May 24, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
CHRONICLES Magazine
Publishes Royal Wedding Essay and More: Check out their Web Site and Articles
Friends,
Back
on Sunday, May 20, MY CORNER
reflected on the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, which had
occurred the previous day. That column has received a lot of traffic and many hundreds
of viewers [http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/may-20-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html].
And it has now been picked up by CHRONICLES
Magazine and is a featured online article on their web site [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/].
CHRONICLES is
by all measures the “granddaddy” journal of traditional, thoughtful conservatism. Founded in 1976 by The Rockford Institute [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/about/the-rockford-institute/],
over the years the monthly has published most of the major figures and writers on
the traditional American and European Right, and its essays and articles have
continuously offered developed and reasoned commentary on the major political,
cultural and social issues and challenges affecting our Western society. In
addition to these concentrations, it features detailed commentaries and reviews
of music, on art and film, and poetry.
After
such magazines as NATIONAL REVIEW—once
the flagship for conservative thought—gave way and accepted the warmed-over
Leftism of the Neoconservatives (with editor Rich Lowry), dressed in drag and
presenting itself as “conservative,” it was to CHRONICLES that many Old Right conservatives (“paleoconservatives”),
Southern traditionalists and conservative libertarians turned for solace, including
authors whose writings were henceforth banned by the new authoritarian Neocon “mainstream.”
The
Marxist Left took note and understood the potential of CHRONICLES, and it became a target early on for its supposed high-toned
“racism,” “sexism,” and support for “white supremacy.” Indeed, here is how the
frenzied Marxist Rationalwiki.org
describes the magazine and its influence:
Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture is a monthly magazine published
by the Rockford Institute, a paleoconservative think
tank.
Established in 1976, it stands as the premier periodical
for erudite, highly-educated racists.
If the American far-right wing is defined by how
white, male, affluent, and out-of-touch it is, then contributors to Chronicles are
the whitest, most affluent, and most out-of-touch men there are….
One
does not know whether to laugh or just shake one’s head at such mind-numbing “critiques”!
But, obviously, intuitively the far Left does recognize the danger to its
agenda from intelligent and well-presented arguments…and they will have none of
it.
Let
me add that the rationalwiki’s
description of CHRONICLES
contributors as “most affluent” totally collapses when I am included! If I were to remove (Heaven forbid!) to one
of those coastal Leftist bastions like Silicon Valley or the (Un)democratic
Socialist Republic of Seattle—with their average incomes in the hundreds of
thousands of dollars—I would, with my meagre retirement income, probably have
to go on Governor Jerry Brown’s generous welfare program—Oops! I forgot, that
is reserved for illegals streaming across the border from Mexico and Honduras,
who will almost immediately be added to the California voting roles as bona
fide Democrats—and that ain’t never going to happen with me!
In any case, I
invite you to go back and re-read “That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry,
and the End of England,” again. It has been very lightly edited. [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/that-royal-wedding-reverend-michael-curry-and-the-end-of-england/]
And
stay tuned, I have another essay
coming out in a few days in the June 2018 print issue of CHRONICLES, titled “Cultural Marxism and Racism.” Watch for it on
the newsstands, or better yet, go to the web page and subscribe to the magazine [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/].
You won’t regret it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
that royal wedding, reverend michael curry, and the end of england
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/that-royal-wedding-reverend-michael-curry-and-the-end-of-england/
By: Boyd D. Cathey | May 23, 2018
Like many Southern boys growing up in the 1950s, I recall
fondly my father reading stories to me of “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah
Valley, of the “Gray Ghost,” Colonel John Mosby, and of Marse Robert Lee who
led Confederate armies during the War for Southern Independence.
But
I also reveled in the exploits of noble knights and cavaliers of old, heroic
monarchs of Europe leading their armies and peoples in great crusades; I was
held spellbound by the courageous exploits of Jean de Valette at the Siege of
Malta by the Ottoman Turks and of Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto. I imagined
myself on the walls of Vienna in 1683 awaiting the fateful charge of King John
Sobieski’s Winged Hussars to destroy the armies of militant Islam and save
Christendom. I could visualize Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, or Lord Wellington on
the field of Waterloo against that “disrupter of Europe,” Napoleon. There was a
seamless connection—a direct line, it seemed to me—linking those great
champions with the Southern heroes I grew up with.
In
addition to the military brilliance these gentlemen soldiers exhibited, there
was something else, something even more elevated, something that my mentor the
late Dr. Russell Kirk called the “moral imagination,” a quality of character
that integrated a discerning, reverent and appreciative view of life and
history with the annealing power and legacy of our Western Christian
civilization and the traditions which those men defended. They incorporated
those elements not only into their actions but into their very being. Like
countless generations before them, they received that inheritance as a kind of
“unbought grace” solemnly deeded to them by their ancestors, and, as such, a
continuation of a civilization that came into existence with Constantine’s
vision—“In Hoc Signo Vinces”—at the Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.) and the
Christianization of the old Roman Empire.
Drawing
from three ancient capitals of wisdom and belief—from Rome, Athens, and
Jerusalem—what became “Christendom” was re-sanctified by the anointing and
coronation of Emperor Charlemagne by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s Basilica in
Rome on December 25, 800 A.D. And despite deadly plagues, famine and
religious wars, the ideals and principles of Christendom remained a real and
accessible model and guide for the inheritors of that civilization and culture
for well over 1,000 years.
That civilization held up first and foremost the Faith as the necessary beacon and as essential for all men. It set boundaries and dictated manners and a standard of allocution and communication, it instructed our ancestors on what it was to be a true Christian gentleman, and it was the source and nourishment of the greatest and most sublime culture in all of history, producing great art, architecture, music, literature that glorified God and through that glorification and through the belief of the Faithful truly defined what it was to be elevated as “children of God” above the lower animals.
