocation in expressing the Christian vision in terms of the wider culture are often delighted to discover, through CL, that they are not nearly as alone as they might have imagined.

Some Italian ciellini, as CLers are called, didn’t do a very good job of distinguishing their own political initiatives from the inspiration, and the movement as a whole suffered; since the middle ‘90s there has been a desire to limit movement activities to the ample spheres of religion and culture, and even there it has become customary to speak of the collaboration of friends rather than the work of a movement. This is not hiding behind “fronts,” but merely an attempt to be honest; where there is no control whatever, the idea of a front is meaningless. Leading such a movement would be like herding cats, CL people often say, a phrase I used to hear a lot in Mensa. Of course the Church, unlike the IQ society, has a Popemobile, the main function of which is to keep away the herd of stray cats which would otherwise blur the image of a sedate and serious ecclesiastic.

Here in New York the major CL activities, apart from School of Community, are the annual Good Friday Way of the Cross over the Brooklyn Bridge to the site of the World Trade Center, and the Crossroads Cultural Center, which organized the program at the United Nations at which Angelo Scola, the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, presented the first issue of Oasis, a journal of inter-religious dialogue, with the participation of Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress and Sayyed Hossein Nasr, once head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.

I was particularly pleased to see Cardinal Scola, of whom I had heard a great deal, in dialogue with Dr. Nasr, whom I had met shortly before the unfortunate revolution in Iran. Scola is a man to watch. Born in 1941, he is young enough to have belonged to Gioventù Studentesca near the beginning of Giussani’s youth ministry, and he was active in Communion and Liberation when the movement came of age. Scola was one of the founders of the international theological journal Communio — together with Cardinal de Lubac and Cardinal designate von Balthasar, two theologians of great importance to both Giussani and Ratzinger. (No, Communio was not a CL initiative, but it is generally understood that the name was intended to indicate a certain affinity.)

Next January 20 the Crossroads Center will present a three way discussion of the relationship between faith and reason, a key theme of Benedict’s papacy. The participants will be Father Julian Carron, handpicked successor to Don Gius, Msgr. Albacete, and Columbia biologist Robert Pollack; the evening before there will be a concert of rhythm and soul music to support the work of AVSI with HIV-infected mothers in Uganda. These women, by the way, make a wretched living by knocking rocks together to make gravel, yet when they heard about Hurricane Katrina they put together what cash they had to send to New Orleans: the spirit of Don Gius.

Many of Taki’s readers will already know that, in the conclave that elected Ratzinger as Benedict XIV, Cardinal Scola was the Paleocon Candidate, backed by Srđa Trifković in Chronicles as the papabile most likely to arrest, perhaps even to reverse, the decline of Western civilization. And he may yet be called upon to do just that — but not, I hope, for many years. Benedict is the man of the hour, a Giussanian in his own right, though more a contemporary and friend than student and disciple. He has indicated in many ways that he favors the CL charism as a particularly apt way to bring the gospel of Christ into a world that has seemingly lost its reason, as Scola is striving with might and main to bring the witness of Christian reason into the discussion with Muslims, not all of whom are fanatics or terrorists, just as not all terrorists and fanatics are Muslims, or even religious. It is the same witness that Father Carron is bringing to New York next month, and it is in harmony with the witness that Italian doctors are bringing to Uganda, and that their patients sent to the people of New Orleans.

Communion and Liberation people do not advertise themselves or their movement. For them the only message is Christ, and they work closely with others whose charisms propose the same message, including Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Missionaries of Charity, and with other laypeople active in the world. They don’t seem to need their own hierarchy or liturgy. They participate fully in the life of their parish churches, not as camouflage, but as a matter of principle. And they strive to think with the mind of the Church, not only about their private lives, but in relation to matters of state. That’s good enough for me. And it’s a good thing for all of us.

One hundred thirty five years ago, on Christmas Day, an aged and ailing Ralph Waldo Emerson disembarked at Alexandria, the cradle of Hellenistic Christendom, whence the Holy Family had fled Herod long centuries before. Emerson was one of the first Americans to be conscious of living in what seemed to be a post-Christian age, though it was more precisely the post-Puritan, or perhaps post-Protestant predicament, and, at least to that extent, post-Modern. Inspired with a remarkable love for the man of the Gospels as the highest expression of our common humanity, the sage of Concord saw the Christ of New England’s churches, not as the revelation of God in man, but rather as the condemnation of our race in general and of each of us (but for a few) individually. If this seems Nietzschian, remember how deeply Emerson influenced Nietzsche, though keeping his own sanity—boy brothels and syphilis were not part of his moral destiny, or America’s—yet. Emerson’s cultural world was more an expression of Boston’s Kulturkampf than Prussia’s, the gutted shell of Christianity without Christmas. To be sure, the Christmas fast was no longer enforced with draconian penalties, but, well into Emerson’s century the feast of the Nativity was still one day of the year in which public school attendance was strictly enforced, if only to prevent those damned Irish Catholics from acquiring diplomas which might qualify them for respectable employment.

The owners of Academe are forever pimping their Fritz because he had the “courage” to embrace his despair and erect upon it his transparently silly myth of the Eternal Return. I choose to remember our Waldo because, for all his foibles, he had the greater courage to refuse the cheap indulgence of despair, and to go on insisting that, whatever our own condition in and out of church, God isn’t dead. I find his words worth repeating today:

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is a vice general throughout American society. But the multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health… There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do; not to work, but to be worked upon; and to this homage there is a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and conditions…

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism devastates the community. I do not think it can be cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic discipline. The cure for false theology is motherwit… The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing… Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern. —The Conduct of Life, “Worship.”

To an American of my generation, used to looking to the East for wisdom, Waldo seems to be speaking of the Tao as understood (or not understood) by Lao Tzu and the other sages of old China—remarkably enough, as our man’s Orientalism seems to have been generally limited to what of India and Persia had been translated into German. But I think it is fair to say that what Taoists called the Way, the dark sage Herakleitos called Logos, the sense of things as well as the mind that sees it and the discourse that unveils it: the Logos that Philo of Alexandria read back into what would soon be called the Old Testament; the Logos that the Evangelist John would recognize in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. “In the beginning,” traditional Chinese translations of the Bible read, “was the Tao;” and I suggest that anyone who wishes to gain some appreciation of the universal implications of Orthodox Christianity track down Christ the Eternal Tao by Heiromonk Damascene, published by Valaam Books, an imprint of the Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.

Our cosmic Christ is not only to be found in the last of the Gospels. Paul tells the Colossians that it is Jesus Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him and in him. And he is before all, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he may hold the primacy: Because in him, it hath well pleased the Father, that all fullness should dwell; And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth, and the things that are in heaven. (I:15-20)

This passage points to the great Christ images of East and West, the mighty Pantokrator of Dafni on the Sacred Road from Athens to Eleusis, and the terrible crucifixes of the the Spanish counter-reformation. We must not lose sight of either; indeed Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, devoted one of his most eloquent discourses to the the tension between the poles of beauty and degredation in our life in the spirit. But this time of year, as the darkness begins to retreat before the light, we celebrate another and more paradoxical image, the Lord of All as a helpless and homeless Palestinian baby, venerated by wretched shepherds and Zoroastrian fire-priests, hunted down and driven into Egypt, even unto Philo’s Alexandria, by Caesar’s own King of the Jews, a people who could later boast that they had no King but Caesar.

This day of Christmas is to remind us that the cosmic Christ, apart from Whom nothing of what has become ever came to be, in his Body the Church, and in the culture of Christendom, of which the Church is heart and mind, is still in His infancy, and we in ours—as Archpriest Alexandr Men so forcefully reminded us the night before he was assassinated. It would be so easy to sit on our hands and wait for Armageddon, or to start wars, even nuclear wars, hoping to provoke Armageddon just to save ourselves the work we are really called to. That work is the building up in science, culture, technology, and society of the body of Christ in the world he created and will not leave to the enemy even when we ourselves would.

Christendom is in its infancy; we are in our infancy. For now we must go to sleep and wake up again in Waldo Emerson’s America. We are free to attend services of the denomination of our choice, but we know that the ringing of our feeble bells will be drowned out in the forced merriment of the season’s Saturnalia of Mammon. For all we know the last of the Magi went down with the Pequod, though a small number of Parsees ply the trade of goldsmith in Queens. As for Emerson himself, from Alexandria he proceeded to Cairo, where he met up with Charles Godfrey Leland (alias Hans Breitmann), the Philadelphia humorist, educator, and folklorist who would go on to write Aradia, The Gospel of the Witches, which I happen to regard as fiction, though any number of New Age true believers prefer not to. But as I say, it’s early times yet.

Yes, the days grow longer, but for a good while yet the winter will get worse. Indeed, when the victory of light is sealed by a full moon, the Man Whose birth we now celebrate will be executed as a terrorist, with the magisterium of his day standing guard over the sealed tomb. But even that is not the end of the story, not by a long shot, even though our schoolbooks say it is. Let it remain a mystery to the neighbors, while we work in secret to build the world, for them as much as for ourselves, in times which seem to be not of the best. “We must work and affirm,” old Waldo remarks, “but we have no guess of the value of what we say or do…

We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher’s meat, sugar, milk, and coal. `Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit.’ `Not so,’ says the good Heaven; `plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.’ Well, ‘tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature..—The Conduct of Life, “Illusions.”

From Concord by way of Alexandria, then, this most Bellocian of Christmas wishes to you, my gentle readers, for the new year: Great affairs and the best of wine—even on a shoestring!

On the morning of Monday, June 28, 2004, Carol Jean Nicholson fell out of love. A professor of philosophy at Rider University, best known as Alma Mater to Woody Allen’s underage beloved, Dr. Nicholson would liken her experience to Bertrand Russell’s realization, while riding a bicycle, that he no longer cared for his wife. Nicholson wasn’t riding a bike but reading The New York Times, and the love she no longer felt was that of her country. On the eve of Independence Day she composed a Dear John (Adams? Kennedy?) letter for publication in Philosophy Now, a British monthly, with the title “Why I am not a Patriot” intended to recall Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, the latter a sadly weak work (especially when compared to his Principles of Mathematics) but still a bestseller, thanks, I suppose, to professors of philosophy.

“I am not,” she insists, “a terrorist or an evil person.” I never said she was, even as a too beautiful freshman of sixteen. “Having found no good justification for patriotism, I have chosen to withhold my love of the U.S.A. Love is one of the few things in life that cannot be compelled, and if I no longer love my country, nobody can make me do it.” How true. But what is this country she loves no longer? In an earlier essay for the same magazine on the “Pragmatic Patriotism” of New Jersey nihilist Richard Rorty she examined Rorty’s claim that “the American left, which has become as cynical and hopeless as Hegel’s weary old Europe, could benefit from a large dose of Dewey and Whitman’s optimistic romanticism. If the left could once more be imbued with a spirit of national pride, not based on military and economic power, but inspired by a moral vision of a decent and civilized society, we might have a chance of achieving our dream country.” This patriotism of the left is suspiciously like that of the neocons, despising the grubby reality of these all too real United States and their grotesquely imperfect population in favor of the dream of some vague ideal to be achieved after the hoped for (economic and cultural) revolution. Even late in 2003 Nicholson was suspicious of this rhetoric: “How can we ‘achieve our country’ in (James) Baldwin’s sense if the left becomes as arrogant as the right? Cant we strive for a dream country without having to be the best?”

To strive for a dream country: that is what so many of us were taught that patriotism is, just as the neocons strive for a dream world. By the next Fourth of July Nicholson had learned to choose reality, and who can blame her? “The best future we can hope for is one in which people love their families, friends, and neighbors and respect all human beings, but don’t waste their love on destructive and suicidal obsessions with national power. Love is too precious to spend on fuel for the raging fire that kills self-respect and independent thought and brings a curse upon the earth.” (Does one hear echoes of Ike and Tina here? “Don’t give your love to Sexy Ida, she is the sister of a black widow spider!”)

