The Catholic Faith and the Mantle of History

When the prominent 19th-century English writer and artist William Morris was still a young man, he penned a heartfelt article describing a visit to the Cathedral of Amiens in France. Moved by the majesty and power of that extraordinary house of God, Morris reflected:

“I think those same churches of North France the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest and most loving of all the buildings that the earth has ever borne; and, thinking of their past-away builders, can I see through them, very faintly, dimly, some little of the medieval times…. And those same builders, still surely living, still real men, and capable of receiving love, I love no less than the great men, poets and painters and such like, who are on earth now…. for their love, and the deeds through which it worked, I think they will not lose their reward.”

Though Morris was not himself a Catholic, his early thinking was very much influenced by the Anglo-Catholic milieu which surrounded him as a student at Exeter College, Oxford. in the 1850s. This included the intellectual currents of the “Oxford Movement” which had already inspired the notable conversion of John Henry Newman. To my mind, Morris’ youthful words brilliantly encapsulate a certain element of the Catholic worldview which I have always cherished—and for a long time believed every Catholic must instinctively cherish—which is, a love, or profound regard, for the glorious achievements of past ages.

It is difficult to accurately describe this genuine feeling of admiration for all that has come before us in the great history of the Church. Though critics and detractors may say so, it is not “nostalgia,” which is a passive, pitiful, morose thing—a longing for what can never again be. Rather, what I am describing is a fierce, living, active love—a movement towards and desire to protect all that is Good, Beautifu, and True in the greatness of the twenty centuries that have passed since Our Lord walked the earth. As an exercise of love, it is a virtue; and it endows our minds with a regard for the Apostles, the Martyrs and Saints, the great Popes who thundered like the heavens and the kings of Christendom who knelt before the Cross. It knows the philosophers, artists, and statesmen who shaped the world—the soldiers and heroes, and their adversaries, too—and all the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of souls who came and went in the smallest corner of civilization, but who labored to keep the promise of the Faith, so that they too might live forever in Christ.

When I was very young, I used to think that every Christian must feel as I did, and love history. With the passing of time, I have sadly realized that this is not so. There are a great many whose eyes are so keenly focused on modern theories and contemporary difficulties that they are almost entirely blind to the rich tapestry of tradition which encompasses the life of the Church. There are some—and I have seen such words quite recently—who speak ill of whole centuries and swathes of time; they seem to fail to understand the foundations of those accomplishments which shine brightest in the culture of the Western world. And they look at both the achievements and the shortcomings of former ages with such jaundiced eyes, that they dare not speak the names of the great minds who manifestly contradict our own.

How can this be? Is there not a degree of intellectual myopia here—a distinct reflection of “chronological snobbery” as C. S. Lewis very aptly called it? I remember when I read Lewis’ autobiographical account Surprised by Joy for the first time, and I found him describe what I had previously understood but could not properly name. He wrote of this tendency in human nature to cling greedily to the present moment—to hold “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” But, as Lewis pointed out, many things simply go “out of date” according to the haphazard forces of accident or “fashion”. For this reason, it is necessary to measure truth from falsehood, and good from evil, before discarding the treasure of the past according to the prejudices of the modern world.

It is a curious thing that so much of Western Civilization’s common inheritance is cordoned off into museum-like cases, to be admired at a distance but not really to be lived or known. Even in the intellectual sphere of the Church, some of the brightest gems of the past are hidden away under the sheer weight of modern culture and thought. As a small illustration of this fact, when I take up the most recent edition of Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum—a very useful anthology of papal decrees and magisterial teachings of the Church—I discover that in a volume of roughly twelve hundred pages of historical documents, nearly half date from the dawn of the 20th century and thereafter. Indeed, upon further inspection, there are almost as many pages cited from the period covering the Second Vatican Council until the present as there are from the entire fifteen hundred years preceding the Council of Trent!

Now, the editors of such a book have a very difficult task, and they are constrained by the gaps of history, as well as the interests and motivations of the scholars who are likely to seek reference to their work. But is it not a little strange that modern Catholic academicians seem to think so highly of their own era, and so little of the preponderance of time that came before? The teaching authority of the Church, having become more than a little frayed and overheated by its feverish theological output in recent times, could perhaps benefit from a period of thoughtful, sedate retrospection.

When such concerns are raised regarding the Christian life, or even in the rather different forum of secular Western politics, they are often met with an outcry that conservatives are trying to “return society to the Dark Ages”. But apart from the obvious hyperbole of this language, the simple fact is that the past will always seem incomprehensibly dark (whether the 9th century or the 19th century) to those who measure the world by a humanistic scale of cheap materialism and modern “social justice”. If, however, you are capable of seeing that there are other qualities of intrinsic value—principles such as truth, faith, charity, memory, honor, grace, freedom, and valor—you can attain appreciation for the less materially-endowed past. And if there are certain facets of the contemporary moral order that are in need of reform, you might be prepared to use the accumulated wisdom of prior centuries to begin to recalibrate our own.

