Conservative?

by Stratford Caldecott

G.K. Chesterton was once described as a "Conservative" thinker. He responded as follows:

"Because I want almost anything that doesn't yet exist; because I want to turn a silent people into a singing people; because I would rejoice if a wineless country could be a wine-growing country; because I would change a world of wage-slaves into a world of freeholders; because I would have healthy employment instead of hideous unemployment; because I wish folk, now ruled by other people's fads, to be ruled by their own laws and liberties; becuase I hate the established dirt and hate more the established cleanliness; because, in short, I want to alter nearly everything there is, a cursed, haughty, high-souled, well-informed, world-worrying, sky-scraping, hair-spliting, head-splitting, academic animal of a common quill-driving social reformer gets up and calls me a Conservative! Excuse me!"

The word "conservative" should, in fact, never be used without a public health warning – or at least without careful definition. Its opposite, "liberal", is no better.

The Saint, the Historian & the Cynic

by Stephen Masty

Today, the 6th of January, is the birthday of Saint Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the Maid of Orleans, virgin and martyr, patron saint of soldiers and one of the patron saints of France.

Her basic story is legend: how during little more than a year of hearing her holy “voices,” the scarcely-educated farm-girl led her nation and her faith to repeated victories on the battlefield and how only a year after that, at age 19, she was burnt alive. Her corrupt, politicised conviction, at the hands of foreign invaders, was overturned a quarter-century later by Pope Callixtus III, but she was beatified only in 1909 and canonised just within living memory in 1920.

Her recent canonisation may seem surprising for she seems to have been among us forever, and in some ways she has been popular and venerated for almost 600 years. But her celebrity accelerated in the mid-Nineteenth Century, thanks partly to a now-forgotten historian and a famous American author, Mark Twain.

Within Joan’s lifetime Christine de Pizan penned an elegiac poem to her. By 1590 and renamed Joan le Pucelle, Shakespeare wrote her into Henry VI, Part 1 as a falsely pious witch put to death, doubtless popular among Tudor England’s Francophobe, Protestant, ticket-buying audiences.

She was again abducted, this time by the Enlightenment in 1756 as The Maid of Oranges (instead of Orleans), in an anti-religious satire by Voltaire. Schiller leaped to her rescue in 1801, but the commercial and cultural demands of High Romanticism made him turn her into a pre-Wagnerian, giving her a magic helmet, playing down religion and killing her off in battle instead of at the stake. Only the Valkyrie’s tin brassiere seems to have been omitted.

The French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) may have been among the first to contaminate his craft with his own Romantic Age feelings and personality, rather as dubious film-makers now write themselves into their documentaries ahistorically. His epic, multi-volume, Histoire de France treats “Joan of Arc as the very soul of France and the living symbol of his own patriotic and democratic ideals” that culminate, curiously enough, in the secularist Revolution and Reign of Terror. Yet again, poor Joan was made into an ideological hobby-horse.

In real life, she broke her sword (possibly a Dark Ages relic of Charles Martel) by whacking prostitutes on their backsides to drive them from her army camps: we must wait for the next world to see what she has done to her literary hijackers.

Temporal justice returned with Jules Etienne Joseph Quicherat (1814-1882), a far more dispassionate historian who, inspired by Michelet, nevertheless translated and published the court proceedings against Joan and several related works that remain seminal.

Cleopatra’s last words, recorded faithfully by her contemporary Strabo, survive through Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor on screen, but even this marvel fails to compete. From an historian’s perspective Quicherat struck a gold-mine, for not only were the voluminous court minutes intact but so was later testimony from virtually anyone who ever met her, including her family and childhood friends, gathered for the papal retrial that overturned her heresy conviction a mere quarter-century after her martyrdom.

One historian brought Saint Joan back to life. Every snide allegation was dispelled as modern audiences could read the trick questions leveled so confusedly by her persecutors, revel in her thoughtful and convincing but clearly unschooled answers, and see the testimony of those who knew her - from the pastures to which she longed to return, to her year in armour bearing a sword that she never used to kill, to her final hours of suffering and faith.

The Romance of Conservatism

By Ted V. McAllister

This is the main body of a lecture I delivered at the ISI Spring Leadership Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 14, 2007. This conference focused on the work of Russell Kirk.

In one of the great works of imagination, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton declared that faith is romantic, that materialism is not only dull but produces a boredom that leads to madness. Humans are born romantics and they can never fulfill their better natures without cultivating an imagination that accepts and embraces mystery.

The romantic lives in tension between what is unchanging and what always changes, between Nature and History, between angels and beasts, between spirit and flesh. But even this is not quite accurate, for while we live in tension between, say, time and timelessness, we also live in possession of both.

We are time-bound and we are timeless. We are spirit and we are flesh. We have a nature and we are products of culture and history.

Chesterton defined romance as satisfying “the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar.” In due course we learn to attach a number of other words to romance: variety, adventure, imagination, and wonder.