Love of family and friends, neighbor and neighborhood, and at least respect for those you don’t know well enough to love. To the traditional conservative, that’s what patriotism is all about, or at least that’s where it has to start — the circles of affection and sympathy widen out from where you stand. To the nationalist, on the other hand, patriotism is all about not having to earn your self-esteem yourself but getting it secondhand from mere membership in a group you believe superior to all other groups, and about unquestioning, inhuman loyalty to a State or Leader who embodies the Will and Destiny of that group, and about the desire to crush or at least humiliate all groups that seem to threaten one’s superiority. The American nationalist is an American. Period. The patriotic American, on the other hand, delights in diversity. He is an American, yes, but a Buckeye, Sooner, Knickerbocker, Tarheel, Nutmegger; a Greek, Turk, Jew, Bengali, Bavarian, Senegalese, Navajo, you name it, and if not all at once, he sometimes wishes he could be. Multicultural? Maybe, as far as some things go. But there is a common civic culture which unites us all, which mass immigration has not utterly destroyed, which has to do with the common decency of how you treat people. More than one immigrant who didn’t take to that culture went home in disgust. But a great many came here because they saw inklings of this common culture reflected in the popular entertainment available in their homelands, and they wanted to be part of it, even felt themselves to be part of it, long before they got on the plane. Acculturation would be more of a nightmare than it is if it hadn’t started many years and thousands of miles ago. If we often feel a greater sense of kinship with our fellow countrymen than with foreigners, it’s not because of what passport they carry, or are entitled to carry, but because we Americans tend to see some things similarly and speak the same language. When we try to reduce the common civic culture to propositional terms they seem to make a certain kind of sense in context, but when we abstract them from their living context and identify them as the essence of a nation, whatever a nation may be, or, worse, with the messianic destiny of an imperial state, we are betraying our real country even with the best intentions — and all too often with the worst ones.

What is the real America? And of course I mean my America; yours will be different, at least somewhat. Last Sunday, in my little Russian Catholic church in Little Italy, I was happy to hear the familiar voice of Father Juan singing behind the iconostasis. I call him Father Juan for your convenience; in his own language the correct spelling is “Joan,” which would be just too confusing, especially if he’s elected Pope, the first Byzantine in a good long time, but why not?

Back in Europe, he serves the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romanian, whatever is needed at the time. But Father is an American, a citizen of the United States, retired from the Federal civil service. I assume he came here on a Spanish passport, though he would only learn the Spanish language as a prison chaplain in New York — his father, a proud and passionate Catalan nationalist, would not permit the language in his home.

But, as I said, Father Joan (there, I wrote it) is an American. Not only does he have a deep and abiding affection for our land and its people, he can recognize, as we all should, the aspirations of the men of 1776 as reflecting the social teaching of the Universal Church, much of which would not be fully developed or formulated for another century or so.

Does this make America a propositional nation of the sort Mr. Lincoln seemed to be describing at Gettysburg? I don’t think so. But I can’t deny that the vision of the Founders has a universal import, one which has drawn people from all over the world, and enabled them to weave themselves into the very fabric of our society. My grandmother was one such, and so were the Jewish families whose houses she cleaned, who treated her with greater kindness than her own flesh and blood ever had. She never forgot. Memories of such kindnesses are one thing that makes America.

The propositional nation is an unreal and dangerous abstraction, but race is a worse one. America is not the creation of political philosophy. Still less is it the expression of the genius of some sort of Anglo-Saxon race, or Anglo-Celtic race, as the Southerners like to put it. Our America is something which emerged in the course of history, under the guidance, we believe, many of us, of Providence. In this history English traditions had their part to play, especially that of Common Law, but so did the distinct folkways of the Celts, Scots, Scots-Irish, and, finally, what I can only call Irish-Irish. Not to mention the Welsh. And the Founders felt themselves under a deep debt of intellectual gratitude to the general culture of Western Europe. They believed America to be an integral part, if one specially favored by circumstance, of Western civilization, a civilization common to New England, New France, and New Spain.

America is more than New England, thank God! By 1776, the New Netherlands had been absorbed, but not without a trace and more than a trace, though New Sweden was but a memory, and a fading one at that. The New Amsterdam Dutch gave us more than Santa Claus and the Headless Horseman. They gave us an example of live and let live and mind your own business, a haven for refugees from New England like Anne Hutchinson and Lady Deborah Moody, for Jews fleeing the Brazilian inquisition, and even Quakers, at least after the farmers of Flushing remonstrated to the mother country (not their own mother country, they were English) against Pegleg Pete’s intolerance. In Lady Moody’s Gravesend, by the way, women voted. After all, she owned the place, and her word was law. I used to love taking my Puerto Rican students down to the Museum of the City of New York to see the magnificent portraits of the Latino grandees who were here before the Gringos. Their tombstones, I remarked, could still be seen, their inscriptions carved in the Hebrew alphabet. My part of New Jersey was settled by New Amsterdam Dutch who bought the land from the Lene Lenape at a fair price. And some of these Dutchmen, I learned much later, were Africans, or part African, and some of the original Africans had never been enslaved but had stowed away on Dutch ships, and prospered in the New World. (Sadly, when the English took over, people of color headed for the hills of the Ramapo and learned to call themselves Indians.)

And a continent away, the Russians were coming (the Russians were coming!) down the West Coast from Alaska, bringing with them, inspired by St. Innocent, future Patriarch of Moscow, a truly enlightened spirit toward the native peoples. (Indeed, the great struggle of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska was to convert the Aleuts from a massively enculturated Orthodox Christianity to an Anglophone Protestantism in which they would always be nothing more than obedient or rebellious subjects.) There were many deplorable things about the Empire of the Tsars, but we can be proud of the way their pioneers brought Christian civilization—I am not ashamed to call it that — to the natives of this continent, whom we cannot censure for receiving it, though our “multicultural” masters do.

All that is history. What is patriotism now? What is my country, that I may love it, if love it I somehow ought?

For the Giulianis, patriotism is all about 9/11, and the endless quest for vengeance against the enemies of Israel. For most of them, Israel itself plays a secondary role in this. If the Jews of the Middle East have to suffer along with the Arabs, that’s just too bad. The point is to teach our enemies a lesson, or rather destroy them so utterly as to be a lesson to any potential enemy. And in this moment of history, the enemy is the anti-Israel coalition. When the Lazy-Boy warriors have satisfied themselves that Iraq, Iran, and anybody else who dares to raise his head from the desert floor have been crushed, they will cheerfully turn their back on Israel as well, and the Jews of America won’t know what hit them.

To the Straussians, America represents the One True Political System of (implicitly) atheistic democratic capitalism. Any country that resists that system needs to be taught a lesson. We will teach the world out of the goodness of our hearts, and to the profit of the multinational corporations. Because we have a monopoly of truth, we must have a corresponding monopoly of deadly force, and any power that might threaten to dispute our global hegemony, or the regional hegemony of our client states, must be ruthlessly crushed. Those within the borders of the United States who cling to outmoded understandings must be swept away swiftly by waves of open immigration and campaigns of “multicultural” indoctrination by the schools and the entertainment industry.

To the Left Behinders, America is God’s chosen instrument to provoke a world war over Israel, one which will bring Jesus back on clouds of glory—and, not so incidentally, place them on heavenly thrones of judgment over their unbelieving neighbors. The flags these people wave might as well bear swastikas, for these “Christians” are full of hate, mostly against fellow Americans — blacks and women who think they should be treated as equals, sodomites, whoremongers, Catholics, and Jews. Yes, Jews—who, except for a handful of converts, they believe, will be tortured to death and beyond death for all eternity, as the righteous secretly gloat. Let the gentle reader forgive me if I am less than charitable toward these purveyors of violent and sadistic pornography, who would not emerge from their prairie gopher holes if they weren’t heavily subsidized by the your tax dollars through anonymous donations laundered in the Levant.

To the patriots of my youth, the United States stood for, in Superman’s words, truth, justice, and the American way. The American way could not be imposed on folks who weren’t American, but people who weren’t American could become Americans—as many had—and still remain themselves on Sunday mornings, and even (we are a generous people) all day Saturday. It was a live and let live patriotism. On Memorial Day, my town publicly honored those fallen in war, but I did not attend the parade regularly until I joined the band; it was a day for each family to tend its own graves and put down fresh flowers; for that reason it was generally called Decoration Day. The big patriotic celebration was the Fourth of July, and, though the local National Guard provided suitably noisy tanks to delight the little boys, the volunteer fire department was the centerpiece, with the oldest member, white-bearded, driving the lovingly maintained horse-drawn truck, giving rides to the children after the parade. It was multicultural in a small way, the Masons marching in their white gloves and top hats and the Knights of Columbus with their swords and capes and magnificent plumes, and the Lions Club with a man capering about in a lion suit, which must have been awfully hot.

Our patriotism was a patriotism of aspiration, such as Professor Nicholson once wished for, and perhaps also a quite pardonable pride that our aspirations had been realized, though imperfectly, and a half acknowledged sadness about that imperfection. My father, for one, was disappointed in the slow progress of racial equity, and when his company was forced to hire African Americans for clerical rather than merely for housekeeping positions, he was very pleased to make them welcome. If his attitude impeded his promotion, as I suspect it did, some things were more important than money. I don’t recall any desire to compare ourselves to other nations, much less to wrestle them to the ground, punch them out, and make them holler Uncle… Sam. There was a certain anxiety, sometimes acute, about the Russians, but no great bitterness over previous wars. My cousin Lloyd recalled the beauty of the Bavarian Alps beyond the fences of his P.O.W. camp, and regretted that he could not get into a plane again even to see them, having been shot down once. The Jews, who had every reason to be bitter, were not; the other Eastern Europeans, whose extended families still suffered under Communism, were, a little, some of them more than a little. Next to the fear, which must not be discounted, it was bitterness of that sort rather than any desire for military glory that fueled the Cold War on our side. At least in my small town.

This was the sort of patriotism I grew up with. Patriotism, not nationalism. Love of country, this vast jumble of a country and the vaster jumble of folks in it, and the quirky history that had made it and made us. Not some Nation, possessed of a mystical Will embodied in an Imperial State and Warlord with a World-historical Destiny—but the land and the people in it, who, in the course of time, have developed remarkably similar ways of looking at things. One small town was pretty much like another, and this was so before the malls. And Jersey City, where my parents lived in the ‘20s and’30s, is still very much Jersey City, though Germania Avenue became Liberty Avenue in 1917 and the signs on the storefronts today are in Bengali, just like the signs in Astoria (except for the signs that are in Greek).

True patriotism is necessarily libertarian, at least with a small “l,” involving a suspicion of “gummint” bordering on polite, and even not so polite, hostility. Beginning with the neighborhood, the patriot sees that politicians never deliver the real goods, that maybe you can fight City Hall, sometimes, and even work with City Hall, occasionally, but that it isn’t often worth the effort, entirely apart from utopian theories about taxation being theft and so on. And what is true of City Hall goes for the State House in spades, never mind the White House, or that Tower of Babel up on the East River. You just have to do for yourself as best you can, and decent folks will pitch in with their neighbors as well, without a bayonet at their backs. If you are a Christian, or claim to be, the Gospel of the Samaritan is clear: Don’t ask who your neighbor is; just act like one. And if you are at all honest, you will think of good people who did just that, as often as not without a written scripture to guide them — though for some reason we take so much pleasure in rather remembering all the others. In excruciating detail.

Why is Carol Nicholson — and she speaks for a great many of our generation — not a patriot? I think it is because the idea of patriotism she has been taught is itself un-American, and she is too much of an American to buy into it. But there are other, older traditions of American patriotism, which it looks like that younger folks are beginning to recover, and I have some hope that they will flourish again when our generation, the shameful generation of George Bush and Hillary Clinton, is gathered to its sadly bemused fathers.

This was pretty much a Mexican neighborhood back in the days, infested by druggies and dealers, but the Mexicans would watch your back once they got used to seeing you around, especially if you were a young woman, as a high school friend of mine was. Not the sort of neighborhood you would expect a Russian Orthodox church, then or now, much less a new one. But it is here that Father Yakov Ryklin, chaplain at Columbia University a half a mile uptown, moved his little flock from a chapel at Union Theological Seminary. Just as well, I think; a seminarian who moonlighted for the Board of Education confided that the Satanists in the dorms were using it at night. The new church, which occupies the ground floor and basement of a residential building, is, despite the profusion of icons, almost Quakerly austere. Father is doing the carpentry himself, and it is well done and artful. The great icons have been commissioned, and he urges us to keep coming by over the years to see how it is getting on.

This evening Father Yakov is hosting the hopefully named First Annual Alexandr Men Memorial Lecture, in honor of the charismatic Russian priest murdered, presumably by the KGB, in 1990. (The death threats did not object to the fact that a minister of the Gospel was exercising ever greater influence in what was still the Soviet Union, but to the scandal that the man was a Jew.) The meeting has been organized by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, a child of the Old Left whose own personal pilgrimage led him from the Christian and Missionary Alliance to the Orthodox See of Sendai in the North of Japan, who supports himself here as a college librarian. (Seraphim’s druglessly psychedelic Theology of Wonder begins at the site of Batushka Alexandr’s assassination, and brings together Kaballa, Charles Williams’ Arthurian Torso, and Arthur Machen’s wonderful story “The Great Return.” Among other things. Many other things.)

