Monday Morning Music Ministry

3-16-15

I have begun reading “A Chronicle Of the Crusades,” a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript – in translation, believe me – originally titled “Les Passages d’Outremer.” I am interested in history of all eras and all places, so this is not exactly required reading. However, I am also prompted by President Obama’s recent scolding of Christians to “get off their high horses” and realize that many awful acts were committed “in the name of Christ,” citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or – famously – last week either.

It is not mere (and common) self-loathing of Christians and whites to assume that the Crusades were birthed and maintained in Christian brutality, blood lust, and racism. Aggressive educators and supine defenders of our faith have transformed this contention into a “fact of history” – despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today’s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.

Christianity had “holy sites,” associated with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Islam, a religion founded centuries subsequent to Christianity, determined to seize lands and sites, sometimes desecrating them. Christians sought to restore ownership, if not management, of holy places in the “Holy Land.” Its center of gravity having shifted northward and westward, Christian expeditions were launched to that end. In succeeding campaigns, there were battles, sieges, pillaging, many deaths, and uncountable examples of bravery and brutality on both sides, on all sides.

It is rather useless, and perhaps intentionlly subversive toward a different agenda, to re-ignite those flames of passion. Yet it is being done, and not only by our president. Wars frequently are bad enough in their first incarnations, without declaring and waging them anew. Perhaps the huge book on my lap will teach me some new things, even though, yes, I realize that it was written by Europeans.

I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture – the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.

People use the phrase “the barbarians are at the gates,” applying it to everything from video games to the corporate history of Nabisco to the threats posed by ISIS. Oddly, there is no consensus on the origin of the tocsin “at the gates!” but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes’ purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of “ba-ba-ba” morphed into “barbarian.” Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.

Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity’s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real… but are not threats.

Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. “The end of history” has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world’s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” – when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture’s life. “How shall we then live?” was the question asked by Francis Schaeffer in a monumental study almost 40 years ago. It is a question posed by philosophers since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle… but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.

The difference today is the exquisite and apocalyptic precipice upon which we teeter. A death-struggle in the twilight of a once-great civilization. Barbarians are past the gates; they have been welcomed, they live amongst us; they are A-list celebrities.

I am not singling out Hollywood, but our Barbarian culture. We have willingly celebrated barbarism. Sometimes this suicidal syndrome is called anti-intellectualism, but is far deeper, of far more serious consequences. It threatens destruction from which survival is impossible. The contemporary morals and mores of Western Christianity (often masquerading as the new sacraments of “tolerance” and “lifestyle choices”) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture’s well.

Our society’s rejection of God, denial of Christ’s divinity and teachings, and demonization of our Western heritage, is not a minor and enlightened bend in the road of progress. It is a complete U-turn, back to… barbarism.

Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he “hopes – and that is the mark of him – that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

“Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this: that he cannot [build anything]; he can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly this has been true.

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment – to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization – the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that civilizations seldom die from invasions (gates and barbarians notwithstanding) but by suicide. In that sense the ghastly Clash of Civilizations is not so much prompted by Communist states or Islamic terrorists or extremists who work to do us harm. It is the clash of traditional Christianity versus the barbarism of modern Christianity and post-modernism. Western Civilization has lost that clash of values.

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The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.

Click: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence