So Ancient and So New

“The water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying, is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses.” – The King of the Golden River

There are things we understand organically, things that are inside of us, and other things we can only comprehend from the outside, by observation. Let me use the example of homosexuality. When I was a young man, thankfully homosexual men were still in the closet. In fact, I don’t think in my teen years I could have given an accurate definition of a homosexual. By the time I entered my college years, however, homosexuals were being encouraged to come out of their closets, and I was then forced to acknowledge that, strange as it might seem to me, there were men who desired to be with men in the way I desired to be with women. But as a heterosexual I was not a minority of one, so I don’t recall being particularly upset that some men were not heterosexual.

It was a different case with my religious orientation. I lost and regained my childhood faith while in the belly of the beast called academia. My “teachers” undermined Christianity, but in the Library there were antique books that existed side by side with those of the despoilers. Men like Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, and Le Fanu told a different story than the philosophical speculators. My nihilism then gave way to the very elemental faith -- let’s call it the ‘Little Town of Bethlehem’ faith -- of my European ancestors. (1)

Man is a very social animal. Having come to believe in that faith which is “so ancient and so new,” I sought fellowship, not only in church but in society. And in both church and society I had to confront the fact that what I believed about God and the European culture, which showed me the face of Christ, was not the organic belief of any of my fellow Europeans.

The new Europeans had broken with the past that was the source of my new found faith. The Europeans of the older times looked on the Christian faith as an epic poem with Christ as the Hero. Through His incarnation, crucifixion, death, and resurrection, He revealed to men the humanity of God and the divine element of humanity. Man was the centerpiece of God’s creation, a personality of infinite value. But in the new Christianity, which cut across all denominational lines, Christ was the great Illuminator; He came not to set hearts on fire, but to enlighten men’s minds. The new Christianity was a mathematical system, and the elect were the men who could figure that system out.

I’ve never been able to understand, from inside, why mathematical, cosmic Christianity is more appealing to modern Europeans than the poetic, fairy tale Christianity of the Europeans of the past. But I have to acknowledge that it is because that is the faith they preach and practice.

Let’s place the faith of our European ancestors up against the faith of the modern Europeans. Our ancestors believed that heaven visited earth in the form of Jesus Christ, and through a divine act of charity He bound our hearts to His heart. All that we know of God and our fellow man comes from our hearts which He set on fire. This is why the folktales of the European people always stress the miraculous powers of a human heart that is connected to the divine heart: “Charity never faileth.”

In contrast to the way of charity, the way of the Third Dumb Brother of the European fairy tale, is a religion that exalts the superior intellect. God does not impart to human hearts, He enlightens human minds, or at least some human minds. “You too can become one of the illuminated” is the call to which modern Christians respond. And in such a religion there is no need to stay connected to a particular people’s past. In fact there is no such thing as a people, either as a group or as individuals; there is only illuminated minds connected to other illuminated minds. The white man is not committing suicide because he has lost his mind; he is committing suicide because he has lost his heart. It is in the coffin he built for the fairy tale faith of his European ancestors.

I found the folklorists of Europe left a trail of bread crumbs that led back to the cottage of the Son of God. Their apologetics of the hearth and the heart was the same as the one He used when He walked the earth. His apologetics consisted of a story about a hero (our Lord was the hero of His story) woven around dogmas illustrated by stories.

Why does the use of stories and parables mark a work as inferior apologetics and lacking in serious moral purpose? In illuminated circles such a work is labeled “natural” and thus inferior to the supernatural works of the Doctors of Theology, but by such a standard the Gospels would be considered inferior apologetics, and Christ a second-rate theologian.

The false assumption of the illuminated apologist is that reason alone stands unpolluted by original sin. This is false. Our reason is not meant to be separated from the rest of our being; it is only when we seek Christ with our heart, soul, and mind, that we can attain a vision (through a glass darkly) of the true God.

Genuine apologetics must be like the old apologetics of our Lord, showing us a vision of the true God through the use of parable, story, and the image of the Hero. When the central dogma of Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen is still strongly present in the consciousness of the reader, the story of the Christ-like hero (such as Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel) is sufficient without the dogma. But when the central dogma of Western civilization has receded from the consciousness of men, the dogma must be more explicit. C. S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, gives us the new-old apologetics for the 21st century. He makes explicit what writers such as Kenneth Grahame, Walter Scott, and Joseph Le Fanu were saying implicitly.

There will be many who will quarrel over the artistic merits of a work of literature that makes such an explicit case for the Christian Faith. But such individuals do not understand that all art is religious. There is no such thing as a work of art without a religious vision. The vision is the work of art. What makes a work of art didactic in the pejorative sense is the nature of the religious vision conveyed. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, The Secret Garden, is not offensive because she writes about God; her novel is offensive because her god is a pantheistic, Buddha-type of God.

Many Catholics are particularly hostile to fairy tale apologetics. The reason Tolkien thought Narnia childish and vulgar was because he was raised in the “old” Catholic school (which was of course really a very modern school), which taught that art and religion were in separate categories, the one in the natural order, and the other in the supernatural order. But that is a false division. God does not just exist on the Mt. Sinai of the theologians, nor should apologetics be left to the professionals.