The speaker is Dr. Michael Christensen, head of Drew University’s D. Min. program, and his topic is Theosis, a central theme of Orthodox life and thought, and one dear to the heart of Father Men. The idea is that through the incarnation of the Word of God we ourselves become, as the Prince of the Apostles put it, partakers of the divine nature, the title of a scholarly collection edited by Christensen. Saint Paul goes even further than Saint Peter, writing over and over again that through the incarnation as it manifests in our own human lives all of creation is eventually taken up into the divine Mystery, what some have called the Cosmic Christ and others, following Teilhard de Chardin, the Omega Point. Theosis isn’t just a Catholic and Orthodox thing; it is central to the Wesleyan tradition in which Drew remains rooted, as John Wesley himself was a deep student of the Greek Fathers. In the audience is Michael Allison, planetary scientist at the Goddard Space Center with an office above the real Tom’s Restaurant from Seinfeld, who spoke to a few of us on retreat last weekend on the exploration of space and the terraforming and settlement of other planets as the cosmic destiny God has called us to, in which (he hopes) Jews and Christians will find their reconciliation. And others as well, I might add; with the unbounded universe as our inheritance, need we kill each other over a few acres of Palestine, when the whole Earth is to be the Holy Land of a myriad galaxies?

There are still those who would deride Theosis as New Age moonshine, asserting dourly that God became man, not to raise us to the Godhead, much less to take the universe into this incarnation, but merely to die a miserable death to appease his own anger and save a few from the general damnation of the species. Evangelicals they call themselves—absurdly, because, Scripture is against them. I shouldn’t throw stones, as I was raised Roman Catholic and learned this late medieval nonsense in Sunday schools taught by people who should have known better. After all, the Catholic Church has never denied the tradition of the Fathers, though Augustine (in moments he later repented) and especially Anselm of Canterbury (though his thought was more nuanced than might appear) teetered on the slippery slope that led to… well, to Calvin and Knox and two presidents of Princeton, Jonathan Edwards and T. Woodrow Wilson.

What a God! The thing about religion, that makes it of ultimate concern to all of us, believers, or not, is that we, and I mean all of us, we grow to resemble what we worship. Beware the man or woman who does not honor a Creator or Redeemer, but bows down before the Accuser, whose Hebrew name is Satan. Satan in the White House is not just a late night horror movie, but a nightmare that has haunted at least one pope of Rome. The last stretch of the road to Abu Ghraib runs from the streets of iconoclastic Geneva through the pleasant meadows of Princeton, where Kuyper preached the corrosive gospel of neo-Calvinism, whence Wilson set out to make the world safe for neoconnery.

I keep returning to the words of the great and greatly neglected Edwin Muir:

The Word made flesh here is made word again A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook. See there King Calvin with his iron pen, And God three angry letters in a book, And there the logical hook On which the Mystery is impaled and bent Into an ideological argument.

Perhaps you will see some trace of Muir’s greatness even in these few lines, and even more the cause of his neglect:

The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down, Pagan and Christian man alike will fall, The auguries say, the white and black and brown, The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all Invisibly will fall: Abstract calamity, save for those who can Build their cold empire on the abstract man.

There is no abstract man here in White Harlem tonight, and no mirthless myrmidons of the cold empire. Tyranny, torture, and terror are on the march to Armageddon, and those who resist will be assimilated because resistance itself, if it is resistance merely, is already assimilation. But here we see the futility of empire itself in the face of Theosis. The power that scatters the universes like seed into the vastness of space here begs humbly for permission to incarnate in the most fleeting thought, the most seemingly inconsequential act of the most obscure of mankind.

We are all fools—only the wise know it—the unholy fools the secret agents of the holy ones. The George to believe is not Bush but Carlin. T. Woodrow Wilson? Better Robert or Colin or Peter! Let us make the world safe for greater and holier follies. Should an Alexandr Men appear here we would no doubt do away with him as expeditiously as did our Russian friends, and with as little or as much to show for it. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is history. The Project for the New American Century isn’t even that and never will be. The Middle East is dying to become American, but only in the most depressingly literal of senses. More to the point, we are all dying to become human, but we are not dying alone. That is the folly of the Cross, which this little storefront church is here to witness to –the all but unbelievable message that it is God who dies, with us and in us and for us so that we ourselves might be raised from the dead with God, in God, for God, and, yes, as God—and as gods.

No doubt the gangs of addicts and pushers will go on torturing, tyrannizing, and terrorizing this small neighborhood of the universe. That’s what they do. It’s called history. But there are poems to be written, songs to be sung, space elevators to be built, galaxies to be explored and planets brought under the plough. Government will not do these things. We will do them. God will do them. It can start as small as you like, with a seed of mustard, or a warm smile for a surly waitress.

I was at a regional gathering of… well, never mind of whom, and for some reason I was seated at the table nearest the podium. Albert Ellis was about to launch himself into a sarcastic denunciation (his specialty) of New Age guruism. “All humans are crazy,” he said, turning a disapprovingly lustful eye on my lovely date, who was dressed in a sari and sported a bindi in the middle of her forehead, “but Asians are crazier than the rest of us.” I married her anyway. (The author of The Sensuous Dirty Old Man was there as well, but didn’t give the keynote.)

I was shocked by the death of Albert Ellis, shocked to realize that he’d still been alive; this was a very general reaction to his death. He was looking very poorly indeed when I last saw him in the ‘80s, soldiering on in his holy war for enlightenment in spite of pain and weakness, and I heard a decade later that he was barely hanging on.

In January the world lost Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, a work I remember best for it’s sly digs (in-jokes, really) at Eric Voegelin and Ayn Rand. Robert Anton Wilson had recently lost the Governorship of California to Arnold—not that the Guns and Drugs Party had much of a chance, even in California. Not when they called themselves that. Toward the end Bob (I never met him, but everyone called him Bob, or, more formally, RAW) had no money and no insurance and needed 24-hour nursing care. When word of his indigence hit the Internet, the money started pouring in from devotees; his family finally had to ask people to stop sending money—he now had enough to see him into the next world. That tells you two things right away. Wilson inspired enormous gratitude, even in those who only read his books, Prometheus Rising and the autobiographical Cosmic Trigger trilogy in particular, and it would have been unthinkable for anyone to use his last illness as a scam.

Wilson played his own part in the sexual revolution: when Playboy needed a philosophy, he was hired as the philosopher. Unlike Ellis, he was no Ph.D—which was too bad, in a way. Ellis’ credentials led people who should have known better to take him seriously. Wilson’s autodidacticism means that his essays on James Joyce and Ezra Pound will never be seen by those who might most benefit from them. Both Ellis and Wilson seem to have owed a good bit to the enlightened selfishness of Miss Ayn Rand, though Ellis went on to write Is Objectivism a Religion? Actually, Albert and Ayn were pretty much two of a kind. If you disagreed with Ayn—about anything at all, say if you liked to listen to Beethoven —you were irrational and immoral. And if you disagreed with Albert, at least about important things, you were mentally ill. If you would not, under any circumstances, try homosexuality, you were fixated and neurotic. (He got that much from Kinsey and company.) On the other hand, if you were homosexual, you were much, much worse—only a deeply disturbed person would insist on a sexual preference that caused so much trouble. To be sure, Ellis advocated that society should change its attitude to homosexuality; but until it did, homosexuals needed to adjust themselves to it. Easier said than done, for some. Perhaps you can, within certain limits, choose whom you will have sex with; falling in love is not so much a matter of choice.

Now don’t get me wrong—Albert Ellis was himself no totalitarian. Disagree with him and he’d call you crazy, not to lock you up in the loony bin, but to argue you out of your foolishness in that endearing, infuriating Dutch uncle / Jewish mother way of his. And he had a gift for epigram. “Don’t should on yourself” is probably his best. And he could admit he was wrong, even about big things. After a professional lifetime of trashing religious believers as neurotics, notably in The Case Against Religion, Ellis was challenged by a student of his, a Catholic monsignor, to let him do a little research. After looking at the results he had to acknowledge that, although religious beliefs were (in his opinion) entirely unjustified, religious believers are no crazier than the rest of us. I’m sure this finding disappointed many, and it never got the publicity it should have.

The matter of religion came up in an odd and poignant way in the last week of Robert Anton Wilson’s life. Some of those who contributed to his terminal care, and even circulated the appeal for assistance, did so in spite of deep feelings of bafflement, disappointment, hurt, even betrayal over something that had happened years before. You see, Wilson had been a follower of the late Aleister Crowley, or at least he used Crowley’s ideas as working hypotheses in his own practice of ritual magic; many of his warmest admirers are the sort of neo-Pagans who spell Christ, Christian, and Christianity with the letter X as a mark of almost convulsive distaste; and his own writings are an important source for that decidedly rum affair, Chaos Magic and the mock religion of Discordianism. Although a libertine in principle, he was monogamous by inclination, very much a family man. The brutal murder of a beloved daughter caused him unbearable anguish, and that’s when the trouble started. He had a healing experience of what he could only describe as the forgiving love of Christ. It didn’t make a believer of him; he didn’t know what to make of it. But he accepted it with wondering gratitude, and for that, for his refusal to repudiate his own experience, he became a stranger to the community that had grown up around his brilliant, learned, phantasmagoric, sometimes obscene, but always deeply humane body of work.

Albert Ellis and Robert Anton Wilson were but two of the chief apostles of the main Gnostic creed of the late modern period—the others being Werner Erhard, founder of Erhard Seminars Training (est), which is now known as the Landmark Forum, and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), a school of psychotherapy with some aspects of a cult—such as I suppose all schools of psychotherapy have. (Yes, the Church of Scientology fits in here somewhere.)

The creed in question is that of the General Semantics movement founded by Count Alfred Vladislavovich Habdank Skarbek Korzybsky, the scripture of which is called Science and Sanity. The movement is Gnostic because it claims that the person initiated into its esoteric knowledge gains the secret key to the universe and is thereby saved from the meaningless misery of mundane existence. That is pretty much the definition of the Gnostic heresies well known to the fathers of the Church –leaving aside the Eschaton and its threatened immanentization so feared by a certain Bavarian savant.

The secret of General Semantics is, like the rituals of the Freemasons, no secret at all. It is well known to students of late Medieval philosophy as nominalism, the crackpot notion that only individual things are real—while the general characteristics that make them what they are fictions (constructs, the deconstructionists say), fuzzy generalizations, or, as William of Occam famously put it, farts of the voicebox. After six hundred years, celebrities and liberal arts and social science majors pay out big bucks to be indoctrinated with this bilge water. Not anyone with any knowledge of science—the difference between sulfuric acid and water isn’t just verbal flatulence, as Little Willy in the poem found out.

My first brush with General Semantics came through my connection with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which has since changed its name, though not its initials. In, oh, never mind what year, ISI hosted a summer school at Bard College, known as St. Stephen’s when Bernard Iddings Bell was President. It was a bit like a classic horror movie set in a decaying manor house inhabited by a society of elderly, genteel personages with an indefinable aura of mystery and menace. It was a wonderful week, in which I was introduced to Voegelin’s New Science of Politics by Frederick Wilhelmsen, and rode through the campus in a convertible late at night with a bunch of boisterous adolescents chanting “Catholic power!” to the discomfiture of the Randian Objectivists, who had not yet been purged from the movement as “libertarians.”

I was there at St. Stephen’s, I mean Bard, when a certain Father Miceli, the author of a fine study of Gabriel Marcel, who was reputed to have converted National Review’s Frank Meyer to the Catholic Church, drove up from the City to show Wilhelmsen proofs of the first issue of Triumph. The mysterious and menacing haunters? Not tweedy Anglican revenants, but General Semanticists to whom the college had rented dormitory and classroom space apart from ours, who stared at us, mouths agape, as if we were from another planet. And so we were, so we were. We hailed from planet Weaverville.