I recall once hearing a homily at Mass, in which a priest told the story of a bishop inspecting the rectories of the pastors within his diocese. I never quite understood if this account was real or merely a rhetorical device—I suspect it might have been the latter—but the thrust of the narrative was that the bishop always looked at his priests’ bookshelves to find the newest (or most recent) book that they had purchased. According to the story, the bishop was testing his priests’ intellectual commitment, and he “wanted to know the date on which they had died”. The premise itself might have been a little ambiguous, but the priest who gave this homily adopted one particular lesson enthusiastically. In his mind, he had apparently concluded that whatever was newest was most worthy of praise, and that a reliance on old ideas (or, in this case, old books) was a sign of atrophy and death.

We can all readily approve of a lifelong commitment to learning, and even of an eagerness to engage with the most important concepts of current thought. Yet, it was surreal to hear a priest carry on in this way, knowing that he should have been expounding on a Gospel reading about the ministry of Our Lord Jesus Christ—an event which had been recorded by one of the Evangelists between nineteen hundred and two thousand years ago! Any prejudicial indifference to age-old truth seems an attitude far removed from wisdom or humility. If we look back at the contributions of so many great minds, such as St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, do we not rightfully feel dwarfed by their prodigious holiness and intellect? As Hilaire Belloc proposed in his travelogue The Path to Rome, it is a healthy thing to “imagine yourself for but one moment introduced into the presence of your ancestors, and ask yourself which would look the fool.”

And this, it seems to me, is one of the clearest reasons why the mantle of history rests so pleasantly upon Catholics: because we believe that time itself is only an accident—(a “distension of the soul” as St. Augustine calls it in his Confessions)—and that the faithful shall meet again in the eternity of Christ, with the Communion of the Saints. It was St. John Henry Newman who wrote in a sermon on “The Individuality of the Soul” that “if we have but once seen any child of Adam, we have seen an immortal soul. It has not passed away as a breeze or a sunshine, but it lives; it lives at this moment in one of those many places, whether of bliss or misery, in which all souls are reserved until the end.” What is true of those we see in our own lives is no less true of those souls we otherwise come to know from the record of history.

In the treasured collections of the British Library, there is a rare medieval manuscript known to scholars of Old English as the “Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos” or the “Sermon of the Wolf to the English”. As its Latin title playfully implies, it was a liturgical sermon composed and delivered by Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, around the year 1014, and written in the Germanic tongue of the Anglo-Saxon realm that existed in England before the Norman Conquest. The “Sermo Lupi” was prepared during a devastating time in the history of the English kingdom, with Danish Viking raids plaguing the coasts, and overwhelming political and ecclesiastical corruption undermining every aspect of society. Archbishop Wulfstan’s passionate language denouncing these crimes, and his comparison of his own failing country to the much earlier era when Roman Britain was swamped and ripped apart under a relentless migration of Germanic tribes, struck fear and repentance into the hearts of his listeners.

I first encountered Archbishop Wulfstan’s words some years ago as a university student. But I keep a copy of his sermon in my bookshelves, and I make a point of rereading it on occasion, to remind myself that although the world did not always look as it does now (our lives are significantly more orderly and predictable), human nature is very much unchanged. And when I think of the great Wulfstan—so learned in Christian theology, in civil law and in Latin, and the rhythmical poetry of his own language—I picture him trying furiously to save his country and his Church, and I cannot help but believe that I know him. Though Archbishop Wulfstan lived more than one thousand years ago in a country that no longer exists, and wrote in a language that almost no one now understands, he is more alive, and real, and impressive to me, than many of those living bishops and Cardinals who serve the Church in our present day.

I would urge all Catholics, and even all Christians and people of goodwill, to embrace the abundant richness of the past. A love for the fullness of tradition, for all the undercurrents of our civilization, and for the whole vibrant history of twenty centuries of life in the Church, lends an unbreakable strength. Historical knowledge serves as an intellectual counterweight to the skepticism that says you cannot know with certainty; to the progressivism that makes you feel arrogantly superior and secure; to the cultural Marxism that attempts to poison and deconstruct the inheritance of the West; and to the moral relativism that says all choices are equal, when history distinctly proves that they are not.

And finally—and perhaps most importantly—a clear understanding of the past inspires a degree of thoughtful charity to each other, and to those who were once our fellow pilgrims upon this earth. As the English essayist Joseph Addison observed, reflecting upon his time walking amongst the many monuments of Westminster Abbey:

When I read the several dates of the tombs of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

That, I think, is a deeply noble sentiment, and an example to emulate in the pilgrimage of life.