C. S. Lewis’s regress was a regress to fairy tale Christianity. After discovering the limitations of the more traditional apologetics, which he did quite well, he wrote the great work of Christian apologetics in Narnia. He broke through the Thomistic separation of the natural and the supernatural and told us a really true fairy tale of how we can learn to love God in this world and live happily ever after with Him in the next. He kept it simple for the peasants like myself, without compromising the dogma.

There is nothing written in stone that says apologetics must be dull, mathematical, unmetaphorical, unimaginative, and unintelligible. The use of parables and stories in one’s apologetics should not disqualify a work from the ranks of “serious” apologetics. In fact, it is my contention that a really effective apologia for the Faith should incorporate the heroic fairy tale traditions of Europe and the Gospels. And because our current anti-civilization does not consciously recognize the central dogma of our old civilization, the new apologetics will make it clear for whom the cross on the knight’s breastplate stands. It stands for the Christ, who was and is the source of the blood faith of the non-illuminated European people. +
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(1) There are two types of faith that I can honestly say entered my blood. The first was the fairy tale Christianity of my childhood and my adulthood, and the second was nihilism, which is more an absence of faith, of my late teens and early twenties. All other modes of thought and feeling I understand as an outside observer.

Rationalist Christianity does not move me in the slightest. Nor do the various nature religions. And neo-paganism? If man is merely a biological specimen as the neo-pagans maintain, then why should I care whether white or black vegetable matter predominates over the other? A person’s skin color matters only if his racial identity is part of his soul, which is a thing divine and which belongs to God. “Nearer My Genes to Me” is not a very inspiring hymn.

The Sacred Heritage

"It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart."

When a man is healthy, he doesn't spend a lot of time pondering his health, but when he is sick he does think about his health. How sick am I? How did I get sick? What will it take for me to recover?

European civilization is sick, and I have spent the greater part of my adult life contemplating its sickness. I have felt for a number of years now that I know the cause of its sickness. In various articles such as "Only My Blood Speaks," The Poetic Core of Western Civilization, and The Lost Thread, I have attempted to expose the serpent that has entwined itself around Europe. That serpent is philosophical speculation. What the philosophical speculators bring to Christianity is a "hedge your bets" type of strategy: "Christ is risen… maybe, but in case He isn't, let's make sure we have a philosophical system to fall back on."

Christianity, however, is not a faith that permits that kind of dualism. When philosophy and Christianity are joined, there is a diminished sense of man's sin and man's need for a loving savior. Sin becomes something that can be cured by the proper use of man's reason. And when sin can be cured by rationality, there is a loss of the tragic sense of life. If the world is ordered so marvelously with pat answers for every contingency of existence, what need is there for the Suffering Servant?

Christianity is a religion of depth. If the riddle of existence can be solved by an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, then we need only consult with the men who possess that knowledge; we do not have to plumb the depths in search of a Savior who speaks to us from the depths.

It is to the Europeans that we must turn for a vision of the true God. Their gods were hero-gods. They couldn't conceive of a god in any other form, and when they were told the story of the ultimate Hero-God, they embraced Him. But unfortunately, the transmission of Christianity via the Romans was a mixed blessing. The Europeans heard the story of the great Hero-God, but with that story came the serpent of philosophical speculation. The Greco-Romans had rejected the vision of their bards, such as Sophocles and Virgil, who saw that only a Hero above the nature gods could save man. Instead the Greco-Romans placed their faith in those men who professed to have found the secret of the universe in the mind, and not the heart, of man. They came as missionaries and teachers, but what their convertites and pupils brought to the faith, a realization that Christ was the Hero-God, was of infinite value. If the intellectual elite of the Roman Church had had the humility to learn from their pupils, the division of Christendom could have been prevented. For what was the Protestant Reformation in essence but an attempt by the Northern Europeans (minus Ireland) to reclaim that vision of the Hero-God free from the serpentine entanglements of the philosophers?

But of course a movement that is only a desperate gasp for life can be easily subverted. The same serpent of philosophical speculation that had entwined itself around the Roman Church entwined itself around the Protestant church as well.

The tragic Christ, the heroic Christ of St. Paul, of Isaiah, was the Christ who the 'primitive' Europeans saw when they embraced Christianity. And we need their dauntless spirits if we are to reclaim the true Europe. Noble hearts must respond directly to His heart. "Now his good sword he has drawn; And he has thrown the sheath away," was the war cry of the old Europeans as they joined their Lord in His battle against Satan. It must once again be our war cry.

The current breed of post-Christians are the bastard children of the illicit union of Christianity and speculative philosophy. They have the outward features of human beings, but they have lost touch with the spiritual wellspring of life. Inside they are dead. So they look for renewal from the barbarian races. "They will provide the blood and spirit we lack." But that will never be. The blood cannot function without the spirit or the spirit without the blood. The barbarians lack the spirit while the post-Christians lack the blood. There is nothing vital in barbarism or post-Christianity. True vitality comes not from the bloodless faith of the philosophical speculators or from the blood-without-spirit faith of the barbarians. True faith comes only from the spirit-infused blood that once belonged to the European.

When the vision is blurred because we attempt to see existence with the eye of the philosopher rather than through the eye of the bard, we kill the blood and eviscerate the spirit. But the eviscerated faith of the modern philosopher is presented to us as a higher faith. All my life I have heard the same propaganda: "There is primitive man who fears lightning and is superstitious. Then there is the man who believes in a human God with a slightly higher ethical code than primitive man. And then there is intellectual man who knows all Gods are just manifestations of the human mind, which is the true God."

