From The European Conservative
By Josué Luís Hernández
All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.
What was sacral society? What was that union of altar and throne, of the spiritual and temporal, that alliance between the Two Swords of authority wielding power over the affairs of men? The sacral society of the past is considered only as an age of darkness whose clouds were pierced, and eventually dissipated, by the dawn of the neutral and tolerant political arrangement of liberalism, which has endowed us with individual liberty, universal equality, and the separation of Church and state. The old social order, bound together by priest and king, gave way to the new age of light and reason.
From a defeated and smoldering Christendom arose the liberal state, quelling the seemingly irreconcilable religious enmities and factions of Europe and ushering in an age of peace, unprecedented prosperity, and universal agreement. Gone forever were the days of religious wars and persecutions, of inquisitions and Auto da Fé’s. The secular would now be the sole realm of political action. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “but it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or one god.” Henceforth, the sphere of religion would be contained and limited to private life. It would remain only in the realm of individual conscience, of private association, and of personal belief and opinion. As John Locke pointed out:
Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical. For whatsoever any church believes, it believes to be true and the contrary unto those things it pronounce; to be error. So that the controversy between these churches about the truth of their doctrines and the purity of their worship is on both sides equal; nor is there any judge, either at Constantinople or elsewhere upon earth, by whose sentence it can be determined. The decision of that question belongs only to the Supreme judge of all men, to whom also alone belongs the punishment of the erroneous.
Thus, religious indifference would become the only permitted attitude in public affairs, and the universal creed replacing that of the old Faith would now be a simple, rational, and incontrovertible platitude: You have the right to do whatever you like, so long as you harm no one else. This at least is what could be considered a typical articulation of the cherished dogma to which modern man and his civilization owe their salvation.
The Novus Ordo Seculorum, founded on the newly conceived Natural Rights, went on to replace the old Natural Law. The shackles formed by the arbitrary restrictions of custom and tradition were undone, and the natural bonds of hearth and kin, and of the broader community of which each person was a part, began to dissolve, and with it, the duties they imposed. Secular authority was taken down from its lofty heights. Rather than constituting one part of the rule ordained by God for the ordering of society towards the natural and supernatural ends that comprise the common good, such authority became one in which an implicit civil conspiracy, resulting in a binding social contract, created an artificial and compulsory social construct for dominating men — with the Supreme Legislature standing in place of the Leviathan, in the supposed kinder, gentler recycled Hobbesianism of Locke. The purpose of such a society was the preservation of life, liberty, and property (or “the pursuit of happiness”)—words and concepts now completely redefined under a new reductionist and materialist conception of Enlightenment thought.
Man came of age, so we say. Left behind was that perplexingly tangled tapestry of overlapping authorities and reciprocal rights and duties, that unkempt intermixing of different spheres of life striving together to form a harmonious whole in common pursuit of virtue and ultimately beatitude. That was Christendom. And in Christendom’s place was set a self-evident principle, a pure and untainted doctrine, a perfectly rational mechanism, akin to the dream of the perpetual self-motion machine. The most elegantly conceived mechanism for the ordering of men and society was, at long last, achieved. The aim of government, according to the new science of politics, was not, in fact, the common good of society but rather the protection of Natural Rights. That is, protection of the personal liberty and autonomy of the individual born in Rousseau’s mythical ‘state of nature,’ in which man was said to have been free and autonomous, unbound from any authority to which he did not personally consent, be it natural or divine. Man’s final end and objective, this new summum bonum, would be procured not through the difficult cultivation of virtue, the illumination of Faith, or the transformative power of grace, but as Madison explains in Federalist Paper No. 10, via the multiplication of factions.
