Nation and Virtue

An Untimely Sophiological Meditation

Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. St Matthew 10:16

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I have shied away from politics in my writing here, for the most part even when I’ve engaged with the social media dimension of this platform that so many of us have come to rue as it has risen in prominence and addictiveness. Still, there are some political (or more properly, metapolitical) issues that are close to my heart, deeply linked to my perennial religious concerns, and uncomfortably far from the Overton window — even though as these metapolitical concerns have matured for me over the past two decades, I have seen the Overton window shift dramatically towards them.

I don’t want to alienate readers, or, taking my own advice, impair the basic witness of my heart to the Gospel in the concrete circumstances of my life that is the deepest purpose of my writing here. But the truth is that to witness to the Gospel means in the end a witness to all truth, and the endemic evils of the age are precisely the place where the Gospel’s healing light is most immediately needed, and where the temptation to a betrayal of the truth through silence is greatest.

Also, I simply think that what I am about to say is true, and important. Writing it is an act of honesty, and of service towards something in the world that is a great gift of God and a manifestation of His glory: something that is the enduring object of my love and admiration and gratitude. Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Gott helf mir.

I don’t want to write this, but I feel myself constrained to write it. Every time over the past weeks that I have sat down to work on it, I have begun with dread, with the sense that I should leave it alone and leave what it says unsaid. But then every time I finish working on it, I find I have said things that I must say. It is a dreadful and particularly modern predicament that one loses one’s innocence in the defense of innocence; that one loses one’s simplicity in the defense of simplicity. I hope that readers will extend charity as they encounter perspectives here that may trouble them. My desire is to serve the true, the good, and the beautiful, and to serve justice.

Where Tradition Fails

To lay the basic groundwork for what follows: the crux of my quarrel with the Tradition of Christianity as I receive it is its failure, if not theoretical, then certainly existential and practical, to inhabit and valorize fully the finite, created world. I think this is the essential thrust of all desire for “re-enchantment,” or what fellow travellers here have called “liturgical realism.” We want both to understand the grounding of the world’s beauty in the divine, and to grasp the character of that beauty as revelation of God’s wisdom and, perhaps more sharply, of the secret heart of Creation itself.

We want to grasp and live the erotic impulse as the radical presence of a creative love truly handed over by God in His kenosis to the created being’s keeping. In this vision we long to unify the reality of God as Creator with the proper reality of Creation in the very abyss of its createdness — we long to see Creation and created things in that inarticulable, meonic depth of what Berdyaev called, following Boehme, the Ungrund (whether or not we follow Boehme and Berdyaev in the full theoretical implications of that word) from which their truly free creative response to God arises.

Deep calleth unto deep, at the voice of Thy cataracts. (Psalm 41:8)

Der Abgrund meines Geists ruft immer mit Geschrei den Abgrund Gottes an. Sag: welcher tiefer sei? (Angelus Silesius)

All created things share in this vocation, this gift, this reality; all of the “cosmic flesh” of which we are made, all of the historicity and specificity of our concrete, embodied being on earth. I take this as the fundamental impulse and insight of Sophiology. Sophiology as a whole represents a new impulse to take Creation seriously as the embodiment of divine Wisdom; Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s distinction of divine and creaturely Sophia is an attempt to do justice to the soul’s burning demand to reconcile the reality of God and the proper reality of created things — to prevent Creation, to prevent ourselves, to prevent our love, from falling, in the failure of our spiritual vision and the dazzling of our spiritual eyes, into the all-consuming fire of a divine Absolute construed according to the demands of a merely human reason.

We could easily exhaust ourselves in an artificially truncated examination of our very embodiment, in the specificity of this body and its life. This examination is of course of capital importance, since this locus is a most pressing and immediate area of concern, and one where the Tradition’s spiritualizing view has resulted, as I have often written, in a sadomasochistic history of false asceticism and the social contagion of cruelty that is its existential obverse. (Of course, there is also a true asceticism that is the participation of the whole person, body and soul, in the heart’s kenosis as it pours itself out in an erotic Exodus from itself; there is an asceticism that is an ecstatic oblation in love of body, mind, and heart, and I know that this is the deepest reality of the asceticism counselled by the Tradition.)