The ruling elite in church and society actually believe that they have achieved the highest stage of existence. They worship the great universal mind that is beyond the gods of the pagans and the God of the Christian. Because the fact of modern man's exalted state, by virtue of his elevated "intellectual" notions of God, is such a given to the post-Christian of the 20th and 21st centuries, we need to go back to the 19th century to see a different vision of God.

The great poets and novelists do not just give us their personal visions; they also give us a glimpse of the spiritual under-girding of the society in which they live. And what we see in the late 1700's through the 1800's and into the early 1900's is a titanic struggle for the soul of Europe. The satanic serpent of philosophical speculation finally decided that he no longer needed to slither on his belly and take people by surprise. He could now stand upright and enjoy the fruits of years of slithering, philosophical speculation: Darwinism, capitalism, communism, science and psychology were all creations of the speculating serpent. But there was also a heroic response. European man was not dead yet. An enormous amount of writers saw through the myth of the "higher stage of existence" and threw in their lot with the God-Man. Surely their journeys also reflected the spiritual journeys of many of their countrymen.

With most of the writers, excepting Walter Scott, the post-Christian consciousness was not something they merely observed in others; it was part of their soul. But they, the great ones, fought against it and tried to reclaim the integral vision of the God-Man. Such a vision belongs in the speculators' second stage of existence, but is in reality the only real stage of existence for a truly Christian and truly European man.

The list of knights errant who made the great refusal is very long (see "The Nineteenth Century Way to God"), but I will limit my discussion here to five men: Walter Scott, Thomas Hughes, J. S. Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ian McClaren.

Walter Scott
With a great many writers it is necessary to forgive much in their personal lives. And that is fair. We are all sinners, and if an author has shown us a glimpse of the eternal through his writings we should mercifully place a veil over his private failings. I know I don't want to hear anything about the personal life of an author I admire unless it is something laudatory. But of course there is always somebody who will take delight in bringing your hero down to earth. "Dickens wrote all those books about happy Victorian families, while he was …." You know that type of debunker. I despise that type of attack even when used against an author I don't like. The E. Michael Jones School of Literary Criticism disgusts me. But such critics we will always have with us. Which is why I take particular delight in their inability to lay a glove on one of my heroes, Sir Walter Scott. H. V. Morton says this about him in his book, In Scotland Again: "It is a commonplace that we who come after must forgive many a man for his sins because he was a great artist. Scott needs no forgiveness. He was a perfect man." Any discussion of a European comeback must begin with Sir Walter Scott.

Scott saw the beginning of the post-Christian stage of European man. But it was never part of his soul. He did not have to fight, like Dostoyevsky, with the demons that were within and without. He was the last thoroughly European writer. Christianity for Scott was not a philosophy from which one could take a few maxims to live by. Christianity was that inextinguishable flame that distinguished the European hearth fire from every other hearth fire. Scott's contempt for the fanatics of every denomination was rooted in a respect, nay a reverence, for the Man of Sorrows. And because of this reverence, Scott loved the continent that nurtured and protected the story of the heroic God-Man. He saw in the new world of industrialism and commerce the victory of the serpent. In all of his literary romances he sets the spirit of European chivalry against the speculative serpent. And it is a chivalry that has been shorn of its medieval formalism. It is not the outward, warlike chivalry of the Knights Templar but is instead a deeper chivalry of the heart. A spindly-legged clergyman such as Reuben Butler can practice it just as intensely as a knight like Quentin Durward.

Scott was a conservative of the blood and spirit. He sensed that the ancient ways were best because they were closer to Him. And he did not equate old Europe with one Christian denomination or one political party or one social structure. In Scott's view, what distinguished the old European man from the new breed of European intellectuals was the old Europeans' disdain for abstract reason divorced from the common experience of the European man of flesh and blood. The European everyman did not need to theorize; he knew in his blood, infused with the blood and spirit of the God-Man, what was the best way to live.

An established system is not to be tried by those tests which may with perfect correctness be applied to a new theory. A civilized nation, long in possession of a code of law, under which, with all its inconveniences, they have found means to flourish, is not to be regarded as an infant colony, on which experiments in legislation may, without much danger of presumption, be hazarded. A philosopher is not entitled to investigate such a system by those ideas which he has fixed in his own mind as the standard of possible excellence. The only unerring test of every old establishment is the effect it has actually produced, for that must be held to be good, from whence good is derived. The people have, by degrees, moulded their habits to the law they are compelled to obey; for some of its imperfections remedies have been found, to others they have reconciled themselves; till, at last, they have, from various causes, attained the object which the most sanguine visionary could promise to himself from his own perfect unembodied system.

from Scott's "Essay on Judicial Reform" quoted in John Gibson Lockhart's Memoirs
of the Life of Scott

Scott completely rejected the "higher stage of development" theories of the new breed of European intellectuals. In his world there was no such thing as a perfect system that could transcend Christianity. His God was always Christ, the Hero-God of the Europeans.

In the introduction to his masterpiece, Uncle Silas, J. S. LeFanu says that he tried to write in the spirit of Sir Walter Scott. He succeeds. The character for whom LeFanu's novel is named is the embodiment of the post-Christian man. He knows, intellectually, what Christianity is, so he can talk and behave like a Christian. But in reality he is a believer in the "higher" religion. The Hero-God that speaks to human hearts does not inspire him because he has no heart that can be set aflame.