Rather than directing unruly men to their proper end, and by so doing run the risk of imposing tyranny and oppression—now simply defined as the suppression of another’s will—the object of government would instead be to seek the weakening of factions through their proliferation. The greater the number of factions the less likely it would be for one to arise as a majority. Through the mutual weakening of each other no single interest, no one concept of religious truth (save that of a fixed and unchanging indifference), would rise above another and, hence, be afforded the opportunity to lord over those beneath it. Discord would now become the very source of stability. Order out of chaos. Solve et coagula: the dissolving of society would itself constitute its formation. And standing above this new settlement, as a benign and impartial referee, was to be the neutral, liberal state. Men need no longer live in the darkness of superstition. We have found a better way. The only way. We have reached the end of history.
Yet, along his slow climb from the swamp to the stars, as the liberal state reached near universal hegemony, this new liberated man witnessed the violent death of over two-hundred million people as a result of wars and oppressive regimes, in what amounted to secular states fighting for secular causes. Trying to match those numbers with the past conflicts of the Ages of Faith would require nearly a hundred more Crusades—a saga that stretched over a few hundred years, mind you—and at least ten more Thirty Years Wars (which, in reality, exhibited more of a pragmatic political struggle than a religious conflict, demonstrated by the fact that Catholics and Protestants fought on the same sides).
It was not just the horrors of the Communist and Nazi regimes that brought about these crimes—whose dedication to secularism no one would accuse of amounting to liberalism. No, we also witnessed the Allied Powers themselves—who comprised the liberal faction of the secular bloodbath that we know as World War II—pursue a policy of targeting civilian populations, as seen with the firebombing of Dresden and other European and Japanese cities, culminating in the explosion of two atomic bombs that resulted in the most horrifyingly apocalyptic imagery mankind has ever witnessed. All this to spread the gospel of liberal democracy. Unlike certain unfortunate episodes during the Crusades or the Spanish conquest of the Americas (episodes that were all unequivocally condemned by both the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities of the time), the atrocities of the liberal democracies, no less than those of the Communist and Nazi regimes, were actions directed by official policy. Moreover, such atrocities were fueled by liberalism’s the desire to impose a particular set of beliefs and way of life on all other peoples.
When all was said and done, a century of unsurpassed horrors lay in the wake of such social experiments in secular order. And we were left facing the unsettling fact that with the dissolution of Christendom and the rise of secular modernity, Western Civilization had gone from the high ideals of chivalry and The Peace and The Truce of God movements—with which the Church had once upon a time limited warfare and largely managed to civilize a violent and barbaric Europe through the bond of charity—to a slaughterhouse. It was the bloodiest century known to man. Thus, laid bare for all to behold were two fiercely opposed visions of the world. As St. Augustine wrote in The City of God: “Two loves built two cities—the earthly, which is built up by the love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly, which is built up by the love of God to the contempt of self.”
We find ourselves standing today at the beginning of a new millennium and witnessing in stunned disbelief what appears to be the crumbling edifice of this seemingly indestructible empire of light and reason. Secular liberalism’s mask of benign neutrality and toleration has been removed only to reveal the naked human will broken free from any notion of truth, revelation, or reason. We are likely looking at the opening of a new era of even stranger evils as yet unimagined, and it would do us well to reflect upon the underlying assumptions from which this sinister ideology has drawn its strength and power.
Leviathan is indeed so ubiquitous that even those who seek to oppose it, often do so while accepting the premises that bequeathed life to that hideous strength in the first place. If we fail to uncover and understand the fatal errors from which Leviathan arose, we will run the risk of retreating into liberalism in our attempts to combat what liberalism itself has wrought. Much will have to be said and unveiled as we continue to untangle the lies and deceptions of a wicked age, that we may further allow the cleansing light of truth to penetrate ever deeper into the darkness of the modern world.
Be that as it may, at this very moment I propose that we first take a step back and, like Samwise Gamgee standing with Frodo beneath the shadow of Cirith Ungol, ask ourselves precisely what sort of tale we’ve fallen into? For stranger still than the mad dreams of the architects of our contemporary cataclysm is that story echoed in the songs and carols sung every year within the countless households of true and simple men—amidst roaring fires, the warmth of friendship, and the innocent laughter of children that gently breaks the holy night’s sacred silence. I write, of course, of the poor babe laid in a manger, a king whose first palace was a stable, a helpless infant who happened to be God.
“A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.” So G.K. Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man. But the story’s strangeness is not due to mere novelty or fancy. It is strange, rather, as Chesterton points out, because it is actually true. Unlike the colorful myths of ancient pagans or the nightmarish fantasies of modern men of science, ours is the strangest of tales because it is the truest. That first Christmas pierces our souls and haunts our imaginations, being at once the most intimate and familiar display of the deepest meaning of our human existence and yet remaining the most astonishing. The Lord’s nativity is as alien and surprising as it is comforting. Like the memory of Christendom, it is as mystical and intangible as it is palpable and visible everywhere. It is the meeting of extremes: of heaven and earth, of God and man. Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.
This is the tale into which we’ve fallen. A helpless babe and yet God Himself, born of a most pure virgin in a stable at Bethlehem. The heir to the throne of David who would rule the nations with an iron rod, whose imperium would encompass all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, whose kingdom would have no end. The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. The supernatural entered and transformed the temporal. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder!
Relating how great rulers of the past, during the feast of the Epiphany—the liturgical feast of earthly princes par excellence—knelt and offered homage to Our Lord, Dom Guéranger writes the following in his The Liturgical Year:
Thus has the Kingship of our new-born Saviour been acknowledged by the great ones of this world. The Royal Psalmist had sung this prophecy: the Kings of the earth shall see him, and his enemies shall lick the ground under his feet [Ps. lxxi. 9, 11]. The race of Emperors like Julian and Valens was to be followed by Monarchs, who would bend their knee before this Babe of Bethlehem, and offer him the homage of orthodox faith and devoted hearts. Theodosius, Charlemagne, our own Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, Stephen of Hungary, the Emperor Henry II, Ferdinand of Castile, Louis IX of France, are examples of Kings who had a special devotion to the Feast of the Epiphany. Their ambition was to go, in company with the Magi, to the feet of the Divine Infant, and offer him their gifts.
And so we hear from the Psalmist the beautiful foretelling of that most blessed empire that once graced the lands of our fathers: “And he shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth… And all kings of the earth shall adore him: all nations shall serve him.” Thus, the Christian social order was made manifest for a time in our world, with all its tragic failings and glorious triumphs, both its defects and unsurpassed splendors. Fallen humanity touched by divine grace, all scornfully rejected in exchange for our current mess of pottage.
The situation we now face seems one of inevitable decline, of heavy sadness and hopelessness. It feels as tragic as defeat and as hopeless as death. One may resist the madness of our age, but it would be a mere gesture of defiance against the unstoppable tide of history. We have, alas, snuffed out the light of His Church and extinguished the flame of His empire. Only a miracle as great as resurrection from the grave could save us now, something as unlikely as God being born in a cave, or as impossible as a virgin bearing a child.
Just as the reconquest of our captive world from the prince of darkness began in a manger in Bethlehem amidst animals and lowly shepherds; and just as the reconquista of that defeated peninsula, destined to one day rule the globe, burst forth from a small cave in the mountains of that lonely and forsaken kingdom of the Asturias; so too will this new reconquest come out of another cave—the cave of obscurity and forgottenness. The cause to retrieve our civilization will emerge from that forlorn cavern where men have sought to hide away the vanquished things of this world. From that hidden place, where the enemies of God have shut away that last remnant of the past—from Christendom’s tomb—? will arise the hope and salvation of the world.
As we go out beneath the blackened skies of a revolutionary and hostile realm that counts fidelity as rebellion and obedience as an act of defiance, with gladdened hearts and unyielding allegiance, we, the happy subjects of that Holy Infant King, in union with our faithful forefathers, will go forth through all the fallen lands. We must recapture those lands once renowned for Christian fraternity, now laid to ruins and awaiting the return of their rightful Sovereign, and together with one voice and eyes raised to the heavens cry aloud, Gloria in excelsis Deo … Domine Deus Rex caelestis!
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