Sex and Sanctity

Still, we must not permit our examination to exhaust itself here; we must expand the Sophiological inquiry into wider realities. Because of course, our concrete flesh, like our soul (of which it is a face), is only apparently isolable. In reality it is inescapably linked with wider circles of embodiment, both physical and spiritual. By the former, I mean identifiable, intelligible constellations arising from the nature of human physicality as fundamentally transmitted through sexual reproduction: the sexual dyad of mother and father; the extended family; and in widening circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation (or “race”), and wider humanity as such, the planetary reality of the human species.

The Assault of Modernity On the Person

The movement of what pragmatically I must call “leftism” or “progressivism” or most generally “liberalism,” referring to an entire existential and historical trend more or less coterminous with “modernity,” is one of the progressive de-valorization of circles below some tentatively ultimate level of abstraction. Liberalism seems always to be reaching higher for “more abstract” abstractions to valorize over and against any that have come before, viz. the current impulse generally called “transhumanism,” which is for the moment its forward edge — hence its capture of formal leftist political institutions and propaganda organs. (I should clarify at this juncture that I see essentially no formal political institutions or organizations that are not “liberal” in this sense. “Conservatives” qua classical liberals are more properly “right liberals”; progressives are left liberals; thus, “they’re all liberals,” particularly in the United States, even if the right liberals are tardy in their adoption of the nostrums of the left liberal vanguard.)

The heart of liberalism’s war against reality is of course its war against the person, the drowning of the person — that unique bearer of freedom and the vocation of love — in the ocean of one or another collectivity: that is, not seeing the collectivity as one in which the person participates, but one in which the person is exhaustively accounted for, explained, reduced. That is, the person is a “nothing but.” In the guise of an explanation that ultimately explains nothing and wins its apparent success only by means of a huckster’s redirection of attention, this reductive tendency elevates for adoration what is finally an idol. To that idol, it sacrifices the person: hence the diabolical Golgothas of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Gaza, Hiroshima, the Middle Passage, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, the Clearances, the “Satanic mills.”

But the spirit of the age is wily. As I have written elsewhere, on the one hand, it proceeds by the direct dissolution of the person qua individual; but on the other hand, it proceeds more subtly by a refusal of the various levels of historical “flesh” in which the person must be embodied, must take form. This latter is the preferred ontological acid of a “right liberalism,” viz. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no society; there are only individuals.”

Our Deeper Bodies, the Pagan Christ, and the Defeat of the Machine

So then, apart from the fundamental metaphysical assault of reductionist scientism, it is the environing circles of incarnate personhood that modernity attacks in its erasure of the person — the sexual dyad attacked in Promethean individualism, individualist anarchism, and homosexualist activism; in promiscuity and pornography, in the stupefying mythology of “self-realization.” The extended family and the tribe attacked in the crushing “rationalization” of déracinement, dispossession, and the Enclosures; in industrial production, systematized usury, and titanic urbanism. The nation, the race, attacked in the reduction of homelands, “fatherlands,” “motherlands” (not accidentally so called) to deracinated “Colors of Benetton” laissez-faire economic transit zones, in the relentless xenophilic and oikophobic catechesis of the entertainment-industrial complex, in the apotheosis of universalist political and economic doctrines (democracy, capitalism, socialism, fascism).

Note the quaint lack of transhumanist gender ideology in this outdated propaganda piece. Modern versions are much more deeply uncanny. Note also the subtle racial hierarchies encoded in the staging of the models.

A Sophiological vision sees the totality of this war against reality as a war against God and against the divine depth of Creation.

National and Racial Consciousness

Above I equated “nation” and “race” in a way that may be confusing for readers. Recall simply that the etymology of nation lies in the Latin natio, which refers originally to a breed, a stock, or a race. The nation is not the state. The state is a political organ, a structure of organized coercive power and authority, that may or may not be coterminous with, or even serve, a nation; it may indeed be, as virtually all modern states are, indifferent or fundamentally hostile to the nation in the proper sense, that is, a people, identifiable biologically, linguistically, historically, culturally, religiously, and in the age that predated modern diasporas, often geographically.

Virtually the only state on earth constituted to serve a nation, rather than to suppress or destroy it, is the state of Israel. The fact that only in this singular case is the subordination of state to nation considered admirable or even acceptable is in itself a fact worthy of deepest consideration. (The Visegrád Group may harbor elements tacitly dedicated to such a program, but it is clearly a phenomenon of a qualitatively different kind.)