Of my wretched uncle's religion what am I to say? Was it utter hypocrisy, or had it at any time a vein of sincerity in it? I cannot say. I don't believe that he had any heart left for religion, which is the highest form of affection, to take hold of. Perhaps he was a sceptic with misgivings about the future, but past the time for finding anything reliable in it. The devil approached the citadel of his heart by stealth, with many zigzags and parallels. The idea of marrying me to his son by fair means, then by foul, and, when that wicked chance was gone, then the design of seizing all by murder, supervened. I dare say that Uncle Silas thought for a while that he was a righteous man. He wished to have heaven and to escape hell, if there were such places. But there were other things whose existence was not speculative, of which some he coveted, and some he dreaded more, and temptation came. 'Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.' There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down. 'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.'

The heroine, Maud Ruthyn, seems helpless against the ruthless Uncle Silas. But she is saved, not by her intellect, but by her innocence and the grace of God. In a marvelous denouement, LeFanu depicts the working of grace in a character who we would not have suspected of being receptive to God's grace. But Maud's innocence inspires him. He becomes a hero in spite of himself.

So it was vain: I was trapped, and all was over.

I stood before him on the step, the white moon shining on my face. I was trembling so that I wonder I could stand, my helpless hands raised towards him, and I looked up in his face. A long shuddering moan—'Oh—oh—oh!' was all I uttered.

The man, still holding my arm, looked, I thought frightened, into my white dumb face.

Suddenly he said, in a wild, fierce whisper—

'Never say another word' (I had not uttered one). 'They shan't hurt ye, Miss; git ye in; I don't care a damn!'

It was an uncouth speech. To me it was the voice of an angel. With a burst of gratitude that sounded in my own ears like a laugh, I thanked God for those blessed words.

LeFanu saw that the new Europe of science and rationalism was not going to produce a new golden age; it was going to produce inhuman men like Uncle Silas. Only the God-Man, pure and unadulterated by rationalism and science, could prevail against the Uncle Silases of the new Europe.

It is not easy to recall in calm and happy hours the sensations of an acute sorrow that is past. Nothing, by the merciful ordinance of God, is more difficult to remember than pain. One or two great agonies of that time I do remember, and they remain to testify of the rest, and convince me, though I can see it no more, how terrible all that period was.

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity; smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the beloved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more; henceforward to lie outside, far away, and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light of warmth, without a voice near. Oh, Death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded. We have just the word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, and our trembling faith. And through the broken vault the gleam of the Star of Bethlehem.

Let me just add before leaving LeFanu that I think his Maud Ruthyn and Scott's Jeanie Deans are the two greatest heroines in English literature.

Thomas Hughes
Thomas Hughes' magnificent work, Tom Brown's School Days, and the sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, deserve to be placed in the topmost rank of English literature, but they are not placed there because they are so unabashedly Christian. There are three aspects to Hughes' Christianity. The first is charity. In this he is like so many of his 19th century contemporaries. They saw St. Paul's meditation on charity (1 Corinthians 13) as the very essence of Christianity. We know Tom Brown will never go too far astray when we see how he takes care of "little Arthur."

On went the talk and laughter. Arthur finished his washing and undressing, and put on his night-gown. He then looked round more nervously than ever. Two or three of the little boys were already in bed, sitting up with their chins on their knees. The light burned clear, the noise went on. It was a trying moment for the poor little lonely boy; however, this time he didn't ask Tom what he might or might not do, but dropped on his knees by his bedside, as he had done every day from his childhood, to open his heart to him who heareth the cry and beareth the sorrows of the tender child, and the strong man in agony.

Tom was sitting at the bottom of this bed unlacing his boots, so that his back was toward Arthur, and he didn't see what happened, and looked up in wonder at the sudden silence. Then two or three boys laughed and sneered, and a big brutal fellow, who was standing in the middle of the room, picked up a slipper, and shied it at the kneeling boy, calling him a sniveling young shaver. Then Tom saw the whole, and the next moment the boot he had just pulled off flew straight at the head of the bully, who had just time to throw up his arm and catch it on his elbow.

"Confound you, Brown, what's that for?" roared he, stamping with pain.

"Never mind what I mean," said Tom, stepping on to the floor, every drop of blood in his body tingling; "if any fellow wants the other boot, he knows how to get it."

The second part of Hughes' vision is implicit in most of the 19th century authors, but Brown makes it explicit, which is unique. Hughes places before us the vital connection between a belief in heroes and faith in the Hero-God. In doing this, he shows us the reason our European ancestors were able to see that Christ the Hero, whose reflection they saw in the faces of their warrior-hero gods, was the true Hero God.

And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb
and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages
have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win
their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord
of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through
the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through
the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that
we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness,
and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these
dwell forever and ever in perfect fullness.

And thirdly, Hughes sees, in contrast to virtually every other European of that era or subsequent eras, the limitations of Greek philosophy:

The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the "Apology" had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson."

"I don't understand," said Tom.

"Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?"

"Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing."

"Why not the same thing?"

"Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning."

"Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"How do you mean?" said Tom.

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us--we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it—know no more of it then he knew about his demon, of course, we are in no better position than he--in fact, heathens."

Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson is rightly revered for his A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. But the Stevenson canon contains much more. He was one of the greats, who was brought up to revere the third, 'higher' stage of existence, but who rejected it for the second, Christian-fairy tale stage of existence.

