New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

 

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

 

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

 

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

 

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

 

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

 

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

 

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

 

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

 

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

 

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

 

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

 

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

 

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

 

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

 

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

Plagued By Dictators

For almost two months now our public health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have been acting like dictators. They have suspended our basic rights and freedoms, denied us access to public facilities such as libraries, gyms and parks, forced businesses that they consider to be “non-essential” even though they are hardly such to the livelihood of the owners and employees to close, locked up the Churches, synagogues and other places of worship, and otherwise acted as if they were the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Our provincial premiers have been no better. Even those I previously had a degree of respect for, such as Upper Canada’s Doug Ford, whose late brother Rob must be spinning in his grave right about now, have shown their true tyrannical colours. The worst of all has been Captain Airhead, the Prime Minister in the Dominion government. While Liberal Prime Ministers since Mackenzie King have behaved like autocratic control freaks rather than the humble servants of Queen-in-Parliament that they are supposed to be, the Trudeaus, who never met a Communist dictatorship they did not admire and fawn over and strive to imitate, have been by far the worst.

Many of those who, like this writer, were fed up with all of this the first hour into the lockdown, might be surprised to learn that creating a dictatorship in response to a plague is not a new phenomenon. Universal quarantines are new – previously, we quarantined only the sick or those we had good reason to suspect might have contracted the contagion. Plague time dictators, however, go back to the very first dictators, those of ancient Rome.

The eternal city was originally a monarchy. Its legendary founder, Romulus, was its first king. Romulus’s fourth successor and Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinus Priscus, was an Etruscan. Beginning with his reign, the Etruscans gained more and more influence over Rome and this created a growing division between the monarchy and the Senate, the Council of the patriarchs of the noble Roman families which Romulus had established to help him govern the city. In the reign of the seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who seized the throne through the assassination of his predecessor, his arrogance – which is actually what his cognomen signifies – and his crimes, along with those of his son, Sextus, pushed that division to the breaking point. When Sextus, through threats and blackmail forced himself upon Lucretia, the wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, leading to her taking her own life in shame, her husband and father, along with Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, drove the Tarquins out of Rome after which the Senate declared the city to be a republic.

This was the first occasion in which the word republic was used to signify a government without a king. Res publica, which literally means “the public thing”, was one of two Latin expressions commonly used to translate the Greek politeia, which simply refers to the institutions which are constitutionally set up to look after the business of the public regardless of whether they be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture, and is best rendered in English by “state”, “commonwealth” or even “constitution.” When the Roman Senate borrowed this Latin expression to refer to their new type of constitution, small-r republicanism was born.

As much as Tarquin the Proud deserved being deposed, the problem stemmed from who he was as a person and not from his office of authority. The Roman nobles of the sixth century BC were not thinking of this, however, when they drove him out, and so they created an inferior constitution, a republic. There are many roles and duties in the constitution of a state that can only properly be filled and performed by a king or queen. I do not intend to argue this point at length here, having made it many times in the past, and mention it only by way of introducing the observation that the Romans themselves quickly figured out that they had created a constitutional vacuum that would need, on certain occasions, to be filled. Thus they created the office of dictator.


Today the terms dictator and tyrant are more or less interchangeable but his was not the case back then. The term tyrant was used to refer to a ruler who was the opposite of a king. Whereas a true king came to his office lawfully, a tyrant was generally a usurper. The term tyrant comes from a word that originally referred to usurpation and it came to be associated with the heavy-handed abuse of power because someone who unlawfully seizes power does so because he thirsts for power and is therefore inclined to abuse it in a way that is not generally true of a lawful king. Note that Tarquin the Proud, who became "king" by assassinating Servius Tullius, was properly a tyrant rather than a king. When the Romans created the office of dictator, the term did not carry any of the opprobrium that would later be attached to it and was already at that time attached to the term tyrant.


The Roman office of dictator was a temporary position. The term was six months, half of that of the consuls, the two co-presidents of the Roman Republic, the first of whom were the aforementioned Brutus and Collatinus. When an emergency arose in which the Romans perceived the need for a single individual to wield the undivided supreme Imperium, the Senate would ask one or the other of the consuls, or both in the event that neither was off on a military venture somewhere, to name a dictator. Sworn into office, his first duty would be to name a magister equitum - master of horse. This was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, his "vice-dictator." The title obviously derives from the expectation that he would lead the cavalry that would accompany the unified army led by the dictator. This points to the fact that the emergencies that prompted the appointment of a dictator tended to be military in nature, when some powerful enemy threatened the city.


The first time this happened, at least according to Livy, was in the ninth year of the Roman Republic. War with the Sabines seemed imminent and the Senate asked consul Postumus Cominius Auruncus to name a dictator. He named his co-consul Titus Lartius Flavus, who appointed Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, one of the consuls of the previous year, to be his master of horse. Although war was declared, no fighting ensued, and Lartius laid down his powers before his six months expired.


The final Roman dictator was Gaius Julius Caesar, who was made dictator for life. That life was cut short on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a gang of conspirators, one of the leaders of which was his former friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had been the first consul of Rome. His death brought the office of dictator to an end because that office existed to fill the vacuum in the Roman constitution that had been created by the absence of a king. A new Roman monarchy would soon be established when Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavius was declared by the Senate to be the sole ruler of Rome and given the titles of Augustus (1) which means “exalted one”, Princeps, which means “first, chief, prince”, and Imperator, which had been a military term meaning “general” but from that point on would also mean “emperor”, a connotation the family name “Caesar” would also soon take on.