In any event, against all propaganda, against all the assaults on the nation that are critical elements of modernity’s assault on the person — as critical as its assaults on the family, on childhood, on the freehold, on regional dialects and accents and minority languages, on traditional crafts and self-reliance, on old-growth forests, pollinators, and watersheds — nations still exist, and even in those places where nations are under the most brutal assault, even where particular nations are forbidden to publicly name themselves, they remain realities as fundamental as the most immediate realities of individual biological existence.

Theological Foundations

More deeply, however, than simply forbidding our self-naming, the powers ranged against the true life of the nations forbid us to love the divine idea that the nation incarnates on earth. That is, we are forbidden to name ourselves, but in the end this is a mere stratagem in the war to make us hate ourselves — so that we will then acquiesce in our own ethnocide, so that we will become participants in the diabolical strategy to undo creation, the Devil’s nihilism that wants to replace all distinction with homogeneity, that flies the rainbow flag at the head of its campaign to turn the world gray — the comprehensive “heresy of formlessness.”

If Sophiology is the attempt to express the rootedness of creation in its inmost depths in divine reality, or, to be more bold, to indicate the proper divinity of creation, there must, then, be a Sophiology that sees and correctly valorizes the nation as such a “divinely informed form” — a Sophiology of the nation.

In the 1930s, the great Romanian theologian Dimitru Stăniloae (recently glorified as a saint by the Romanian Orthodox Church) wrote on this topic in a series of articles in the ecclesiastical newspaper Telegraful Român. In these articles he quotes Bulgakov’s mature works, including the first book of the “major trilogy,” The Lamb of God, published in Russian in 1933 — demonstrating that he was interacting with the Sophiological current (I am not a scholar but I assume St Dumitru was fluent in Russian). He writes:

Regarding man specifically, God created Adam and Eve at the beginning. But in them were potentially contained all nations. These are revelations in time of images that exist eternally in God. At the foundation of each national type acts an eternal divine model which that nation has to realize within itself as fully as possible… Nations are, according to their content, eternal in God. God wants them all. In each He shows a nuance of His infinite spirituality. Shall we suppress them, wanting to rectify God’s eternal work and thought? Let it not be! Rather we will hold to the existence of each nation, protesting when one wants to oppress or suppress another and preaching their harmony, for complete harmony exists also in the world of divine ideas.

To draw this Sophiological meditation on the nation in a more existentially incisive direction, I would wish to ground it in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s axiology. That is, our love of the nation — and not merely our own nation, but all nations as divinely willed, and nationhood as such — is the proper response of the human heart to a perceived value. We do not value the nation merely as self-interested individuals; the outgoing of our heart towards its integrity and beauty as a divine idea is not merely a matter of subjective self-satisfaction, nor is it merely the perception of some morally neutral vital good which is instrumental in serving some other higher purpose. Our love of our nation and our desire to serve its proper flourishing is precisely the proper response to a Hildebrandian value.

It is of utmost importance to bear this in mind as this argument proceeds — to feel in one’s heart the warmth of a genuine response to transcendent value in one’s contemplation of one’s own nation and of the genuine national diversity that characterizes the life of human beings on earth. I would argue that the fundamental spiritual purpose of liberalism is to drain, obfuscate, and “problematize” this warmth. As St Seraphim of Sarov said, the Devil is cold, and seeks to make our hearts cold. (Given my own spiritual constitution, one of the most painful examples of this diabolical coldness for me is the indifference of my people’s hearts to their own traditional music. But more on this topic below.) Our first response to the vision of our own folk should be to love them, to love their existence with a warm heart.

The very fact that there will likely be a visceral hesitation among my readers to acknowledge the value-bearing character of the nation or race as a divine idea to which we owe a morally laden response of proper service and veneration — the very fact that this assertion will likely trigger indignant objections of a thousand kinds from race doesn’t exist! to this valorization of race will lead to atrocities! — indicates that something is afoot, indicates that I am here trespassing on and exposing a stratagem that has succeeded in subverting the clear thought and feeling of a significant section, indeed, an outright majority, of educated and cultured people, at least in the “developed” west. Until five minutes ago, historically speaking, an instinctive appreciation of, and approbation of, human diversity under the heading of “race,” and of one’s own race, would have been considered so unproblematic and obvious that it could not be objected to and in fact didn’t even need to be consciously affirmed. (To be sure, there are historical reasons for this instinctive hesitation, to which I am sympathetic, and I will address these below in the context of the nation’s proper subordination to values ontologically yet higher than its own. Axiology is hierarchically ordered.)