In Ebb Tide, we meet a man who has reconverted. He was a man of the mind, but he returns to Christian orthodoxy. It is significant that in the two movie versions of Ebb Tide, the Christian reconvertite is depicted as a madman. Why, of course. How could a man exposed to the wonders of the 'higher' religion of the mind return to a Crude Fairy Tale? But Attwater does reject the new faith. And his unflinching orthodoxy brings another sinner into the fold: "That's just the one thing wanted; just say, 'Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief! And He'll fold you in His arms. You see, I know! I've been a sinner myself!"

It doesn't matter whether a great poet comes from a Catholic or a Protestant background; he always sees that the Christian faith cannot be made into a philosophy. It must always be a faith, with God and the devil warring for the soul of man. Stevenson, in Thrawn Janet, gives us a wonderful glimpse of the on-going war between God and the devil. And he makes it clear that a man who has one foot in the third stage of the 'higher' religion and one foot in the Christian stage cannot cope with the devil.

The Reverend Murdoch Soulis seemed like a good young man when he first came into Balweary, but he was "fu' o' book learnin' and grand at the exposition, but as was natural in sae young a man, wi' nae leevin' experience in religion… There was no doubt onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college."

Murdoch is not in the final stage when he comes to Balweary. He has only been flirting with it. When he encounters evil incarnate, he is driven back to orthodoxy.

"Witch, heldame, devil!" he cried, "I charge you by the power of God, begone — if you be dead, to the grave — if you be damned, to hell."

And for the rest of his life, the Rev. Murdoch Soulis never again flirted with the third stage of religion.

Ian Maclaren
In the 1890's two novels appeared that stand as a final testament to the faith of the European peoples. In Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and its sequel, The Days of Auld Lang Syne, John Watson (pen name, Ian Maclaren) sets before us an image of Christ that is beyond creed, it is pure unadulterated vision. Our hearts burn within us when reading the Drumtochty novels, and we feel with absolute certainty that "this is Christianity and these people are the true Europeans."

Watson places us in the town of Drumtochty where there are two Presbyterian kirks, the Free Kirk and the established Kirk. But it is not Calvinism that dominates the hearts and minds of the people of Drumtochty. It is Christ. Before there was an Aquinas, before there was a Calvin, there was the Savior.

The town of Drumtochty is a bit of a throwback; there is no one in the town who has completely gone over to the third stage of religion. But there are some who are in danger. And they are brought back to the fold by other Drumtochtians who can see His blood on the bonnie brier bush. One such individual is the local Dominie who has made a whited sepulcher of the Greek classics. As his prize pupil lies dying, he realizes that it was the pupil who was the true teacher:

"Maister Jamieson, ye hae been a gude freend tae me, the best I ever hed aifter my mither and faither. Wull ye tak this buik for a keepsake o' yir grateful scholar? It's a Latin 'Imitation' Dominie, and it's bonnie printin'. Ye mind hoo ye gave me yir ain Virgil, and said he was a kind o' Pagan sanct. Noo here is my sanct, and div ye ken I've often thocht Virgil saw His day afar off, and was glad. Wull ye read it, Dominie, for my sake, and maybe ye 'ill come to see--" and George could not find words for more.

But Domsie understood. "Ma laddie, ma laddie, that I luve better than onythin' on earth, I'll read it till I die, and, George, I'll tell ye what livin' man does na ken. When I was your verra age I had a cruel trial, and ma heart was turned frae faith. The classics hae been my bible, though I said naethin' to ony man against Christ. He aye seemed beyond man, and noo the veesion o' Him has come to me in this gairden. Laddie, ye hae dune far mair for me than I ever did for you. Wull ye mak a prayer for yir auld dominie afore we pairt?"

There was a thrush singing in the birches and a sound of bees in the air, when George prayed in a low, soft voice, with a little break in it.

"Lord Jesus, remember my dear maister, for he's been a kind freend to me and mony a puir laddie in Drumtochty. Bind up his sair heart and give him licht at eventide, and may the maister and his scholars meet some mornin' where the schule never skails, in the kingdom o' oor Father."

Twice Domsie said Amen, and it seemed as the voice of another man, and then he kissed George upon the forehead; but what they said Marget did not wish to hear.

When he passed out at the garden gate, the westering sun was shining golden, and the face of Domsie was like unto that of a little child.

Yes, "like unto that of a little child." When the Europeans bent their knees to Christ they did so with the faith that was like unto that of a little child. It took centuries for them to become too adult and too intelligent to believe in a fairy story about a heroic God who was God and man.

Drumtochty gets into a man's soul. Once he's been exposed to the town, he can never really leave it. There is something about that town that is antithetical to those who stand poised between Christianity and the 'higher' stage. One young minister is in danger, when his dead Mother's words come back to him.

He had finished its last page with honest pride that afternoon, and had declaimed it, facing the southern window, with a success that amazed himself. His hope was that he might be kept humble, and not called to Edinburgh for at least two years; and now he lifted the sheets with fear. The brilliant opening, with its historical parallel, this review of modern thought reinforced by telling quotations, that trenchant criticism of old-fashioned views, would not deliver. For the audience had vanished, and left one careworn, but ever beautiful face, whose gentle eyes were waiting with a yearning look. Twice he crushed the sermon in his hands, and turned to the fire his aunt's care had kindled, and twice he repented and smoothed it out. What else could he say now to the people? and then in the stillness of the room he heard a voice, "Speak a
gude word for Jesus Christ."