Such was my first contact with the vanguard of modern thought. For arguably (but I don’t need to argue it here) the unexamined dogma of nominalism is what makes modernity, for lack of a better term, modern. If the nominalism of Occam is the essence of the modern, is the key to the postmodern to be found in some sort of return to the metaphysical realism of Duns Scotus which came before it? Actually, yes. Such was the opinion of America’s greatest philosopher, no mean scientist himself. Indeed John Deely dates the birth of the postmodern precisely — overprecisely, perhaps — to April 14, 1866, when Charles Sanders Peirce announced his “New List of Categories” to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And the mainstream of American philosophy has followed Peirce in his return to realism — I mean the people doing the real work, not the ones most of us have heard of precisely because they did not upset the opinion-mongers’ apple carts, the Jameses, the Deweys, the Rortys. The latter were richly rewarded for telling us what we already knew — or thought we knew.

General Semantics got its big break after World War II, thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt and her G.I. Bill of Rights. A generation of demobilized veterans, who would have been a plague on the labor market, filled classrooms instead, and there was a sudden need for a small army behind the professorial desks. As with any unanticipated rapid mobilization of forces, training officers (e.g., “faculty”) who had not been a part of the regular peacetime army (e.g., “academe) was a big problem, and they themselves did their own improvising. For such as these General Semantics, which could not survive peer review in any established discipline, was a godsend. Demoralized by the battlefield, the barracks, and the back offices, resentfully eager to make up for lost time, members of the Greatest of all Generations (as some were already thinking of themselves) dutifully learned to repeat that “‘is’ is always a lie,” and to write compositions in something called E-prime, a dialect of English in which all forms of the verb “to be” were strictly verboten.

To close the circle, it is the dialect in which My Life After Death, the concluding volume of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger was written, and in that book he explains it wittily and well. The danger of the E-prime directive is clear. Once we refuse on principle to draw distinctions between classes of things, we have nothing left to go on but our gut feelings of who is with us and who is against us, which is made the whole of politics by Carl Schmitt and his Straussian (or pseudo-Straussian) successors of Neocondom. Unless you happen to have Wilson’s intellectual virtuosity and self-deprecating humor, qualities in sadly short supply these days.

Weaverville. The ancestral home of Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences, a title Charles Sanders Peirce could have used, but also the virtual reality of all who share his conviction that the General Semantics that was sweeping the college scene as he was driven to write, the nominalism that GS so well expressed and lay behind the last sorry century’s descent into the maelstrom of madness, that this metaphysical presumption was, and is now, and evermore shall be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Weaver of Weaverville ... postmodern? The mind boggles, though not as much as when that trendy term was recently and convincing applied to our other father in the faith, Russell Kirk. And of course given the definition of modernity above, the term postmodern is entirely appropriate to both men. On the other hand, no, the same hand, who could be more “pomo” than Marshall McLuhan? Marshall McLuhan, the interdisciplinary gadfly and Catholic, devoutly Catholic philosopher, who happened to be in Chicago as Ideas Have Consequences was in the writing, and who downed more than one beer with Weaver in the process. (The once I heard McLuhan in person, at Teachers College, of all places, he even got in a dig at the Novus Ordo Missae, complaining that rubrics dictated by the technology of mass communication now compelled the priest to turn around to face, not “the people,” which is what everyone expected him to say, but “the microphone.” His point was of course that the priest was no longer chiefly addressing God, but performing for the congregation.)

I don’t always like to admit it, but Ideas Have Consequences and I are of an age, and when I was sufficiently schooled to read it with any sort of understanding, few indeed thought it worth the effort. Now I see the foibles, fads, and fashions of my youth fade into oblivion with those who advanced them, but ideas still have their consequences, and I like to think that, however slowly, the world is coming home to Weaverville.

When the first plane hit I thought there had been some kind of accident on the floor above and stood up in my cubicle; halfway between me and the North windows a little more than a city block away the office manager was standing up, pointing at me with her mouth open. But she was pointing past me to the South windows a little less than a block behind me, and a hole in the side of the World Trade Center the shape of a small plane, which was beginning to smoke. It looked small to everyone; you couldn’t really estimate accurately just how big the tower was, or how far away. I saw everyone going to the windows to see the fire a block away and far above, and I followed them. I looked up into a dark fire, like the fire of hell, maybe—the burning was deep red within the upper floors, before the yellow flames and billows of smoke came out. After I saw the first body fall, seeming as tiny as a speck of confetti but I knew what it was, I went back to my work station weeping. My boss was still at the windows when the second plane hit, poor man—it was not the kind of thing you could turn away from unless you had to. I dug a prayerbook out from the stacks of papers on my desk and tried to recite Orthros, the morning office of the Eastern Church, but found my attention as unreliable as my vision. Some of the verses were all too appropriate: (M)y soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to the grave. I am counted with those who go down to the pit; I am like a man who has no strength. Adrift among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, and who are cut off from Your hand. You have laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the depths. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and You have afflicted me with all Your waves…

I balked at what came next, and closed the book: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: Who forgives you all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases. Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, Who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

We were told it was not safe to leave the building, but that we had to evacuate the south side, where my desk is located; I went to the printer room, where I was able to get online and send email, letting the world know, prematurely, that I was safe. It was the first some heard of the disaster. Not having had anything to eat, and not knowing when I would be permitted to leave, I went up to the cafeteria level, where some walkways were open to the lobby, which extends up to the the roof of the building with the elevators rising like missile silos from the center, connected to the work areas by glassed in bridges on every floor. Suddenly the windows were covered with brown darkness and there was a sound of screaming from fifteen floors down: the first tower had fallen. I went back down to my cube and picked up my briefcase. Soon we evacuated; had I been permitted to leave earlier, I might be dead.

I walked down twelve flights of stairs and headed uptown. Hundreds of us computer people were huddled in the parking lot below when a vibration too deep to be heard was felt in the small of the back, the knees, and the abdomen. I turned around to see the North Tower, fall a half mile away. I couldn’t even imagine the numbers of people still in it. Clouds of destruction swept up Church Street to our east, and West Street toward the River, but we were sheltered by the bulk of Number Seven, still standing. I walked home.

The walk was exhausting, which is good and gave me an excuse to rest without the television when I finally got home. I was one of a small army of refugees heading uptown, some of them still covered with rubble and ash. One of the oddest sights I saw was about a half dozen horse vans among the emergency vehicles heading the other way, in case mounted police were needed for crowd control, yes, but more importantly because the beasts in the downtown stables, which I hadn’t really noticed, were spooked.

There was a line about a block long in front of St Vincent’s Hospital. I assumed it was people lined up to ask about relatives, but actually it was the line to donate blood. Men and women must have left home and office as soon as they heard of the trouble; they had to turn people away. For months there has been a bad shortage of blood, but as soon as this thing happened, folks headed for the hospitals to give. The need for blood was not so great now as everyone thought; survivors were too few. I was still glad I was myself a donor.

I stopped for an iced tea and grilled cheese around Fifteenth Street after walking in a daze back and forth and back and forth from the corner of Sixth to the corner of Fifth hoping to get into a bus. I put my head down on my cloth briefcase on the lunch counter and broke down silently for a moment, and the stranger on the next stool silently put his hand on my shoulder for a second. By the time I reached Times Square the trains were running uptown, so I was able to ride the last mile and a half. At the corner of 72nd and West End I met the owner of the All State Cafe, who told me my wife was inside with her sister in law, evacuated from the United Nations.

For days I was still catching up on the details, but couldn’t really comprehend them. I saw the terrible fires burning and one body falling before we were removed to the safer side of our building. Then the unbelievable collapse. The television pictures only made it more and more unreal. Everyone who owns a television has seen it all before in movies, with actors dressed as newscasters, or even newscasters hired as actors, saying that this time it was real. The press conferences showed a setting strangely familiar; it was, of course, 101 Barclay. Rudy Giuliani’s secret command center had been at WTC Seven across the street, and when it caught fire he sent in troops to secure our building. A SWAT team shut down the main data center, disrupting securities trading throughout the world, since the main backup was taken out by the collapse of the South Tower. I understand someone tried to talk sense to the imperial stormtroopers—operations could have been shifted to the location which would have taken over if Manhattan had been wiped out in a thermonuclear blast—but orders are orders and civilians were already the enemy. This might already have happened by the time I got out, but I didn’t learn of it for many months.

Wednesday was to have been my Middle Eastern night at the Lafayette Grill on Franklin Street, but of course it was in the forbidden zone. There would be no dance recital. What the vulgar call "belly dance," is in its own way a celebration of life, which I felt a great need for, having seen thousands die, incinerated, vaporized, crushed in a matter of seconds; I also felt a strong need to reach out to our Arab neighbors, many of whom came here to escape persecution at the hands of fanatical Muslims. I was pleased to be able to attend the event when it was rescheduled a week later, though I was only able to get through the police lines because the restaurant owner told the officer at the barricade that he knew me; I was an audience of one. He had only had electricity since the morning, and the telephone service had not yet been restored. When the event was over I looked down West Broadway from the Canal Street station, and at the end of the street, there was nothing there.

Thursday there was to have been a Vesper Liturgy of the Exaltation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross at my litle church on Mulberry Street, but it was still behind police lines, but Friday we were made welcome by the little Orthodox community at Union Seminary. It was at this time of year in 1812 that Moscow burned and everyone who has heard the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Overture knows the melody of the mighty troparion: Lord save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance: Grant victory to Orthodox Christians over their enemies And by the power of Thy Cross safeguard all Thy people. At a time when it was hard to pray in words, it was good to touch our foreheads to the floor at the icon of the crucifixion: Before Thy cross we fall down in worship And Thy holy resurrection we glorify.

The following weeks I worked from home, waiting for my call to the emergency monitoring station in New Jersey from which the bank was managing some of its internet operations. Military jets flew overhead continually. Awakened one night I tore apart the sides of an empty envelope, smoothed it into a kind of page, and wrote a single iambic line: “How shall he live, who lives by accident?” I could not sleep until I had written a second: How shall he live, who lives by accident, More strictly speaking, Providence?

I could then sleep. The torn envelope would go with me to the New Jersey mountaintop where I would work my irregular shifts. I wrote in exhaustion as a black limousine driven by a Christian Arab took me back toward the pillar of smoke on the Eastern horizon that marked the island where I lived—the fire would burn for a hundred days. In the course of a few weeks the poem, if I may be permitted to call it that, grew to some four score lines, and still embodies whatever historical, philosophical and even theological sense I can make of it all.

America had made history but until now not experienced history, at least not since the War Between the States, and most of us are from families who immigrated since then. The day of the attacks it was said that this would be America’s second bloodiest day, second to that of Antietam, when twenty three thousand died in a couple of hours. But—thank God—the casualties are much less than was first expected, and even at the worst there could have been no comparison with Hamburg or Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Warsaw or Nanking.

Three weeks after the Event I crossed police lines again, to buy ink for a German pen that could only be filled from a special bottle available at the Fountain Pen Hospital. It was the closest I came to Ground Zero for many months. From where pedestrians were allowed the site of the Towers resembled a cross between a bizarre junkyard and a construction site; what really got to me was the blackened hulk of WTC Five still standing at the end of Fulton Street. What angered and depressed me bitterly was the sight of the so-called evangelists every block or so, well groomed and energetic in their shirtsleeves, in constant cell phone contact with the commanding officers I imagined back in their hotel suites uptown. Preying on the fears of the vulnerable, these ghouls mesmerized their victims with the curse of a demon-god who would feast on their souls’ pain forever unless they made a total submission to Jesus as their personal savior.

I have read of the voluptuous ecstasy of total submission, and its seductive appeal to certain people, and people in certain circumstances. It is well known in the context of what was once quaintly called sexual perversion. In religion, it has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s true name, in Arabic, is Islam. This false Christianity seemed then perhaps a more benign form of Islam than that which caused the destruction so near to us, but as implacable an enemy of the faith I profess and the religion I practice, which I take to be that founded on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And in less than a year and a half the “Christian” jihadists had launched a campaign of destruction more cruel and remorseless than anything mere Muslims could imagine, one which had been promised to their backers long before the day of which I have been writing, and which was intended to have no terminus.

But at the time I wrote this: “It now appears our own leaders may have groomed the man behind the September 11 atrocities to be the supreme warlord of the Islamic world because they didn’t trust the Afghans to be bloodthirsty enough to drive the Russians out of their country. If so, this is a ghastly thing. We must pray that we do not do even worse in our attempt to destroy him. Perhaps the Muslims themselves will realize that he has incurred the death penalty under their own sacred law, not so much for taking innocent life, but for claiming to be a Muslim while doing so, and inflicting a lasting shame which could spell the end of Islam as a world religion.” Six years later I cannot read these words without real bitterness, for the great shame now is ours.