If there is now an environmental theology that applies the resources of various theological traditions to the valorization of the natural world in an attempt to marshal them to the practical task of protecting the integrity of that world from the assaults of a capital that is unconstrained by any allegiance to deeper values, that environmental theology must be turned to a defense of the nation. If we resist the strip-mining of the natural world to serve Mammon, we must perceive the ideology of transnational homogenization, as expressed through the overpowering organs of corporate propaganda and through the legislative actions of a state captured by and in ultimate service to usurious, deracinated global capital, as another strip mining — another deforestation — another clear-cutting — another extinction — another poisoning of the air, soil, and water. The globalist project of deracination should attract the same instinctive spiritual, philosophical, theological, and political ire as the destruction of the natural world does for environmentalists, and should prompt the same level of practical questioning: How can we live a life that rejects this destruction root and branch? How can we structure our personal lives — therefore also our communal lives — in a way that serves life rather than participating in its destruction?

We should be asking ourselves not simply, how can we contribute to a rebirth of the peoples’ life on the earth, in the sense of re-establishing a vital relationship of person, community, soil, and wildlands, but explicitly — how can we contribute to the rebirth of the peoples of the earth?

A further theological grounding of the nation must come from angelology. The traditional angelology of the Church, beginning with Origen and Clement of Alexandria, holds that each nation — remembering again that this word to the ancients referred not to the state but to a people’s total intelligible character as distinct from other peoples, its “common birth” — has a tutelary angel. That angel inspires and guides it historically in its preparation to receive the Gospel. The great Ressourcement theologian and patrologist Fr Jean Daniélou ascribes the various propaedeutic wisdoms of the nations to the inspiration mediated by their angels. Filial love for the nation is thus organically related to the veneration of its angel, and through this takes on a transcendent character.

This is not an idolatry of the nation as it exists in history, any more than it is an idolatry of the person to acknowledge the guiding and inspiring reality of that person’s own guardian angel. Persons and nations also have tutelary devils which seek to draw them aside from righteousness and salvation. Prior to a person’s baptism and prior to a nation’s embrace of the Gospel, the devils have the upper hand; afterwards, the guardian angels come within the sanctuary of a person or a nation’s “soul” and guide and strengthen it from within. (There is a reason that exorcisms feature so prominently in the “great works” that witness to the divinity of the Incarnate Word. His entire economy can be seen as an exorcism.) Very truly, then, we could say that the guardian angel of the Greeks was able to inspire philosophy fully — that pagan Greek “Old Testament” — only after the nation’s ingrafting into the Incarnate Word. The true glory of Greek philosophy is neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Plotinus, but the Fathers’ “baptized Platonism.”

The Nation That May Not Be Named

I wish to offer some personal reflections at this juncture, to bring the discussion back to earth: particularly, to my own “earth” — the flesh of my own nation.

This nation is forbidden to publicly name itself except to condemn itself. This was evident, above all, in the response of the “commanding heights” of culture, politics, and media to the decade-old “It’s okay to be White” meme. The commissars and mandarins declared that it was coherent to reject this meme and yet to embrace “Black lives matter,” although in neither case can neutral reason detect anything remotely objectionable. As memes they employ the same strategy, yet one is admirable and the other is “hate speech” — what does this tell us?

How then shall I name my nation? “White” is indeed the most obvious word, yet it is so inadequate that I think the word itself might be a ruse suggested by our adversaries. In spite of the derision and vitriol it provokes from current leftist partisans (who of course refuse even to capitalize it), it does have an older pedigree than one might suspect, given that it was referred to in the earliest naturalization act of the nascent United States as a defining characteristic of those eligible for citizenship in the new Republic. A curious indication, incidentally, of the fact that the United States is not, purely, in its origins, a universalist project; it was rather the project of self-governance of a specific people — so how shall I name that people, my people?

“White” first of all falls under the problematic of “color,” that is, of the identification of national differences with something that is precisely only “skin deep.” There is nothing “skin deep” about the identity of my nation, or indeed, about the identity of any nation. The idea that national identity is “skin deep” is a misdirection that is obviously congruent with the “nothing but” reduction of persons and their environing incarnational Sophianic matrices. (Note, once again, the biological resonance in the very word matrix/mater.)