Next minute he was kneeling on the hearth, and pressing the magnum opus, that was to shake Drumtochty, into the heart of the red fire, and he saw, half-smiling and half-weeping, the impressive words, "Semitic environment," shrivel up and disappear.

As the last black flake fluttered out of sight, the face looked at him again, but this time the sweet brown eyes were full of peace.

It was no masterpiece, but only the crude production of a lad who knew little of letters and nothing of the world. Very likely it would have done neither harm nor good, but it was his best, and he gave it for love's sake, and I suppose that there is nothing in a human life so precious to God, neither clever words nor famous deeds, as the sacrifices of love.

The moon flooded his bedroom with silver light, and he felt the presence of his mother. His bed stood ghostly with its white curtains, and he remembered how every night his mother knelt by its side in prayer for him. He is a boy once more, and repeats theLord's Prayer, then he cries again, "My mother! my mother!" and an indescribable contentment fills his heart.

These short glimpses of the 19th century counterattack do not do justice to the depth and breadth of the resistance. But they do reveal to us the essential touchstone of reality: Men and women of depth, when faced with the tragedy of existence (often brought home to them by satanic 'isms' such as capitalism and communism), return to a Christ-centered Christianity. The philosophical Christ, the theological Christ, is not sufficient. They instinctively know that they need a hero, not a sage. They need the God-Man. They knew it; we don't. That's why there is a chasm between our culture and the 19th century European culture. However, the chasm is not impassable. We simply need to recapture the same spirit as the early Europeans:

The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?

Sir Walter Scott: Down These Mean Streets

I once heard a Catholic professor of literature explain that one needed to read classic works of literature because they built up the natural man to the point where he was ready to receive the supernatural truths of religion. And I once heard a Protestant educator explain that “we don’t read literature to learn about the truth. We read literature to hear the truth expressed well.” Both the Catholic and the Protestant were blasphemers. They were not blasphemers because they denigrated literature; they were blasphemers because they denounced the truth and the way.

Divine truth does not come to us from outside in predigested church documents. It comes to us from within. The poet – at least the true poet, as distinct from the mere wordsmith – intuits divine truth from listening to the promptings of his heart and by sympathizing with the yearnings in the hearts of his fellow men. There is more wisdom in the fourth verse of Phillip Brooks’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem” than in all the books of philosophy and theology ever written:

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven;

No ear may hear his coming;
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still,
The dear Christ enters in.

When a religious expert denies that the heart’s promptings and not the experts’ documents lead us to God, he blasphemes. He blasphemes because he is denying the divinity in man and the humanity in God. The dear Christ cannot enter in to the sterile cold world of the supernatural element devoid of humanity nor through the prophetic element devoid of humanity.

The ancient arduous process of listening and responding to the heart’s promptings has now ceased with the modern European man. But there was a time when men went through the process. And from such “convertites there is much matter to be heard and learn’d.”

There is a reason why there are no great novels written anymore. And the reason is not because the modern world lacks men and women who can write well. No, there are numerous authors who write well. But it takes more than an ability to write well to put together a great novel. An author must believe, as Dostoyevsky believed, that “Man is a mystery; if I spend my life trying to solve that mystery, I will not have lived in vain” if he is going to write great novels. In other worlds, a man must believe that there is something in man worth exploring.

A dogmatic Catholic would not be interested in exploring the soul of man because the dogmatic Catholic would claim he already knew the truth about man. Truth comes from outside of a man, from nature; therefore, there is no need to explore man’s soul; one only has to cultivate it. And the same is true for the dogmatic Protestant who believes “we know the truth, so we only look for books that express the truth well.” The liberal is also part of the anti-humanity triumvirate: “There is no soul; there is only a psyche, so we read fiction in order to interpret the characters’ motives in the light of modern psychology.” The ultimate compliment a liberal can give a novel is to say that it is “full of psychological insights.”

When the external props of Christian civilization were crumbling in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the great authors of that time period went deeper and produced a body of literature, true literature, which has never been equaled and certainly never shall be equaled by the post-Christians of our era. The litany of the greats is too long to list; it begins with Scott and goes on through Le Fanu and Thomas Hughes. All the greats of the 19th century (and I use the term ‘19th century’ loosely because Scott slightly predates it and men such as J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. E. W. Mason slightly postdate it) bear witness to the reality of the God-man because they took the mystery that was within seriously. But most of the great authors of the 19th century, such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens, who give us a vision of the God-man, do not give us an anchor to help us hold that vision down to earth. It is always in danger of flying away from us and becoming a phantom or an airy nothing. That is because most of the authors of that magnificent century were fighting modernity from within and without. They were fighting the outside forces: Darwinism, capitalism, feminism, and Marxism, and they were fighting the spirit of modernity that was within them. But the great ones, though tainted with modernity, saw the risen Lord standing above the citadels of modernity. One man, however, was not tainted by modernity, and he can supply us with a vision and an anchor for that vision. That man is Walter Scott.