What we do not find in Chesterton is a clear, analytical, dialectical clarification of this word, for there is something about the subject that begs for the allusive, the indirect, the language of the mystic or the poet. To define too analytically would produce a most unromantic book about romance. And so to understand Chesterton, to discover the meanings and purpose of romance, we must balance our love of logic and analytical distinctions with an imagination that allows the careful play of words to form constellations of associations.

Ultimately, Chesterton or any other imaginative thinker must show us what we recognize in our own experiences. We must “see” with them somehow. But seeing in this way requires imagination, and imagination is often atrophied in ages of reductive thinking and thin language.

Understanding a thinker like Russell Kirk requires the patience to allow his words to work on you, to cultivate an imagination that sees things in complex and messy wholes rather than in their easily digestible parts. Russell Kirk was a romantic. He was a wise man with the soul of a child, a man comfortable with the familiar while yearning for adventure and surprise. He was a wanderer with a purpose.

To understand better the romantic Kirk, I draw again on Chesterton (a practice that Kirk employed often—using the words of person “x” to explain the ideas of person “y”). Chesterton wrote that “we need this life of practical romance: the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.”

Now before I attempt to flesh out the meanings Chesterton intends here, I want to note an important characteristic about conservative thought, properly understood. Conservatives reject—more properly, they fear—simplifications. Simplifications are usually a result of isolating something, tearing that something from the whole of which it is a part. Simplification is a form of abstraction.

Conservatives prefer the thing in its complexity, with its integrity, even if the thing apprehended is of such a nature that it is expressed only in metaphoric terms or in a fashion that expresses the necessary tension that keeps the parts together. The faculty that best apprehends these things is the imagination and often the best form of expression is metaphor or even myth.

The romantic rejects the middle as he demands all extremes—he demands the extremes as they were meant to be, bound together. He isn’t interested in some artificial safe middle-ground, he doesn’t see things as left and right, as though ideas fit on some line, the center of which might be located.

Quote of the Day: Chesterton and the Revolt against Vows

"The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—'free-love'—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants." -G.K. Chesterton, 'The Defendant'

Quote of the Day: G.K. Chesterton

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.

Little Words and Mighty Swords

By Brad Birzer

My talk today is about death, love, mystery, and myth.

G.K. Chesterton wrote some of most stirring words of the past century in his “Ballad of the White Horse.”

The Men of the East may search the scrolls, For sure fates and fame,

But the men that drink the blood of God Go Singing to their shame

The wise men know what wicked things are written on the sky,

They trim sad Lamps, they touch sad strings,

Heaving the heavy purple wings,

Where the forgotten seraph kings Still plot how God shall die.[1]

Out of the mouth of the Mother of God like a little word come I;

For I go gather Christian men from sunken paving and ford and fen,

To die in battle, God knows when, By God, but I know why.

And this is the word of Mary, The word of the world’s desire:

“No more of comfort shall ye get,

Save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher.”

Then silence sank.[2]

Though it was ostensibly a poem about an event in the ninth century, King Alfred’s valiant defense of the Christian Anglo-Saxons against a massive invasion by barbarian infidels, “The Ballad of the White Horse” really served as a thinly veiled, gallant call to arms for those who would have to suffer through the miseries and pains of the twentieth century, the deadliest century in the history of the world.  Though Chesterton wrote the poem before the horrors began, he prophetically believed that a world that was embracing the materialism of Marx, Freud, and Spencer would only come to ruin.

Indeed, the twentieth century was one that witnessed the flourishing of the vast filth and blatant inhumanity of the killings fields, the holocaust camps, and the gulags.  Whether in the camps of the European or Asian ideologues, some humans, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, viewed all other human persons as nothing more than a collection of parts, ready to be dismembered and reassembled in Picasso-esque fashion, or perhaps simply quartered and then quartered again.  Armed with the ideological doctrines of fascism, National Socialism, and Communism, the twentieth-century became a century of the inverted vision of Ezekiel: wheels within wheels, endlessly spinning, the abyss ever expanding, ever within reach. The names of the ideologues may have varied, but they were all of the same stripe, and, in the end, they will most likely arrive in the same place, their names absent from the Book of Life.  And to them, I say “good riddance, may justice be done.”  Each denied the uniqueness and dignity of the human person, seeing him or her not as Imago Dei, in the image of God, but, instead, tragically, as only a means to an end; nothing but a cog in a vast machine, and the system—as all systems are wont to do—run amok.  Indeed, with modernity and its many servants, the Logos wept, and in marched the new gods: Demos, Leviathan, and Mars.  And, they quickly took possession of the field, claiming victory, and setting up their supposed utopias, based on race, class, or any other fanciful human notion.  Once we have overturned history and superstition, the new prophets of the new gods argued, we should start at the year zero.  Once this has been accomplished, man—or at least certain men—might attain godhood—and the apotheosis began.