It would have been right and proper to pursue this man bin Laden and his henchmen to the ends of the earth. Instead the United States presented the Afghans with an ultimatum like that of Austria to Serbia which plunged the West into a quarter century of civil war and in so doing doomed our whole civilization. When the Taliban failed to capture and surrender bin Laden we devastated, conquered, and occupied Afghanistan without hitting our main target. Indeed, we gave up on bin Laden entirely and decided to destroy his worst enemy instead. Saddam might have been the symbol of that secular nationalism that al Qaeda fears and despises most, but he happened to be at the top of the hit list, and Iraq was thought to be an easy target.

Between the Gulf Wars I had expressed dismay at fact that American sanctions were mostly hurting the aged, the sick, and the children of Iraq. It was answered that every Arab baby dead was one less enemy we would have to face later on. To me it was a terrible crime against humanity, as the Supreme Pontiff of Christendom, sick as he was, did not tire of pointing out. It was a crime that would have terrible consequences for America and the world.

As I limped home unharmed from the disaster ruins I paused in front of a television set which had been brought on to the sidewalk and was made aware of bin Laden and the justifications he advanced for the attack. I was confirmed in my conviction that this was the inevitable consequence, not only of ten years of brutal sanctions, but of a half century of bribery and blackmail which corrupted the American body politic to the extent that the security of a foreign power was preferred to the peace and prosperity of the United States, and the Christian idea of the law of nature and of nations was suppressed in favor of the ancient Assyrian ethos of conquest and extermination.

If my reflections stop short of out and out anti-Semitism, you can blame the Jews for that, the ones I worked with, many of them from the Soviet Union by way of Israel, who came here not so much for material advantage, but to breathe the free air of a peaceful country. For these Orthodox colleagues being Jewish was not a matter of nationality and military splendor, but a sacred calling to serve the Creator in a special way. They put their trust in “G_d” rather than in princes, and some are given to patriotic enthusiasm—for the America of 1776. Israel? When the Messiah comes! (That, you should know, is Newyorkese for “Don’t hold your breath.”) It cheered me no end to see these men heading for the elevators at lunch hour clutching their ancient black books, their prayer cushions, and their formal black hats, just as it did to observe the Friday crowd prostrating themselves on the sidewalk in front of the Fountain Pen Hospital because there was no more room in the mosque upstairs. (Praying to our pens, a shop clerk said, but with real if bemused affection.) It’s good to know people are praying, even when you don’t.

It is these Jews, patriotic Americans of Jewish descent, culture, and religion, who will be made to suffer in the anti-Semitic reaction to our lost Mesopotamian war. But it is not Moshe Rabbenu who whispers into the Presidential ears, it is a delusional or even demonic simulacrum of Jesus Christ. The truly powerful conspirators against America are true believers in a ghastly Cromwellian gnosis, and they will see to it that it is others who are punished for their sins.

Unlike the religious Jews and the worldly Zionists, these Christian fanatics are dedicated enemies of the United States as a secular democratic republic. The so-called PATRIOT Act, rationalized as a necessity of the War on Terror, was primarily intended to reduce to a dead letter a Federal Constitution they fear, hate, and despise. If terrorism should prevent the elections of 2008, they will see the hand of God in it. If a three day blitzkrieg against Iran serves to provoke another 9/11, this could only hasten the demise of a secular constitutional state, leading to a dictatorship of those who answer to that imaginary Jesus who now dictates to George Bush. On my bad days, so I reflect.

I survived 9/11 with no worse than sore feet, and I survived kidney cancer a couple of years later. I lost my job to Mother India, but that was probably in the cards anyway. I want to celebrate my enormous pride in the unbelievable heroism and self-sacrifice of my fellow New Yorkers, not all of them in uniform whatever the Giulianis imply, but our pride has been hijacked along with our grief by the armchair terrorists of the war party. I will need to fight down my temptations to self-pity, personal, municipal, and national, to superstitious guilt over my own survival, to fears for a future so much less secure than it seemed on September 10 six years ago.

How shall he live, who lives by accident, More strictly speaking, Providence? Shall he now live as dead to world, to self, to dreams, To ghosts of dreams long dead, to bitterness That took their place in chill and numb of heart? Can he be faithful to a dream reborn, Perhaps embodied in illusion, and Illusion but another name for that Sacred image and word proceeding from The divine center of the human soul? Endure the unendurable a little yet, Be glad each day is over, and the next. Admit no enmity with mortal flesh; In time of war speak only words of peace. Worship your God, alone if it need be, Protect the child from violent despair. Attend the rites of beauty as you can, Content that it exists, not craving more. Embrace philosophy, ruler of souls.

That’s what I needed to write then. That’s what I need to read now.

You didn’t see these headlines last month, and neither did I.  I did get an email from a retired heirarch of a church in Asia with the subject line: “Fire bombing of Bishop J____’s house,” and the news that a stolen car, evidently packed with cans of gasoline, exploded in back of a modest home with a small church in the front — I call it a Cathedral because it is the seat, however humble, of a bishop, however marginal.   The rising fireball missed the bishop’s living quarters on the ground floor, but destroyed the third story apartment of a priest, his wife, daughters, and all that they owned.  The priest had been born in Pakistan, and might have been believed to be a former Muslim, or at least of Muslim descent;  local Muslims have long boasted of getting away with the clandestine execution of “apostates.”  This is New York, where insulting graffiti on a Jewish tombstone are relentlessly publicized as an unforgivable hate crime, as they are, but Christians, especially Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, are considered undesirable elements unless they happen to be rich.  The tiny Orthodox denomination whose mother church was attacked is keeping a low profile, perhaps in well founded fear that publicity will put their clergy in greater danger without any hope of effective police protection.  Indeed, the police claimed that investigating fires is the Fire Department’s job;  New York’s finest have better things to do than track down car thieves.  The burned out car itself eventually disappeared, as cars, even wrecked cars, tend to do, without being examined.

Bishop J____ knows his second class status well.  A convert from Anglicanism, he was baptized around the corner from my house in what was then the North American Mission of the Russian Church Abroad.  By the time he had completed his seminary training upstate the cathedral was closed, together with St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church a block away, condemned by the State of New York along with the parishioners’ homes, to make way for luxury apartments, gargantuan eyesores of remarkably shabby construction.  The neighborhood was left standing long enough to film the movie version of West Side Story to show just what sort of criminal elements were being packed off to New Jersey and the outer boroughs.  The Orthodox relocated to one of the latter, I shall remain discreet about which one, and those few Catholics remaining West of Broadway in buildings like mine left standing, were integrated into Blessed Sacrament, the once fashionable parish of General Sherman and Dorothy Parker.

Ethnic cleansing?  It has been called that, and so it might have been for the egregious Robert Moses.  But, as Charles Coulombe reminded us not long ago, it was more a matter of an unscrupulous landlord, the State, embarking on a massive campaign of harassment and eviction with the prospect of charging more rent, that is, taxes, to a better class of tenants.  For, as insurance agents were long trained to advise their prospects, you don’t really own your home, you only think you do.  In fact you only rent it from the State, as the Supreme Court has recently made plain.

The developers had promised to replace the houses of worship they had destroyed, and so they did, and handsomely.  The Lincoln Square Synagogue, serving a largely Israeli congregation, stands proudly over the site of the old Russian Church.  On a Saturday afternoon I can hear these immigrants wax bitterly indignant that they must share the sidewalks of New York with people of color.  “Look at that one.  See how black he is?  A real criminal!”  (My high school German is still good for spoken Yiddish, though even after two trimesters of college Hebrew the alphabet defeats me.)
Encounters like that one are particularly painful for a philo-Semite like me.  I remember very well indeed the remnants of the Gilded Ghetto the West Side used to be.  Even before I moved down from Inwood I had dinner with the family of a college friend across the street from the rich folks’ projects.  The father, a physician deeply nostalgic for the Vienna of the Habsburgs, would burst out into “Herr, lehere doch mich” from Brahms’ German requiem, and remembered Ludendorff’s declaration of unrestricted U-Boot warfare particularly well — because he and his schoolfellows were required to translate it into Greek.  Fourth Century Attic Greek.  I don’t think it was a particularly kosher meal, and I can’t imagine this magnificent patriarch submitting his suits to the Rabbi’s microscope to check for any forbidden miscegenation of animal with plant fiber, as posters in the local drycleaners now demand that we do.  For me the Jews were the people fighting to save Carnegie Hall from the real estate interests, not the ones destroying family homes to build Lincoln Center.  And, thanks to the heroic efforts of Isaac Stern among others, the Philharmonic is finally able to return to their historic home now that the acoustic disaster of their more recent venue can be admitted in public.

The problem here isn’t a Jewish problem, or even an Israeli problem.  It is an immigration problem.   Israelis born in the Soviet Union aren’t the only ones who despise America and Americans for our remarkable colorblindness, imperfect as it is.  I recall an academic from India complaining that other Indians were boycotting his parties, because he had somehow found it natural to invite his black colleagues — and some of the offended were those United Nations types who so love to denounce us for our racism.  I have no doubt that the arsonist who occasioned these reflections represents a school of Islam fairly new to America and still, thank God, fairly rare here.  But multiculturalism is a deadly menace, and deadlier on a daily basis.  We simply cannot continue to embrace with open arms those whose culture mandates racial contempt and religious hate.  We must always be a refuge for those immigrants who want to be free to practice the Christian religion, or any other religion (within reason) or none — not for those who would murder them for it.

Violence against Christians, Catholics in particular, and Orthodox, whom many fail to distinguish from Catholics, has been a growing and unreported problem here and, I suspect, elsewhere.  Five or ten years ago, in broad daylight, a priest was dragged from the altar of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on 60th Street while celebrating Mass and roughed up by some thugs who disapproved of the Church’s ministry to those struggling with homosexual inclinations.  Video clips were shown on the early evening news, but by ten o’clock the story had been spiked.  If a synagogue service were so profaned, the outrage would be massive and public, but the owners of the media and the authorities, civil and ecclesiastic, treated the incident as an embarrassment to be hushed up.  Again, in the run-up to the current Iraq war, after the Pope had voiced his opposition to it, the sanctuary of St. Margaret’s church in heavily Jewish Riverdale was invaded and vandalized.  The matter was kept off the air and out of the papers;  I only heard because the husband of my Jewish boss was a parishioner there — she said it had to be black kids who did it.  Maybe it was;  we’ll never know.  In New York the desecration of Christian houses of worship is almost never reported.  Violent attacks on priests seem to make the news only when the motive is obviously robbery.  It’s not Baghdad yet, or even Jerusalem, but it’s getting there.

Hate crime against traditional (liturgical) Christians is growing, and we need to take action now.  First of all, we need to keep using the internet to break through the mainstream media blackout, as my Orthodox friend did in the present instance, and we must learn to use the new media even better.  We must counter the blood libels of the Foxmans and Goldhagens which incite and justify violence against us here and against Christians in the Middle East and throughout the world.  We must refute the constant propaganda barrage of less disreputable figures from the pseudo-scientist Dawkins to the stage magicians Penn and Teller claiming that we are mental defectives who should not be allowed to breed, much less to raise children or be entrusted with educational or cultural work.  We need to carry on incessant and creative guerilla warfare on the cultural front, liberating a kaleidoscopic array of temporary autonomous zones where our values are permitted, however briefly, to show themselves.  We need to exploit the magnificent opportunity the Pope has now give us to open windows of liturgical splendor into the Puritan meetinghouses of the Latin Rite, and we need to open the eyes of our hearts ever more to the richness of the Eastern Churches both in and out of communion with Rome.

Most of all, perhaps, the remnants of Christian America must give refuge to the remnants of the ancient Christian churches of the East as they are rendered homeless by the Islamic, Likudnik, and Bushite jihadists, though our rulers and pundits defame them as ragheaded “sand niggers” steeped in ludicrous superstition.

I am an historian of American pragmatism—I admit it—so I will discuss Kirk in terms of our native school of philosophy, even though John Dewey was the poster child for all Kirk rightly detested, and the late Richard Rorty was even worse. If all you have is a hammer all the world is one great nail, but the case of my own move from Kirkian conservatism to Peircean pragmatism (and back?—but I never went away!) may be of interest to students of American philosophy who find the conservative movement beneath notice, and to conservatives who break into hives at the mere mention of pragmatism.