Scott is generally credited with reviving chivalry, and certainly the chivalric code is seldom missing from a Scott novel, but Scott does not view knight-errantry in the same light as do such authors as Ariosto. He gives the warriors of the Middle Ages their due, but his heroes always adhere to a code that is deeper than the medieval code. Scott, following St. Paul and Shakespeare, shifts the emphasis from the pursuit of fame and honor and directs his heroes’ efforts toward charity. When driven to the wall, Scott’s heroes and heroines reveal to us the wisdom of St. Paul. Jeanie Deans prevails because her faith cannot be broken. It is not based on prophecies which can fail, nor on knowledge which can fail; it is based on that which cannot fail – charity. And Quentin Durward wins the fair maiden not because he prevails in glorious combat but because he forgoes glorious combat in order to perform an act of charity.

It’s not that other 19th century authors do not place charity at the center of their visions. They do. But where Dickens often gets sidetracked by democratic delusions and Dostoyevsky by Russian messianism, Scott never wavers from the path of St. Paul. He admires the Highlanders but he does not place his ultimate hope on their political success. There is only one reign worthy of our undivided support: His reign of charity. In Scott’s view, political systems come and go, and our support or resistance to them should depend on how closely they adhere to His reign of charity.

In his poetry and novels, Scott eschews the classical approach which consists of feeble attempts to recapture the glory of Greece, and instead embarks on a romantic quest through the human heart. There and there alone is the anchor. In our hearts is the imprint of His heart.

It was Scott’s special destiny to take up Shakespeare’s mantle and show European man that the journey through the human heart is not a passive journey but an intensely active one. There are so many dragons along the way that must be slain, the dragons of all the seven deadly sins, but above all, the dragon of intellectual pride.

Scott’s authorial voice speaks loud and clear through the actions of his heroes and heroines. It is charity alone that can anchor our hearts to His. And that charitable center of our heart can not be reached by the spiritually weak or the intellectually proud.

Scott, with characteristic modesty, once told a woman who compared him to Shakespeare that he was not fit to tie Shakespeare’s shoe laces. But there is a great similarity between the two authors. They both bid us look away from the outward pageantry of life to the romance that is within. And that is extremely rare. Few authors have the courage to embark on the inward journey because they fear that which is within. But the inner journey through the human heart is the real journey that the hero must take. Scott gives us the anchor to prevail against all the forces of hell because he himself is the hero Raymond Chandler was looking for: “But down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

To those of us tarnished with modernity and afraid (and who is not?), Walter Scott reaches out over what is really only a short span of years and bids us take heart, as Quentin Durward does. Though exiled from his native land, Quentin prevails because he knows that all the enduring graces of home and hearth he takes with him. “Behold the Kingdom of God is within you.”

The Nineteenth Century Way to God

I do not hold the traditional Catholic view of Western civilization, which looks on the 13th century as the epoch of Christian civilization followed by a steady decline in each ensuing century. I look on Christendom somewhat differently. I see it as one, whole entity from the 700's until 1917, with each century having some very negative anti-Christian heresies, and each century having some important Christian elements which other centuries lacked. But all the centuries preceding the 20th century in Europe and its satellites, such as America, New Zealand, and Australia, were Christian centuries. My favorite century is the 19th, and I think there is contained in that century the foundations of a future restoration of Christian culture.

What I call the separatist heresy, that which separates man's physical nature from his spiritual nature and his reason from his other senses, has been with us since the Greeks, but it was codified in the "great Catholic century": the 13th. In each subsequent century, that heresy ate away at the vitals of the Faith, and in each century until the 20th century, there has been a Christian counter-attack. These counter-attacks were not planned, reasoned attacks; they sprang up organically from the mystical body of the Christian Church.

In the 19th century, the attack was fiercer than in any of the preceding centuries, but the counter-attack was also greater than in any other century. The attack came in the form of Darwinism, capitalism, and communism, which were logical outgrowths of the Catholic separatist heresy. The Christian counter-attack came in the form of a greater interiorization of the Christian Faith. The Pauline Christianity of "if you have not charity" was developed more fully in the 19th century than it had been in any previous century. It was as if the European Christians were saying, "You have driven us to the wall, so we will cling to the most essential element of our Faith." That precious element was of course Christ's sacred humanity. God is human, God is humane, and hence our link to God is through the human.

My assertion of the greater interiorization and humanizing of the Christian Faith in the 19th century is not based on the number of people who attended church but on the testimony of that century's great authors, because I believe the great authors reflect not only their own personal vision but also the soul of their age. The one exception to this is Shakespeare, who, as Ben Jonson correctly stated, did not belong to any age. In fact, to the extent that he does belong to an age, it is the 19th century.

I do not see the Pauline Christianity in the British writers alone; I find it in Dostoyevsky, Spyri, and Schiller as well, but I will limit this discussion to the British authors. A partial list includes the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Porter, Charlotte M. Yonge, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, George MacDonald, Thomas Hughes, William Edmoundstoune Aytoun, Kenneth Grahame, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, and C. S. Lewis. The last four did their work in the 20th century, but they were very much men of the 19th century.

The Greek Heresy. It is not intrinsically evil to study the Greek and Latin languages. Nor is it evil to study classical cultures. In fact, both intellectual pursuits can be a great good. The danger lies in the adaptation of the Greek mindset. If one goes down that dark alley, he will be at the mercy of every self-proclaimed Socrates and will be hopelessly cut off from the personal, revealed God of Christianity. Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, is aware of the difference between Plato and St. Paul. He realizes there is more than a slight difference in the shifting of emphasis between an impersonal force, even if it is called a spiritual force, and a personal God with a name.

