3-16-15<\/p>\n
I have begun reading \u201cA Chronicle Of the Crusades,\u201d a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript \u2013 in translation, believe me \u2013 originally titled \u201cLes Passages d\u2019Outremer.\u201d 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\u2019s recent scolding of Christians to \u201cget off their high horses\u201d and realize that many awful acts were committed \u201cin the name of Christ,\u201d citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or \u2013 famously \u2013 last week either.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfact of history\u201d \u2013 despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today\u2019s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.<\/p>\n
Christianity had \u201choly sites,\u201d 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 \u201cHoly Land.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture \u2013 the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.<\/p>\n
People use the phrase \u201cthe barbarians are at the gates,\u201d 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 \u201cat the gates!\u201d but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes\u2019 purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of \u201cba-ba-ba\u201d morphed into \u201cbarbarian.\u201d Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.<\/p>\n
Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity\u2019s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real\u2026 but are not threats. <\/p>\n
Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. \u201cThe end of history\u201d has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world\u2019s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cGod is dead\u201d \u2013 when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture\u2019s life. \u201cHow shall we then live?\u201d 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\u2026 but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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 \u201ctolerance\u201d and \u201clifestyle choices\u201d) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture\u2019s well.<\/p>\n
Our society\u2019s rejection of God, denial of Christ\u2019s 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\u2026 barbarism. <\/p>\n
Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he \u201chopes \u2013 and that is the mark of him \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
\u201cDiscipline 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.\u201d <\/p>\n
We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment \u2013 to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization \u2013 the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.<\/p>\n