Thought for the Day No. 6: Walls and Ring-roads

This is the seed of a larger essay on the nature of modern cities.

In multitudinous days passed of political uncertainty, distributed political authority, and armies without air-power, cities built great walls to protect their citizens' lives and capital, and to increase the income of the local government. This act of ownership marked them off from the countryside, and so symbolised a distinct mode of life. Today our cities build ring-road highways for much the same purpose and with much the same symbolism. The fortifications of the past are grand, familiar, and local, and the men who walked them watched the land. The fortifications of the present are rarely more than brute, distant, and identical, and the people who drive along them watch only the road ahead.

Boothman Bar, one of four great gatehouses of the city of York

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children

Our unlikeness from our ancestors calcifies yearly, as the egg-shell hardens in the womb of the bird. The grandeur of Europe is dead, in its place is a cynical establishment that celebrates a culture of the kitsch, the unmanly, the unfeminine, an abstractive, self-reflexive, self-parodic serpent, which will devour the world before it devours itself. Those uninitiated in this new Dionysian cultural cannibalism live in the entrails of the beast, grasping for dollars with which to buy unearned and dishonorable pleasure and power. In the periodic sufferings of the economic cycle, these acolytes are allowed to despair, perhaps commit suicide, shat into the void, thereby revealing themselves to be weak, and therefore unworthy of the secret knowledge, which is that the world is a Joke without a mouth or a face, that in reality (what is reality?) it is Nothing.

Who among us can walk through the halls of Blenheim, follow the silken melodies of Vaughan Williams, feel the intellectual passion of Rodin, pray in the pews of Notre Dame, ascend the steps to the halls of Congress, study the prudence of Madison, or, closer to our own day, read the grave optimism of T.H. White, and grieve at all for what is gone? We have not the power to feel, for we are cut off from attachment by a horrible bank of garbage, moral, theological, aesthetic. We may ascend the heights of our own side, and view what remains of Western culture with a pleasant detachment, but we lack a sense of belonging.

I believe this is extremely dangerous. At this time we lack a traditional high culture. The whim may arise at any time in our cultural leadership to destroy what relics remain of the old. At those times, and until we regain a confident aesthetic based in a Christian faith, we will have no defense other than our grief to protect these things. Architecture and landscape are clearly the most obvious victims, for they require upkeep and they use valuable land, which is always in demand in this world. But the other high arts are just as much in danger, though for a more subtle, more basic cause. Critical knowledge is easily lost. Taste and judgment and appropriate enjoyment of the good, the true, and the beautiful are not developed by accident, but by purposeful education. The aim to develop such appreciation has largely disappeared from the modern university. If it disappears utterly, then Beethoven and de Tocqueville will be just as invisible as a bulldozed St. Paul's.

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. We must carry on grieving. Teach yourselves, find teachers, to cultivate your taste for Western culture. Steep yourself in it, make the painful sacrifice of emotion necessary to take your place as PART of it. Remember your home with longing and love, so that when they come to destroy it utterly, you may tuck a memory of it away with you. Preserve it in your personal library, share it with your children. Information in books is not enough. You must learn it by heart, and cherish it as your own. Some day the modern world may forget its hatred of the past, and the children of our descendants will be allowed to play in the ruins of the old world. The monastic orders may again become significant. Even then the learning must be preserved. When the renaissance finally comes (and who knows how long that will be?), this knowledge will be valuable, and the grain of wheat that fell to the ground and died will bear much fruit. This is your responsibility to your inheritance, thrown as it has been to the four winds. Gather what you can, add to it if you will from your own soul, and wait for a better day.


Piero di Cosimo - Perseus Frees Andromeda (1513)

A Snippet of Praise

From The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978), p. 164, by John Senior - the heir of Mark Van Doren, co-founder of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, and professor to David Whalen:

"Christopher Dawson, who tried to prove that medieval Christianity was responsible for the whole idea of progress, achieved an academic respectability denied to the cantankerous old Romantic, anti-Modern, and greater historian, Belloc."

Words for All Seasons No. 3

Accidie:
Sloth, torpor.
Etym: blogspot can't interpret the non-qwerty letters. I shall solve this problem eventually. Look it up if you like: it goes all the way back to the Greek.

"After the synne of Envye and of Ire, now wol I speken of the synne of Accidie. For Envye blyndeth the herte of a man, and Ire troubleth a man, and Accidie maketh hym hevy, thoghtful, and wraw. / Envye and Ire maken bitternesse in herte, which bitternesse is mooder of Accidie, and bynymeth [takes away from] hym the love of alle goodnesse. Thanne is Accidie the angwissh of troubled herte; and Seint Augustyn seith, "It is anoy of goodnesse and ioye of harm." / Certes, this is a dampnable synne; for it dooth wrong to Jhesu Crist, in as muche as it bynymeth the service that men oghte doon to Crist with alle diligence, as seith Salomon. / But Accidie dooth no swich diligence. He dooth alle thyng with anoy, and with wrawnesse, slaknesse, and excusacioun, and with ydelnesse, and unlust; for which the book seith, "Acursed be he that dooth the service of God necligently."...
Agayns this roten-herted synne of Accidie and Slouthe shold men exercise hemself [themselves] to doon goode werkes, and manly and vertuously cacchen corage well to doon, thynkynge that oure Lord Jhesu Crist quiteth [rewards] every good deede, be it never so lite. Usage of labour is a greet thyng, for it maketh, as seith Seint Bernard, the laborer to have stronge armes and harde synwes; and slouthe maketh hem feble and tendre. / Thanne comth drede to bigynne to werke anye goode werkes. For certes, he that is enclyned to synne, hym thynketh it is so greet an emprise for to undertake to doon werkes of goodnesse, / and casteth in his herte that the circumstaunces of goodnesse been so grevouse and so chargeaunt for to suffre, that he dar nat undertake to do werkes of goodnesse, as seith Seint Gregorie....
Agayns this horrible synne of Accidie, and the branches of the same, ther is a vertu that is called fortitudo or strengthe, that is an affeccioun thurgh which a man despiseth anoyouse thinges. / This vertu is so myghty and so vigerous that it dar withstonde myghtily and wisely kepen hymself fro perils that been wikked, and wrastle agayn the assautes of the devel. / For it enhaunceth and enforceth the soule, right as Accidie abateth it and maketh it fieble. For this fortitudo may endure by long suffraunce the travailles that been covenable [fitting/allowed]....
Eke ther been mo speciale remedies against Accidie in diverse werkes, and in consideracioun of the peynes of helle and of the joyes of hevene, and in the trust of the grace of the Holy Goost, that wole yeve hym myght to perfourne his goode entente."
Excerpts of lines 676-738 of the Parson's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (London: Oxford UP, [no publication date given]), pp. 296-99.

No apologies for mis-spellings.