The Little Town of Europe

O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray…

A good many years ago during the Christmas season, I remarked to a friend that Christmas was one part joyful to me and three parts depressing; depressing because the European people no longer celebrated Christmas with the fervent belief in the Holy Child of Bethlehem with which their European ancestors once celebrated Christmas. My friend replied that he was not going to let a bunch of secular liberals spoil his Christmas; he would celebrate Christmas as his ancestors had. I felt quite chastened and guilty for having allowed, in contrast to my friend, the liberalism of my fellow Europeans to depress me. But “no man,” as Donne so wisely tells us, “is an island,” and about four years later my friend was in a mental institution suffering from a nervous breakdown.

It’s no good lying to ourselves; of course being surrounded by the darkness of Liberaldom and Heathendom affects us. For many of us the darkness has seeped into our immediate family. Christmas is often a very combative time of year for many families, because of a deep divide over what Christmas is supposed to mean to a European.

Let’s make it clear. The European people and only the European people made the meaning of Christmas -- the belief that the hopes and fears of all the years were met in Him on the sacred night -- the cornerstone of their culture. Every village, every home where European people dwelt, bore witness to their faith in the birth, death, and resurrection of the incarnate Lord born in a stable in Bethlehem.

Europe became a spiritual Bethlehem because the belief in the Christ Child was nurtured and protected there. It is during the Christmas season that all the theological wrangling over free will and grace becomes nonsense. The Child in the manger freely gives “to human hearts” the charge and care of His Sacred Person. It is my contention that the European people prior to the 20^th century fulfilled their sacred trust, even though every good Christian during the Christian European era would say they had failed the Child born in Bethlehem. And from a divine standard they would be right; they all failed. But Christ judges us as human beings not as divinities. And by that humane standard the European everyman of antique Europe has left behind an irreplaceable legacy of fidelity and loyalty to Jesus Christ. At Easter we think of the Triumphant Lord, who conquered death, but at Christmas we think of the Child and the Friend. Yeats once wrote:

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
and say my glory was I had such friends.

The European’s glory was that he befriended and championed the Christ Child.

Every Christmas my family and I sing our way through a book of traditional Christmas carols. The songs speak to the heart; they tell of the silent night, the holy night, on which the Savior was born. They speak of the child in the manger, so helpless and yet the hope of the world. Sung collectively the old Christmas carols place a man in Christian Europe. Everything is clear in that world. The dark night was destroyed by the dangerous and heroic leap that Christ made onto the stage of human history. As the song says, “The hopes and fears of all the years, Are met in thee tonight.”

The great Civil War which Lincoln said the American Europeans were engaged in to determine whether a nation conceived in utopian liberalism could long endure was just one manifestation of the ongoing attempt of Satan to make Christendom into Babylon. In Babylon all is not clear, bright, and holy. All is dark, dim, and unholy. The Babylonian world is the world the modern European has chosen over the Europe that revered the little town of Bethlehem.

It is good to talk of peace at Christmas time when all Europeans share a belief in the Christ Child, but when Liberaldom replaces Christendom and the savage rites of black barbarism and the techno-barbarity of the liberals replace the star of Bethlehem, we needs must seek the peace that comes from fighting against principalities and powers. Christ is our Savior, but He also is our friend. And we have left our friend at the mercy of the liberals and the barbarians. It is not improper or against the Christmas spirit to renew our vow of fidelity to our Lord and gird up our loins for the battle against the Babylonian minions of Satan, who are legion.

If I wanted to write a book on the works of Walter Scott, there would be a vast body of work I could write about. And so it is with our European ancestors. They have left behind a great body of work that we can look at and make judgments concerning the quality of their work. The liberals condemn the antique Europeans with all their hearts, without allowing for any mitigating circumstances. We know the litany: “they were racist, they were sexist, they were fascists, they had bad breath…” The list of their sins is endless. The halfway-house Christians also condemn the antique Europeans. Their condemnations are often softened with, “They were a product of their unenlightened times,” but in the end the halfway-house Christian joins the liberal in condemning ‘The Little Town of Bethlehem’ culture of the antique Europeans. But both the liberal and the halfway-house Christian feed on the older European culture like leeches. Where is the life-sustaining grace in Babylon? When the liberal needs mercy he will always, most often without acknowledging the source, look for some hidden remnant of European light on the periphery of Babylon. And likewise the halfway-house Christian, when looking for Christian comfort and mercy, will turn to the European past to relieve his present misery. There are very few pockets of European light left in Babylon, so the liberal and his halfway-house Christian cousin will soon have to embrace the soulless, dark night of Babylon in which there is no mercy because there is no Christ Child, the source of all mercy.

Just as the antique Europeans left behind a body of work, so now have the liberals built up a body of work to which we can point. They have established abortuaries in every major city of what was once Christendom. In keeping with their faith in the ‘natural savage’, they have opened up Christian Europe to the barbarian hordes of color and joined with the barbarians in their desecration of Christian Europe. These are the people with whom the halfway-house Christians want to merge? These are the people we are not supposed to drive from our land? “Everyone is beautiful” to the halfway-house Christian except the European Christian; he must progress and leave his racism and sexism behind before he can become part of Liberaldom, which somehow is supposed to be good, despite the fact that Liberaldom sanctifies the destruction of everything sacred to the antique Europeans.

In the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” by Phillips Brooks, we can hear the voice of Christian Europe. Surely the Europeans of the pre-modern era got it right: “God imparts to human hearts, The blessings of His heav’n.” The Europeans of the Christian era found God in the little human things that the modern Europeans scorn. But He did not scorn the little human things, being born of the Virgin Mary in the Little Town of Bethlehem. I have read and heard many sermons about the unbearable agony Christ suffered on the cross, and I have no doubt that the agony was unbearable, and yet He bore it. But I have never read about the agony that the Son of God endured in the womb of His mother. His divine humanity had to have been conscious even then that he was totally dependent on the care of His Father who was in heaven and the man and woman to whom His Father entrusted Him. All this He endured to show us that we were linked to Him through our common humanity. This the European of the past age knew, and this the modern European no longer knows. To become more human is to become closer to Him. To become less human, which the modern does when he denounces all ties of blood and faith to his European ancestors, is to become a man without a soul. The little town of Bethlehem is old Europe, and the hopes and fears of all the years are indeed met in Europe. +

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.”