Kirk was the philosopher of the moral imagination. Not only did he identify and explicate those thinkers of the past who worked in the moral imagination; moral imagination was the method with which he himself confronted the world. Some will say that the word method is too definite a term, but I cannot agree. Moral imagination, as Kirk exemplified it, and recognized and elucidated it in earlier writers, is precisely what his beloved, now Venerable, and soon (Deo volente) Blessed Cardinal Newman analyzed in the Grammar of Assent, which had guided Newman into the Catholic Church (as it would guide Kirk) during the writing of his Development of Doctrine.

The story goes back to Sam Coleridge—you know, who stoppeth one of three, that fellow. Sam didn’t like the Britannica: too enlightened, too alphabetical, too Scottish. So he started his own project, the Encyclopedia Metropolitana: systematic in organization, orthodox Christian in tone, and representing the best minds of London, Cambridge, and Oxford. One of the latter was Richard Whately, who was assigned to cover two thirds of the Scholastic trivium, the Elements of Logic and Rhetoric; Whately in turn farmed out part of the Logic to a former student, the Rev. John H. Newman, then of the Established church. The Encyclopedia as a whole didn’t sell, but these two volumes did, like hotcakes. In America. As textbooks. And so the Elements of Logic found their way into the home of Professor Benjamin Peirce of Cambridge Mass. and into the hands of his precocious son Charles, who was never the same.

Charles Sanders Peirce went on to become the father of American philosophy. (There are days I acknowledge Emerson; this isn’t one of them.) In 1867 and 1868 he began to give out the broad picture of his way of thinking, which, he argues, is pretty much the way we all think when we really think. For him the art of discovering reality isn’t a matter of empirical observation or rational deduction, though these are of course indispensable, but more the weighing of converging independent probabilities. This is something he had picked up from Whately’s (and Newman’s) Elements of Logic, but was now able to show is the way real work is done in the hard sciences, in which he made his living. He also argued that what passes for philosophy has been on the wrong track since the end of the Middle Ages, and that if philosophers wanted to be modern in the sense of being scientific, they needed to go back to the methods of scholasticism.

By the 1870s Peirce was calling his philosophy pragmatism, and explaining it as the theory that the meaning of an idea is the sum of its consequences, the infinite total of what the world would be like if it were true. Of course people got this wrong. First of all Peirce’s student John Dewey and an Englishman named Schiller, who would go on to write an amusing history of philosophy in limericks. Then (stab in the back!) his old friend Willy James, who began by distinguishing Peirce’s theory of meaning from the Schiller-Dewey theory of truth, but then proceeded to confuse them again. James got rich and famous, or at least richer and more famous, with his book on Pragmatism, which held that truth is nothing more than what happens to work for you. Mussolini loved it. (Dewey’s admirers tended more toward Stalinism.) Of course, dressed up in European jargon, this is the line of blather that too many college kids have to master, or at least parrot, to pass freshman English these days.

Of course one Peircean pragmatist did get extensive coverage in The Conservative Mind: Jorge Ruiz de Santayana. And any number of conservatives have followed in the footsteps of Caleb Wetherbee, the most engaging character in Santayana’s masterpiece The Last Puritan, who finds his New England destiny in the medieval remnants of the Roman Catholic Church. While I am glad Kirk was steeped in Santayana, I do wish that he had been able to pay more attention to Josiah Royce. When I first studied American philosophy some four decades ago Royce was consigned to the first volume of the source book, as an Idealist, which was almost as bad as a Transcendentalist; it is the second volume, with Peirce, James, and Dewey, that we were required to buy. You wouldn’t have guessed that Royce had studied at the Hopkins when Peirce was teaching there, that The Religious Aspect of Philosophy was in part an intelligent critique of Peirce’s theory of knowledge, or that by the end of his life Peirce considered Royce to be the only real pragmatist besides himself.

I understand that many Conservatives have little time and even less patience for philosophy as such, but I would still urge anyone with a serious interest in the roots of Conservative thought in America to pay close attention at least to Royce’s three greatest classics of moral imagination, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Sources of Religious Insight, and The Problem of Christianity—especially the latter, in view of the way M. L. King misused the central idea of the Beloved Community. (Santayana, like the other great Harvard philosophers of his generation, studied with both James and Royce. But the best known Roycean is no doubt the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, whose dissertation on the American pragmatic idealist is generally neglected.)

Granted, Russell Kirk is not the sole fons et origo of recent American Conservatism; there is also Richard Weaver, who deserves a chapter of his own. But I can’t resist anticipating that here by noting that Weaver’s eloquent and indeed notorious denunciation of William of Occam might have been written by Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce thought (quite rightly) that pragmatism simply couldn’t work without the kind of metaphysical realism most of us were taught to believe Occam had destroyed forever, for example the realism of John Duns Scotus, which Peirce championed. (In some ways Peirce was himself closer to St. Thomas Aquinas, but we don’t need to go into that here.)

But where was Charlie Peirce getting this stuff? Not from the Vatican, for sure—even the popes weren’t there yet. Of course there was his experience as a working scientist, and the daily realization that the realities that forced themselves on his attention, the periodic table of the chemical elements, for example, were anything but figments of human imagination. But long before he set foot in the laboratory, at least as a professional, there was one great influence that would have tickled Kirk no end, an old tome called The True Intellectual System of the Universe—Ralph Cudworth‘s refutation of Thomas Hobbes. The same Harvard library copy, I would like to think, that had similarly inspired the young Waldo Emerson a generation before. In any case, the great monument of Anglican Neo-Platonism, the tradition in which Richard Weaver would take his stand, like Kirk’s beloved Paul Elmer More.

In so far as it is an ideology, conservatism belongs to the modern age, as well as to Modern Age. But, as Gerald Russello’s recent insightful study shows, Russell Kirk’s moral imagination is distinctly postmodern. To see what this means, we need to go back to Charles Peirce’s attempt to identify and remedy the characteristic errors of modern philosophy, which render it unfit company for modern science. (Don’t worry, I won’t attempt to go into that now.) Kirk’s work was, after all, contemporary with that of such figures as Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Father Walter Ong, Theodore Roszak, E. F. Schumacher, and Gregory Bateson, who represent the first stirrings of an explicitly postmodern consciousness, and he was himself a kind of protege of Canon Bernard Bell, as was the Reverend Alan Watts before the latter swallowed and was hooked on the lure of guruism. In retrospect we can see much of the not so new New Age Movement as a half-assed attempt to leave modernity behind in flights of moral imagination separated if not divorced from much of what most folks have always recognized as morality—though it must be admitted that traditional moral principles regarding war and peace and race relations were honored more consistently by many New Agers than by some of the “silent majority.” In this connection, recall, if you will, that the politician who represented the best of the generation of ‘68 was Eugene McCarthy, a friend of Kirk’s.

The American of conservative disposition and sentiment finds himself at a bit of a loss these days. Words that once meant something to him have become slogans of profoundly alien import. He needs Russell Kirk, among others, to recover the true resonance of conservative thought. He also needs to find ways to relate himself and the tradition in which he stands to the postmodern culture of the day, and, indeed, to the broad sweep of American life and thought over the last century and a half. I have argued here that Kirk can help us do this, once we see him as an embodiment of what is best in the mainstream of the American philosophical tradition, a school of thought rightly called pragmatism however the Rortys may misappropriate the term. When we have claimed the pragmatic movement for Kirkian conservatism, we have rich resources at our disposal, not only Peirce, Royce, and Santayana, but such lesser known (alas) figures as Ernest Hocking, Clarence Lewis, and Brand Blanshard, and the Quaker philosopher, educator, and mystic Rufus Jones. When we freely embrace an American intellectual past of all but unbelievable richness, the future will be ours. If we can do this we must thank Russell Kirk, and we owe it to him to make a start.

Frank Purcell is a philosophy teacher in New York City. Photo courtesy of the Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

Amartya Sen is one of those supremely civilized human beings from Asia who have made their home in the West, and are as appalled as we are, perhaps even more than we, at what has become of us here.  Under massive immigration and government enforced “multiculturalism” the England Sen loves is turning into something too much like the East Bengal of his childhood.

In Identity and Violence, the concluding sentence of which I have quoted above, Nobel Prize economist Sen meditates on what the Patriarch of Venice has well indicated as the unavoidable fact of civilizational hybridity. Sen, like Cardinal Angelo Scola, is sensitive to the concerns that many of us, who call ourselves cultural conservatives, have over what passes for multiculturalism:

“There is a real need to rethink the understanding of multiculturalism both to avoid conceptual disarray about social identity and also to resist the purposeful exploitation of the divisiveness that this conceptual disarray allows and even, to some extent, encourages. What has to be particularly avoided (if the foregoing analysis is right) is the confusion between multiculturalism with cultural liberty, on the one side, and plural monoculturalism with faith-based separatism on the other. A nation can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments, with citizens being assigned fixed places in predetermined segments. Nor can Britain be seen, explicitly or by implication, as an imagined national federation of religious ethnicities.” (p. 165)

And neither can the United States — or Europe.  Yes, we are members of communities of faith.  But there is common humanity, and, in various places and at various times, common civilizations have flourished, each articulating that common humanity in its own unique way.  Our own civilization has been fairly unique in offering hospitality to those who come to us from other civilizations and their outskirts, trusting to our common humanity and to a set of institutions and traditions designed to allow members of different communities to collaborate as neighbors, clients, and colleagues.  And this has worked remarkably well, at least in America.

When I think of 9/11 I recall how my glass fortress diagonally opposite the World Trade Center complex was locked down by security, ingress and egress forbidden.  One gentleman, a computer technologist, as were we all, made it in — and out again.  When he emerged from the subway station and saw the Twin Towers on fire, rather than get back on a train for Brooklyn with the rest, he rushed to his cubicle, retrieved a medical bag (he was a trained paramedic) from his desk, and headed for what the media would soon be calling Ground Zero.  There are pictures of him there doing what he could for people until the building collapsed on him.  I am not sure any remains were identified.  He was the only one we lost.

I don’t even know the man’s name, and there were many like him, whose names are known to God.  What I do know is that he was from China, and that generations of Communist indoctrination had failed to eradicate the Confucian ethic, the conviction that knowledge imposes obligation.  And I am proud that this man chose my country to make his home.  Of course this is not a plea for unrestricted immigration.  But I think we waste too much energy on schemes to keep the wrong people out, when we should rather stop encouraging people to come for the wrong reasons, and strengthen and renew those elements of our culture that have attracted those immigrants of whom we are rightly proud.

America is a unique civilization, in which people of all cultures have made homes for themselves.  Not all came to suck the welfare tit.  Yes, my mother’s mother and my father’s grandfather came for opportunity, but there is nothing wrong with that.  The desire to achieve a decent life for yourself and your family is a noble one, especially when centuries of English rule and Protestant ascendancy have beaten in the lesson that as Irish and as Catholic you and yours are forever unworthy of a decent life. 

The American establishment, including my mother’s father’s people, dreaded the arrival of my Catholic ancestors, German and French as well as Irish, expecting to be overwhelmed by starving hordes of medieval peasants.  Of course nothing of the sort happened.  In wishing to be free from Protestant oppression, they wished to be free to live lives open to realities not anticipated by their predefined communal identity.  And such lives they have led, to the dismay of innumerable parochial school principals.  The same may be said, and indeed has been said, of the children of Hindu and, yes, Muslim families in America.  Even Jews complain of it, though the ghetto remains intact in parts of Brooklyn.  Still, a Jewish woman may take a seat in the front of a New York city bus without taking a beating for it, as she might in Jerusalem.

The Muslim community in America is quite unlike that of France or Britain or anywhere else.  Arabic speaking Muslims have been integrated into a wider Arab-American community founded by Christian refugees from Islamicist terror.  There is a certain concern and esteem for Palestinian refugees from areas controlled by Israel, but again, many of these are of Christian heritage.  The Bangladeshi Muslims who run so many small businesses are Bengalis before all else, who sing the songs of the Christianized Hindu Rabindranath Tagore, the national sage whose broad religious sense also reflects the kinds of Sufism common in South Asia.  On the whole, American Muslims, or, should I say, Muslim Americans, do not think that they dishonor God by treating secular matters in a secular spirit.

Despite the best efforts of demented social studies teachers in our public schools, what Sen calls plural, separatist, monoculturalism has made little progress here, except among two groups.  It is in Jewish circles that the specter of communalism became especially powerful in the wake of 9/11.  On the evening of that day itself a woman prominent in the Jewish organizations telephoned our home to make sure I was all right.  In the course of her conversation she said, “Now you know what it feels like to be Israeli,” a remark not only breathtakingly tactless, but singularly inappropriate addressed by a woman born and raised in the Bronx and educated at the expense of the taxpayers of New York to a woman born in a temple compound on the banks of the Brahmaputra.  After that I was prepared for the unspeakable Netenyahu’s brutal and bullying speech the next day.