The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the Apology had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson."

"I don't understand," said Tom.

"Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?"

"Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing."

"Why not the same thing?"

"Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning."

"Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"How do you mean?" said Tom.

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us--we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it--we are in no better position than he--in fact, heathens."

That quote illustrates the great 19th century Christian counter-attack. The Greek philosophers can be read but only with a critical eye, not with the eyes of a devotee seeking guidance. The way of the Cross and the way of Platonic thought are two separate things. The one weakness in C. S. Lewis's masterpiece, The Last Battle, is when the Professor says, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato." Well, it's not all in Plato.

The 19th century Christians did not defeat the Greek heresy, which outlasted them into the 20th century, but there were the beginnings, in the 19th century, of a necessary rebellion against the Greek mindset. The rebellion was and is necessary because when faith becomes philosophy or pure mind, the heart and soul of that faith is eliminated. The Faith becomes a myth, which can be studied and examined and found to be necessary for the psychic health (Jung, Campbell) of the individual, but it cannot be acted upon as if it were literally true. What the Greeks and their Catholic followers fail to grasp is that pure mind will always fail to find God because God can only be found through the fairy tale mode -- the Christianized version of the myth -- of apprehension.

Chivalry. What had its tentative and rather formalistic beginnings in the medieval ages was deepened and enlarged upon in the 19th century. Tennyson's Arthur is a saint while Mallory's Arthur is a pagan with a few Christian trappings. Mere fighting skill is not sufficient; the knight must be fighting for those causes that support His reign of charity. Again, this is expressed well by Thomas Hughes:

Here all likeness ends, for the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belaboring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fermenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, and advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth, which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worth of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.

And what are the works of Walter Scott if not an attempt to bridge the scholastic-created gap between God and men by way of chivalry? The fair damsel was imprisoned in the Darwinian tower and guarded by a capitalist dragon. (Yes, I know Scott wrote before Darwin's thesis was published, but the scientistic worldview that spawned Darwin was present when Scott wrote.) It was left to the knight with "But the greatest of these is charity," engraved on his shield to rescue the maiden from the dragon.

The Hero. There is a false apologetics which for many years was the unofficial official apologetics of the Catholic Church: Thomas Aquinas's infamous five proofs for the existence of God (five proofs which never convinced anyone of God's existence but did in fact make millions of potential believers believe that there was no God). And then there is the real apologetics that has led countless unbelievers to the foot of the cross. The real apologetics consists of the apprehension of something Godlike in one particular human being. It may be a parent, a friend, or a sibling, but we see in that person more than a mere collection of molecules.

That apprehension is not necessarily limited to one individual; we may see that quickening spirit in other individuals as well. And that vision of something more than nature in another human being enables us to see and believe in the God-man. Through humanity and through humanity only can we come to Him. If we only cogitate God, we will forever go around and around in a philosophic gyroscope, getting an occasional blast from some cosmic force as we whiz by, but we will not see the living God.

In contrast, the sympathetic bond we form with the hero is our true link to God. Let us look in on Tom Brown as he comes to do homage to his deceased hero, Arnold of Rugby, in Tom Brown's School Days:

He raised himself up and looked round, and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how, when a little boy, he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rooks, before the painted glass came; and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak panelling.

And then came the thought of all his old school-fellows; and form after form of boys nobler, and braver, and purer than he rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling--they who had honoured and loved from the first the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar, and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.

Here let us leave him. Where better could we leave him than at the altar before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood--at the grave beneath the altar of him who had opened his eyes to see that glory, and softened his heart till it could feel that bond?

And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships--through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers and sisters and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers and brothers and teachers--that we can come to the knowledge of Him in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fullness.

The 20th and the 21st century movements that purport to be Christian all seek to copy the technique of former times but care nothing for the spirit of those days. They seem to want Christian ethical behavior for utilitarian purposes, but they do not want a Christian spirit. But it is the spirit that we should seek to recapture:

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.

Ah, what a perception! Does not Tennyson echo St. Paul? "Our little systems have their day" -- "And though I have the give of prophecy and understand all mysteries..."

They sinned much in the 19th century by placing a Darwinian monkey beside His altar. But the 19th century Christians did not respond to scientific wizardry with a wizardry of their own. They saw their Redeemer in the faces of His creatures and faced modernity with only St. Paul's assurance that charity never faileth. They followed the path of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

We of the 20th and 21st centuries have chosen a different path from the ancient mariners of the 19th century. We have chose wizardry over the God-man. We have killed the albatross, but we have not repented. Instead we have gone on to shoot down robin redbreasts, sparrows, doves, and every other bird that is the harbinger of fair weather. Why? I suppose it is because we do not want fair weather. We have become so used to foul weather that we think it is beautiful and fair weather. To us, "fair is foul and foul is fair."

It is useless to posit a faith in God as a response to modernity if that Faith is only a faith in a computerized caricature of the true God. We need first to join Lear in the hovel and learn the difference between mercy and sacrifice. Then, and then only, will we be in union with the 19th century Christians and with Him.

Addendum:
I do not see the deeper, more developed Christianity reflected in just the great authors of the 19th century. Its artists reflect the same vision. Gustave Dore is the prime example; his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Bible, Idylls of the King, and other works are also examples of the great Pauline Christianity of the 19th century.