That civilization held up first and foremost the Faith as the necessary beacon and as essential for all men. It set boundaries and dictated manners and a standard of allocution and communication, it instructed our ancestors on what it was to be a true Christian gentleman, and it was the source and nourishment of the greatest and most sublime culture in all of history, producing great art, architecture, music, literature that glorified God and through that glorification and through the belief of the Faithful truly defined what it was to be elevated as “children of God” above the lower animals.
Integrally
a part of this historic Christian vision was the idea of kingship, of monarchy
and royalty as incarnating a special role and obligation for him who not only
led his people and country, but who also represented them in his very person.
It was St. Thomas Aquinas who in his works De Regimine Principium (On the
Government of Princes, 1265) and De Regno (On Kingship)
summarized the weight of history and millennia of experience that what he
termed a “temperate monarchy” was the most ideally suited form of government
for most of mankind (allowing, of course, for aristocratic republics in Venice,
Genoa, and later in America). By that he did not mean the modern conception of
an absolutist dictator who simply bore the title of “king.” His description was
much more nuanced, including significant elements of what we would call today
“representation” of the different strata and segments of society. A temperate
monarchy was not at all incompatible with regionalism and regional autonomy, as
it reflected diverse customs and traditions. Nor was it antithetical to
elections if those elections would reflect the influence of families and
corporate and professional organizations—those real and organic building blocks
of society.
It
incorporated the “father” figure, a paterfamilias, grounded in the very
laws of nature and in the history of each commonwealth. That “father” ruled
under laws given by God, Divine Positive Law, and he was bound strictly by
those laws and the precepts of the Church. His primary duty was to the good of
the commonwealth, to the “family” that composed his realm—modeled on the
God-given and sanctioned nuclear family itself. The commonwealth was, in this
sense, the nuclear family writ large.
St.
Thomas was not the only medieval author to discuss forms of government and the
significance of monarchy in the history and development of Christendom. One can
cite the Englishman John of Salisbury in the 12th century, Vincent of
Beauvais’s On the Moral Education of a Prince (ca. 1259), and
various others, each in a sense reaching back to Aristotle and to both the
wisdom and experience of the ancients and to the very Kings of Judah.
Like
the father of the household, the monarch was responsible for—had the sacred
duty of—insuring the common good and assuring that justice was properly and wisely
meted out for his people. And as he represented his “family,” he also had the
obligation to serve as exemplar and symbol for his people. Thus, in much of
Medieval and Renaissance literature we hear the monarchs of various lands
called simply by the names of those lands—“What will England [i.e., King Henry
V] now do?” “How shall France [i.e., King Louis] react?”
And
despite all the vicissitudes and disasters of war, famine, plagues, religious
conflict, and revolution, the monarchical principle survived more or less in
tact into the bloody twentieth century—past the Protestant Reformation, past
the horrid Cromwellian interlude in England, past even the French Revolution
and its bastardized children of the nineteenth (and twentieth) century. And
even the Soviets could not snuff it out, despite their best efforts.
Yet
what revolution and war, assassination and the triumph of liberalism could not
do, contemporary monarchy seems intent of doing to itself.
And
the most recent and searing example of this came at the wedding of English
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on May 19.
Years
ago when I was a graduate student in Pamplona, Spain, one of my closest friends
(who aided me tremendously in the research for my doctoral dissertation),
Ignacio de Orbe y Tuero, Baron de Pardinas de Montevilla and grandson of the
great Spanish Traditionalist general Juan Nepomuceno de Orbe, Marquis of
Valdespina, summed up the role of monarchs and monarchy in the modern world:
“Most
of Europe’s kings no longer have thrones,” he declared. “But they, like those
who do, have a special role and that is to keep alive the ancient traditions
and legacy they inherited, not to bend to the current fashion or opinion of the
moment, to stand apart and remind this generation—and the next—of the history
and continuity they represent. In this they comply with their solemn duty as
inheritors of a sacred and Christian inheritance and trust. They must remind us
of not only who we have been but what we can be. They are increasingly a ‘sign
of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in
this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they
will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.” [translation of a letter to
me, September 1974]
In
December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over
his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on
and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir
apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a
disastrous matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House
of Windsor, which had already begun a decline many years earlier.
But
like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,”
getting “with it,” so to speak, with all the current fads, breaking with
tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance
in the survival of the nation. And if that means bringing in a flamer like
Elton John and inviting a whole slew of disreputable Hollywood types, not to
mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels
that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria
Regina, then so be it.
And
then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael
Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry a few
years back was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina and distinguished himself
for his leftwing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the
gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and
prohibitions in the Pauline message!
And
he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a
jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou
dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as gushing Fox commentators Shepard Smith
and airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American
element” to the wedding.
For
thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But
he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yes, King, that expert on conjugal love!),
civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.
The
Windsors, for the most part, set stony-faced and amused, enveloped by the tide
of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said
that the ceremony “combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh
‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the
truth of my friend Ignacio de Orbe’s observation about monarchy and monarchs in
the modern world: “They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their
role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses
and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly
so.”
Our
world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of
Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and for kings like
John Sobieski or St. Louis of France, who would stand manfully against the
onrushing tide of Modernity and decay in our civilization. The awe and
reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is
always potentially within us, and that it can inform
our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious
legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it,
and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.
When
the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as
the Windsors have done, only Evil smiles.
_______________________________________
Boyd D.
Cathey holds a Ph.D. in European History from the Catholic University of
Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an M.A. in
Intellectual History from the University of Virginia. He was assistant to the
late Russell Kirk and State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of
Archives and History.
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