In the years that followed strange things have been happening in the Jewish community.  Several teachers who tutor yeshiva students at home report that the boys are being taught to hold the subjects taught in the English language — including mathematics, science, and history as well as grammar and literature — in growing contempt.  One boy demanded to know whether his tutor accepted the idea of evolution.  “In a couple of years you’ll know better,” he smirked — evidently he believed, believes, that Moshiah will come soon to teach the rest of us a lesson.

Sound familiar, you hinterlanders? Damn straight!  This is not a New York Jewish thing, but something that has been growing in the fundamentalist backwaters for years.  Indeed, it is fairly new out East, and still rather unwelcome here.  I live in the Gilded Ghetto of Manhattan’s West Side, which was, within living memory, a fading suburb of Habsburg Vienna, with old Budapest at the other end of the crosstown bus.  Here you don’t have to be an Irish Catholic to shake your head over the foibles of the Soviet-born Israelis who seem to be taking over.  Indeed, the Irish Catholics are an endangered species here ever since the ethnic cleansing known as urban renewal, and the tiny bits of public land from which Christian symbols were ripped away two generations ago now display triumphant menorahs for Advent.

But we somehow manage to get along;  if you don’t believe it, read the news from France, even England, and, God help us all, Sweden, and see what things are like overseas.  We are not, or at least not yet, in the grip of Sen’s pluralistic monoculturalism.  We have, in additional to our particular ethnoreligious cultures, a common culture of liberty, what Sen calls cultural liberty.  By this he means the ability given by education to make intelligent, informed, and responsible choices among the cultural alternatives offered to us. As Goethe says somewhere, we do not really own what we inherit until we freely embrace it. If you want to call this the criterion of Western civilization I will not dispute you, though it is one we have not always honored, and Sen can point, does point, to paradigmatic instances of it east of Suez.

The common culture may not be what it once was (and maybe it never was), but it is still enough to keep the conversation going, and as Oakeshott puts it, we are a species of ape who lost our tails sitting around talking.  Or, as Bob Hutchins pitched it to the upmarket, ours is the civilization of the dialogue.  And it is, unlike any other.  It’s not just that old man Plato wrote literary dialogues on the assumption that people should be prodded to make up their own mind about things.  It’s also that Christendom has always felt itself to be in a very odd relationship indeed with its Hebrew and with its Pagan ancestry.  We could say that this realization is as old as Petrarch, but it was no secret to Justin, Clement, or even Augustine.

Of course every social studies teacher and professor of critical studies in America would have hissy-fits over this kind of “Eurocentric” talk.  Some member of the Brussels parliament might even want to make it illegal.  But while I have the freedom, I’m going to use it.  And so should we all.  That’s what civilization is all about;  the alternative, as Amartya Sen well remembers, is genocidal violence.

Frank Purcell is a philosophy teacher living in New York City.

The prisoner was given less than twelve hours’ notice:

“This morning, at about 5:30 am we were told to get dressed immediately and informed that the car was already waiting for us. Then I, along with other condemned men, was driven to Brandenburg. We didn’t know what would happen to us. It wasn’t until noon that I was told that the verdict had been confirmed on the 14th and that it was going to be carried out today at 4 pm.”  The prisoner was allowed to write a last letter to his wife and family.  On the desk lay the oath of unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler.  All he had to do was sign it;  the Wehrmacht had gone so far as to promise not only to spare his life, but give him training as a medic and a noncombatant assignment in the field — to grant him the status of a conscientious objector.  “Dearest wife and mother,” he wrote.  “It was not possible for me to spare you the pain you are now suffering on behalf of me. How hard it must have been for our dear Savior to cause his dear mother such great sorrow by his suffering and death; and all this they suffered for love of us sinners. I thank my Savior that I was allowed to suffer for Him and also die for Him. I trust in his infinite mercy, that God has forgiven me everything and will not abandon me in the final hour.”

A priest came in around noon to give the condemned the last rites — and one last chance to save his neck.  “I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war,” the prisoner said, and politely turned down the offer of religious tracts and a reading from the New Testament.  “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord, and any reading would only interrupt my communication with my God.” The priest never forgot the joy of his countenance.  It was the same day in 1943 that the Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, now Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, was consumed in Hitler’s Final Solution.

A week before George W. Bush arrived in Rome for their first meeting, Benedict XVI put his signature to a document proclaiming Franz Jägerstätter a martyr of the Church for refusing to serve in an unjust war, such as Benedict and John Paul the Great insisted the Bush war against Iraq has been from the beginning.  The decree means that the Bishop of Linz in Austria, whose predecessor had tried to talk the farmer out of his rash act of resistance, can go ahead with the beatification;  a miracle is not required, as it would be in the case of a Servant of God who was not a martyr.  (A miracle will be required, however, before the Blessed Franz becomes Saint Franz.)   The beatification will take place on October 26—just about the time that some observers expect a departing, lame-duck President Bush to launch a Pearl Harbor style pre-emptive attack (perhaps a nuclear one) against Iran.

The case of Franz Jägerstätter raises two urgent questions for the Christians of our own time, and Americans in particular.  Why did the vast majority of Germans and Austrians follow Hitler so meekly?  What gave Franz the insight to discern the will of God and the resolution to carry it out alone, even unto the death of a criminal?  To take the second first, we might write him off as a case of peasant stubbornness.  We would be wrong.  To be sure, he had little in the way of formal education.  But he did have a motorcycle, the first in his town, at a time when this eccentric hobby necessarily involved not only the thrill of speed, but the constant challenge of keeping a state-of-the art machine in good repair.  In other words, he was neither ignorant nor stupid.  In a later generation he might have been an amateur radio enthusiast or an Ubuntu geek.  He was a Christian cosmopolitan:  at a time when few of his class ventured far from their ancestral homesteads Franz and his bride took the opportunity of their honeymoon to make a pilgrimage to Rome.  And he was a Franciscan tertiary, that is, a member of the Third Order that Francis of Assisi established for laymen to live the Gospel of Jesus in the midst of the world.  As such he would have been forbidden to bear arms in any case according to the original Rule, but he probably had no way of knowing this.

We can’t all hack the Linux kernel, but Rome is still there for us, as close as the modem or cable box, though we may turn our back on her.  The Third Orders are more alive than ever, those of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and, in an even more ancient tradition, many communities following the Rule of St. Benedict have lay affiliates known as Oblates.  The only reason there is no Third Order of St. Benedict is that there is no First or Second Order — Benedictines are just too decentralized.  Dorothy Day was a Benedictine Oblate; so was Walker Percy.  You don’t even have to be Catholic any more.  The World Community for Christian Meditation is formed around a core of Oblates of the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Tuscany.  The Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, the closest thing that that exuberant movement has to a formal organization, was founded under the episcopal sponsorship of the Lord Abbot of Monte Cassino, the successor of St. Benedict himself (the Father of Europe), though it was soon recognized by the See of Rome and enjoys the special favor of Pope Benedict.

Ancient tradition, medieval spirituality, modern resistance.  Traditional Christians throughout the world, including this Pope, treasure Dietrich von Hildebrand‘s Transformation in Christ, many without being aware of Hildebrand’s Benedictine roots, or thinking much about the fact that the book originated in two retreats Hildebrand (a layman, of course) gave at his villa in Florence for German and Austrian anti-Nazis.  Hildebrand had been a full-time anti-Nazi propagandist in Vienna before Austria was absorbed by the Reich;  I have seen no evidence that Jägerstätter was directly influenced by Hildebrand’s agitation, but you can’t help wondering.  During the same dark period, evangelical theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was going from place to place organizing the underground church, conspiring to rescue Jews — and to assassinate Hitler.  From time to time he would take refuge at Kloster Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, where even today the monks distill some wonderful liqueurs, and even a kind of cologne.  Francis II, present heir to the Stuart claims to the thrones of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France, received his education there — after he was liberated from Dachau.  At the age of eleven, the uncrowned prince was rounded up in Budapest after that ill-fated attempt on Hitler that would cost Bonhoeffer his head.

But the question remains, why did so many Christians, even Catholics, fall for Hitler, a man who openly denounced Christian faith as a Jewish pollution?  American sociologist Gordon Zahn explored this deeply painful issue in German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars.  In the course of his research Zahn discovered Jägerstätter, and eventually wrote In Solitary Witness about him, a book which probably inspired more effective dissent against the Vietnam War than all the turgid Marxist tracts of Marcuse and friends;  it was soon forgotten here.  To understand German Christians we don’t have to look far.  America, like Germany was once a Christian country, the last great power to acknowledge, at least in practice, the lordship of Christ.  I say in practice — there is nothing in the Declaration of Independence about Jesus, at least not directly.  But the opening of that document is a key statement of the basic principle of Christian civilization, that all of us are created equal, at least in the sense of having basic God-given human rights which cannot be taken away from us, and which God does not permit us to give away, as He did not permit the martyred Franz to sign the Hitler oath.  The idea of fundamental, universal, and unalienable human rights is unique to our Christian civilization, anathema to Nazis, Communists, Islamists, and, I regret to say, some Jews, secular as well as religious.  According to Middle Eastern philosophy you have no human rights if you refuse to submit to Mohammedan rule — or if you show yourself to be an enemy of the Jewish people and their State.  The enemies of God, in this view, are justly subject to expropriation, enslavement, massacre, and torture.

It is in relation to torture that George Bush proved himself a traitor to America and to Christ.  When his “advisors” demanded that he use forbidden methods in secret prisons he asked the American military for their opinion.  They responded as true patriots, admitting that such practices are immoral, illegal, contrary to the American military spirit — and useless from a practical point of view.  Of course the real purpose of torture is not to obtain information of military import, but to gratify sadistic lusts, and to degrade not only the prisoners, but whole subject populations, first of all in their own eyes, to demoralize the demonized enemy.  Whether inspired himself by such motivations or merely intimidated by sinister forces, the Commander in Chief abandoned our men in uniform to follow the instructions of his foreign advisors while America’s nominal Christians clicked their heels.  How did this shame come to pass?

Like Germans of the Weimar Republic after the mass inflation wiped out their life savings in the 1920s, many Americans have become in the wake of 9/11 a frightened and vindictive people.  When we say we are Christian, we mostly mean that we are frightened, of homosexuals, pornographers, drug users, “terrists,” you name it.  We look for leaders who best act out our vindictiveness, the Nixons, the Giulianis.  Already in 1920 the late Henry Mencken was predicting a Giuliani presidency with his remarks about the road to power in America beginning in the office of the ambitious, unscrupulous prosecutor.  “Conservative” Christians may talk about the right to life, but will embrace the most anti-life strongman as long as he seems vindictive enough.  The evangelicals caved on life back in the Nixon days.  In 1971 and 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention came out strongly in favor of legal abortion, at first in limited circumstances, then more generally.  As “patriotic Americans” they had already consented to industrialized murder, to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and (many of them) My Lai.  A fetus wasn’t a human being, any more than a Jap or a Gook.  The Baptists, to their eternal honor, have lately begun to repent, and now form a powerful part of the pro-life movement.  But the Evangelical movement as a whole, as represented by the likes of Cal Thomas, congratulates itself on its maturity—that is, on its new refusal to emphasize any belief that might embarrass churchgoers in the company of liberals, as Paul Gottfried so tellingly points out.  The essence of Evangelicalism, at least in the public sphere, is reduced to hysterical jihad against the Muslim menace.

Baylor University recently demonstrated the kind of maturity the pundits are praising.  The University denied tenure to the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis J. Beckwith. A philosopher of international repute, Beckwith was a fierce a critic of abortion—and one of those thinkers who, without denying Darwinism, thought it should not be imposed as dogma by the state.  Baylor backed down, but not without a great deal of soul-searching on all sides:  Professor Beckwith’s led him back to the Catholic Church of his childhood.  Just last year, Evangelical theologian Kirby Godsey, president of Mercer University, published a remarkable book entitled When We Talk about God… Let’s Be Honest.  In it, he insists that the Christian who is really honest with himself has no higher opinion of Jesus Christ than a Muslim or a Reform Jew would have, and a lower one than any Hindu.  All who uphold the Creed can be safely dismissed as dishonest.  If this be maturity, let us become again as little children!  The Christian who stands against the worship of the state, the holocaust of the unborn, the systematic torture and degradation of our rulers’ enemies, will find as little support among these so-called Evangelicals as Jägerstätter found among the so-called Catholics of his time.