In between Lartius and Ceasar, the most well-known dictator, and the one who is the most admired, was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who held the position twice. In 458 BC, war with the Aequi left one of the consular armies besieged and the other powerless to help. Cincinnatus, an elderly farmer, was at his field, the legend says, when a delegation from the Senate arrived to tell him that he had been named dictator. With Lucius Tarquitius as his master of horse, he conscripted a large army, marched to the relief of the besieged consul, quickly forced the Aequi into submission at the Battle of Mount Algidus, and returned to his plow in a fortnight plus one day. His second dictatorship was almost as short, and involved putting down an internal conspiracy against the city.


Usually the emergencies were military in nature, but this was not always the case.


It can be amusing, when reading the ancient Roman historian Livy's multi-volume history of Rome from its beginning down to his own era, the Augustinian, to note the many occasions on which the Romans appointed a dictator in order to pound a nail into a wall. This, of course, sounds to the modern reader like a ridiculous thing to do and it is made all the more absurd by the way in which every time this happened the dictator would name a master of horse even though the task for which he was appointed sounds very much like a one-man job and was not military in nature.


Perhaps you are wondering what sort of bizarre carpentry emergency was constantly arising that required a dictator to take up the hammer. This is the funniest part of it all because it had nothing to do with carpentry at all but was done whenever the city was threatened by a plague.


Now if your next question pertains to what they were smoking in ancient Rome and/or where you might acquire some of it, allow me to assure you that while promising to legalize the abuse of mind-altering substances helped Captain Airhead to seize power, it had nothing to do with the Roman custom of nominating a dictator to drive a nail into the wall to stop a plague.


What I have been talking about was a religious ceremony. The nail, a symbol of the goddesses of fate, destiny, and necessity, would be ceremonially driven into a wall once a year, upon an important anniversary, in a number of Roman temples. The most important of these ceremonies was the one that took place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder had begun construction of this Temple in his reign, but it was not completed until the period in which Tarquin the Proud was driven out and the Republic established. It was consecrated on September 13th in either 509 BC or 507 BC. The reason for the uncertainty is that while the ancient authorities are in agreement that Marcus Horatius Pulvius, the uncle of the famous Horatius Cocles who figures in to story about “Horatius at the Bridge”, was the consul who consecrated the Temple, they do not agree as to whether it was while he was suffect consul in 509 or during his second consulship in 507. At any rate, each year on that date the Epulum Jovis banquet would be held in honour of the temple’s patron deity. On the same day the clavis annalis would take place, in which one of the consuls would ritually attach a nail to the wall of the Temple, on the right side near the shrine to Minerva. Horatius was probably the first to perform this ritual.


The law governing this ritual was itself written out and attached to the wall where the ritual was performed. It specified that only the praeter maximus, or chief magistrate, could perform it. For the annual ritual, this meant one of the consuls. Whenever the Senate decided that there was an emergency calling for a special extra performance of the ritual, only a dictator would suffice. The first time this happened, according to Livy, was in 363 BC. A plague had been ravaging the city for a couple of years. Lucius Manlius Capitolinus Imperiosus was named dictator (Lucius Pinarius Natta was his master of horse if you wish to know) for the purpose of performing this ritual. After he had hammered the nail into the wall the plague stopped. On several subsequent occasions when Rome was threatened by a plague this was repeated.


Exactly why the Romans thought this would work is unclear because the original significance of the ritual has been lost to the sands of time. The seeming success of the first performance might explain its having been repeated but not why it was done in the first place. One explanation is that the nail was thought to be symbolically driven through the spirit behind the plague, fixing him in place and preventing him from doing harm, but nobody really knows for sure.


Today’s epidemiologists would scoff at such an unscientific and superstitious manner of dealing with a plague but I see little evidence that would commend their own approach as being superior. Science and superstition are a lot more closely related than they would like us to believe. The methodology of each involves about an equal amount of guesswork, blind leaps in the dark, hit and miss, trial and error, and sheer dumb luck. Science is more respectable only because it has shinier, fancier, equipment and more impressive technical terminology. Where Roman superstition is truly vulnerable to critique is on the religious grounds. A far better religious response to a plague is to do as the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah, and call upon the nation to turn to the true and living God in humility, confessing our sins, and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Our superstitious medical dictators obviously want none of that, however, as evidenced by their locking up all the Churches during Lent, the annual season of pre-Paschal repentance.


Indeed, the ancient Roman technique has this to commend it in comparison with today’s medical dictatorship. It at least complies with what has been recognized as the first rule of medical ethics since Hippocrates of Kos, who died seven years before the first time a Roman dictator was called upon to stop a plague with a nail. Whether it did any good or not, it could not conceivably do any harm. Shutting down society and the economy and putting everybody under universal house arrests does immeasurable harm – economic, moral, legal, political, social, spiritual, psychological, physical, and even mortal.


The lesson in all of this for Captain Airhead is that if he truly feels this pandemic requires a dictatorial response, he would be better off looking to the example of the ancient Roman dictators rather than modern Communist ones. If he really wants to be useful, he could, if he can figure out the difference between the flat and the pointy end, try hammering a nail into a wall.



(1) Although this was a title that was passed on to all of his heirs, it is also used as the personal name by which historians identify him after his elevation to the rank of emperor.