The grass isn’t much greener on the Catholic side of the street.  The already partly homosexualized American Church stood almost alone against abortion, its moral standing compromised by its own blessing of total war for unconditional surrender and by its insistence that lay people follow their own inclinations in matters of war and contraception.  What support could Paul VI expect for Humanae Vitae when the most articulate Catholic in North America had already defied the Blessed John XXIII with the slogan Mater si, magistra no?  In the four and a half decades since the conservative Catholic intelligentsia set its face against Rome, the New Left has become the Neocon Center.  The Lutheran firebrand who said Che Guevara deserved his defeat because he lacked the revolutionary will to terror now advises the President in the collar of a Catholic priest, and the author of A Theology for Radical Politics lectures Popes on the moral necessity of preemptive war.

Even Hitler didn’t start with Jews, that is, with neighbors other Germans saw every day, and when he got around to them, a great many Germans didn’t have the heart to give them up.  He started with lives that were more obviously “unlebenswürdig,” lives not worth living, not worth keeping alive, not worth allowing to live.  The Pope well remembers a cousin being taken off, and later learning that his life had been judged unworthy and terminated.  Then it was the handicapped.  Now it is any child whose mother doesn’t want him, or can be persuaded — by boyfriend, parent, teacher, guidance councilor — to have him terminated.  Some people who still believe that abortion is a sin for themselves think it a great virtue to abort others.  A nation that will crush the skull of a half born baby as an act of liberation will not object greatly when the police ram the broken stick of a toilet plunger up a Haitian cab driver’s rectum.  When this happened here in New York, one heard a certain amount of muttering that it was about time “those people” were taught a lesson, muttering we would not have heard twenty years ago.  We have been on the road to Abu Gharaib — and Guantanamo — for a long time.

Where is light to be found today?  In the Catholic Church, to be sure, in so far as it is faithful to the See of Rome, and in the Peace Churches in so far as they are faithful to their Gospel roots.  The main stream of Protestantism and its Catholic hangers on, as far as we can tell, is theologically confused, spiritually sterile, and morally bankrupt.  As with the German churches of the Hitler years, it is dominated by modernism, the social gospel in one form or other, and neoconservatism.  In other words there is little belief in the literal truth of Christianity, much faith in the ability of government to create and sustain a moral social order, and a despairing conviction that we must use whatever means seem necessary, because only the naïve trust God’s providence in history.  Some oppose the Bush regime, but most of those would have supported, and indeed did and do support, tyranny, torture, and terrorism when practiced by regimes of the Left.  They are neocons too, the tired spawn of Reinhold Niebuhr.

A recent PBS biography of Bonhoeffer sniffed that Neibuhr at Union Seminary left the German theologian cold, with the clear implication that the realities of life in Nazi Germany would teach him better.  I think not;  Bonhoeffer did well to look rather to the black churches of Harlem.  But Reinhold had a brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, not so well known today because he did not serve our secular masters so well.  Richard broke with Reinhold over Asia, thinking the Christian had enough to do to keep the Gospel alive in his own milieu without demanding the government send troops to police the rest of the world.  Richard’s model of Christian action and resistance was St. Benedict, and of course it is with the Benedictines that Bonhoeffer found refuge and inspiration.  We could do worse in our own bad times than read or, better, reread Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ, and make an occasional toast of Kloster Ettal (I prefer the bitter variety), if you can get it, to the memory of the martyrs of Germany and Austria, known and unknown.

Frank Purcell is a philosophy teacher living in New York City.

Icon of Franz Jägerstätter by Fr. William McNichols, used w/permission, courtesy of Trinity Stores, 800-699-4482.

We all know that picture of the late Warren Gamaliel Harding Calvin Coolidge bedecked in a Sioux war bonnet.  In my own youth, in late May thirty seven years ago, a rather less honorable man crowned himself with a construction helmet bearing the title Commander in Chief, a consolation prize for the honorary doctorate my Alma Mater withdrew at the last moment, after the invasion of Cambodia.  Richard Nixon was king at least of the building trades, laborers in which had violently disrupted commemorations of the four students who died protesting the invasion.

I remembered the incident last Christmas.  I was at the Bible museum near Lincoln Center for a wonderful lecture on Giotto with music by the Communion and Liberation choir, and took a tour of the current display.  Featured was a copy of pop sculptor George Segal’s moving depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac, intended as a memorial to those students shot by the Ohio National Guard at Kent, but now in the sculpture garden at Princeton.  I was haunted by this stark reminder of my first semester of graduate school, especially because I fancied the figure of Abraham had been inspired by old photographs of philosopher William James, whose deeply misguided conception of truth, which he called pragmatism, has had such a tragic effect on American life and thought.

In May 1970, I was at Columbia studying higher education, in which I hoped to make a career, and my advisor was Walter Sindlinger, a wise, gentle, and good man, from Ohio himself.  Sad and bewildered, he explained to us that the riots at Kent State, with college kids turning cars upside down and setting them on fire, were an annual event which had nothing at all to do with Vietnam, Cambodia, Nixon, or Kissinger.  Surely, he implied, the Governor knew this, even if the President did not.  Nixon of course saw himself as the new Lincoln, Father Abraham, called to save the nation from the sin of rebellion, and the young men, the very young men, of the National Guard were ordered to lock and load.  According to his henchman Haldemann, it was the beginning of the end for Nixon.

It was certainly the end of my identification with a conservative movement he had so successfully seduced, this old New Deal bureaucrat, the quintessential proto-neocon.  And yet, as I collaborated more and more closely with the antiwar movement (though not the Communist, anti-American wing of it), I became more and more obsessed with the philosophy of pragmatism, and especially with Charles Peirce, who started it, and with his lifelong crusade against nominalism.  Nominalism?  Nominalism.  Remember Richard Weaver?  Ideas Have Consequences? 

“Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.”

Weaver’s words, Peirce’s sentiments.  Poor Willy James just didn’t get it.  Or those damned Republicrats, slippysliding down the steep slope to neoconnery.  But there are universal standards of human decency, and that’s what hapless George McGovern was calling us home to.  But Charles Peirce knew, Richard Weaver knew, that we began to turn our back on them long before the so-called Reformation.  (Dear Phil Sherrard, all too briefly my teacher in Athens, blamed Charlemagne and the filioque, but I wouldn’t go that far.)

May 4, 1970.  It’s not that some frightened kid in uniform pulls the trigger.  It’s not that, in the general panic and confusion, gunshot victims don’t get the prompt medical attention that might save their lives.  It’s the all too general sentiment: Too bad for their parents, but those Commies had it coming — a sentiment Elton Trueblood, the Quaker Pope of the Midwest, duly repeats to a (presumably) shocked Bill Moyers, in a part of the interview that was cut from the book version.  The cynical spurning of common human decency.  The fruit of that systematic indoctrination in metaphysical nominalism and moral relativism known as public education.

The Ohio war protesters are shot and killed on Monday;  Friday is set aside as a day of mourning.  On Wall Street organized gangs of men dressed as construction workers converge on peaceful demonstrators, beating them with tools and stomping them with work boots.  They attack a line of New York City police at Federal Hall, where Washington was sworn in in 1789, and proceed to storm City Hall, where the flag has been at half mast, in order to raise it, and to denounce the Mayor as a Communist.

It is lunch hour on Wall Street.  A Lehman Brothers partner comes to the aid of a demonstrator and is himself attacked.  So is another member of the financial community who moves to protect him.  The rioters storm Trinity Church, Washington’s parish, where a first aid station has been set up, but are locked out, and must content themselves with ripping down the flag of the Episcopal Church.  Many of the rioters are employed at the World Trade Center site and one or two other buildings under construction.  They have been ordered to report for this duty, and their movements are directed by men in suits using hand signals.

On May 20, a grateful President receives a delegation from the leaders of New York’s construction unions, accepting from them the “hard hat” of Commander in Chief.  He tries it on, grinning for a photograph in the National Archives, though not for the press.  One of union leaders, James Brennan, becomes Secretary of Labor after the 1972 election.

These people are shameless:  they glory in their very shamelessness;  they expect Americans to abase themselves before it.  Burke saw it in France long ago:  “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”

I did not then use the F-word, Fascism, and rather despised those who did.  Moreover, the interwar European right had had, if not a certain grandeur, a certain aspiration to grandeur, or at least a nostalgia for it.  Mussolini had had his Pound, Franco his Roy Campbell.  And our Nixon?  He had… Elvis!

To be a Burkean conservative at a small Quaker college in the swinging Sixties was a bit of an affectation, and, to tell the truth, perhaps more than a bit.  On Morningside Heights in the wake of the Cambodian Incursion Burke’s moral imagination was an urgent necessity to be clung to with passion.  I kept coming back to Burke’s furious indictment of Warren Hastings for the crimes of imperialism, his ringing defense of Natural Law, upon which my own Republic, not so incidentally, had been founded:

“He to have arbitrary power! My lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no arbitrary power to give him; your lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is the thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give away. No man can govern himself by by his own will, much less can he be governed by the will of others. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to our very being itself, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir. This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have; it does not arise from our vain institutions.”

My friends on the Left despaired at the thought of rebellion against the seemingly omnipotent State.  The poor fools could not imagine that it was — it is — merely a matter of refusing to take part in a doomed rebellion against the truly omnipotent Creator of the universe:

“Every good gift is of God, all power is of God; and He who has given the power, and from whom it alone originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. Therefore, will it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom and justice?”

“Blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation… feeble, contemptible, ridiculous…”  The Left had its own words for Mr. Nixon and I had mine, borrowed from the best.  Apply them as you will to his successors How sad that some today, who were young then, or younger, at any rate, grow rich, or richer, by vilifying their own resistance to this usurpation.  To be sure, their opposition was too often justified, if not entirely motivated, by a system of belief as blasphemous, absurd, feeble, contemptible, and ridiculous as that of the Republicans, if, indeed the Republicans had anything consistent enough to be rightly called a system of belief — or do now.  I like to think that common human decency played its part in the antiwar movement as well, even though the Marxists leading it, or pretending to lead it, affected to scorn all such bourgeois sentimentality.

For Burke there is of course a duty to resist:  “Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal, and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world. Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not resisting it to the best of their power.”

But there is no duty to be successful, or to appear to be successful.  Our impotence may not be absolute, but our potency is sometimes pitiful.  Burke himself failed to stop the Jacobins of his day, much less the Napoleonic, the Bolshevik, the Bushite armies of liberation, or even the somewhat kinder and gentler British Raj.  Indeed, he is vilified to this day for taking his stand, as those of us who stood up for America against an unjust war and a corrupt administration are condemned as traitors by those whose only abiding loyalty is to an alien power in the Levant.

The work of resistance God demands of us takes many forms, according to our personal powers and opportunities.  For the philosopher and the educator it is an unceasing struggle to recover the cultural sanity of the West, the appreciation that this universe of ours, mathematical, physical, vital, mental, spiritual, is the manifestation of Mind and to be understood by mind.  That universals are real.  That the law of nature and of nations has unconditional authority over our actions whether our masters acknowledge it or not.

May 1970 was a turning point in what Yale law professor Charles Reich would call, in his runaway best seller of the end of the year, The Greening of America.  The bewildered elder generations reluctantly concluded that those young people they saw on the television were on to something.  (The protesters, I mean.  A greater number of the young were still getting shot at in the jungle in a war we had neither the will to win nor the decency to end.)  Whatever the military necessity or geopolitical prudence of the Cambodian incursion, events were surely out of hand.

The arson at Kent called for the apprehension and conviction of the arsonist, not the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators in order to intimidate dissent.  The rioting of the the construction workers may have been understandable if regrettable, but the hearty commendation of the rioters by a national administration was nothing to be proud of.  On the younger generations the intimidation worked, but in an ultimately counterproductive way.  Many of us concluded that we were better off in the hot tubs and encounter groups than in the streets.  Some of us, for a brief moment, even thought we were better off in the classrooms and libraries.  But the scholarship we produced, and the teaching we undertook, did not serve the Nixonian vision of America, to say the least.

This May I remember the dreams of our youth, the radical dream of peace, freedom, and justice, the conservative dream of order, decency, and grace.  I invite all who were young then, of either persuasion or both, to cry out with Tennyson’s Ulysses,
                              Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Shall we not say to all who marched against the war in Vietnam, but also to all who labored silently, tirelessly, thanklessly to preserve what of Western civilization is left to us, shall we not say

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Frank Purcell is a teacher and scholar of philosophy living in New York City.