I sometimes call myself “a mongrel son of Europe.” This is warm but also inadequate; the self-deprecation, while congenial to me, cuts against the grain of what self-naming needs to achieve under current conditions in which the state that ought to be the organ of the nation’s thriving is instead implacably hostile towards it. To call ourselves “mongrels” is to accede to our abasement. “Heritage American” is making the rounds at the moment, but has many obvious disadvantages, not least that it is manifestly attempting to skirt or obfuscate the underlying stratum of common birth that is the crux of the issue.

The option where, for now, I plant a stake, pending any better option, is “Amerikaner.” Because of the resonance with the Dutch settlers of the Veldt, it suggests a people whose ethnogenesis is the result of their settlement in a land distant from their ancestors’ homeland (the same associations of course attend also the old use of the term “the Pilgrims,” with the addition of a salutary gloss of piety and reverence), and yet who are manifestly rooted in the patrimony of that ancient motherland, and manifestly in filial continuity with it despite their distinctiveness.

If the powers that be forbid us to name ourselves, if they proclaim relentlessly that we are not a people (even as they proclaim cynically that other peoples, usually the ones they are recruiting to displace us in our own homelands, are indeed peoples, and worthy of protection, succor, and veneration — an essential plank of xenophilic brainwashing), then our response must be precisely first to name ourselves, to unapologetically assert the reality, the specificity, the incommensurability, the depth, the beauty, and the goodness — the Sophianic willedness by God — of our existence as a people.

Thus I assert: I am an Amerikaner. We are a nation. Like any nation we can distinguish ourselves in many ways: biological, cultural, historical, linguistic, mythological, religious, aesthetic. We have been, even if only inchoately, conscious of our existence and identity from our beginnings. We are beautiful as well as ugly; we are precious as well as wounded; we deserve to exist because our existence is willed by God, and like all nations, we are accompanied not merely by the devils who work to draw us away from Him, but by angels to whom we may attend and who instruct us in divine mysteries — some of which mysteries are granted to us to know with unique depth and perspicacity — and draw us forward on the path of salvation. We are thus drawn forward as persons, but not as individuals. We are drawn forward as persons, and persons are inevitably rooted in, informed by, their family, their clan, their tribe, and their nation — that is to say, their race.

The Fate of My People, and of All Peoples

I noted above that the modern states, being diabolical, are implacably hostile to the nations, with one very noteworthy exception (Israel), whose nation enjoys an apparently unique right, by their lights and the lights of our own rulers, to give political and military teeth to its assertion of its right to existence and self-determination. I admire the Sabras for this. I deny that they are unique. I further deny that they have the right to draw my nation by subterfuge into the defense of their own, to make their enemies our enemies; and I observe a strange incongruence between their advocacy for their own national life, and their prominence in the propaganda movements that have undermined my own nation’s self-consciousness and capacity for a similar self assertion.

The Hart-Celler Act was the Nakba of my people — a “civilized” and initially bloodless Nakba conducted in the legal stratosphere rather than with tanks, rifles, and mortars on the dusty roads of my ancestral homeland. (It was initially bloodless, but has become more bloody as it has come to fruition, of course.) The strategic genius of it is strangely admirable. Cloaked in soothing nostrums that would appeal to the dulled sensibilities of the most coddled generation in history, it initiated a generational democide: the marginalization of the Amerikaners in the lands we had settled. When we sit today and watch Piers Morgan utterly unable to comprehend why any young person would listen to Nick Fuentes, all we have to do is remember that Morgan and his confreres grew up in a world in which the national founding stocks were still ascendant, and enjoyed all the benefits of this ascendancy, whereas Fuentes and his partisans have grown up in the successor society — a racial Balkans in which the ruling authority doesn’t even have the perennial wisdom of empire (which historically allowed empires’ constituent nations their own territories of internal predominance as long as they paid their taxes), but instead applies every available tool of legal compulsion, pulls every lever of mass propaganda, to force the nations into the same spaces — spaces where inevitably, they are in cultural and demographic conflict. For the regime, homogenization — that is, the destruction of the nations — is their final solution.

(And by the way, if your heart does not rebel at the prospect of the global death of the nations, at the elimination of this diversity, your vision is inadequate. You do not see the depth of the beauty of your own folk, or of any other. You lack the central and architectonic virtue seen by von Hildebrand: reverence. Seek it.)

Zoomers live this conflict and pay the price. Some give up in one way or another and succumb to dissociative psychoses such as elective homosexuality, gender dysphoria, Tumblr subcultures, or collectivist radicalism: the less “agentic” into the mere sedation of the algorithms. Who can blame them? But other Zoomers notice, and having noticed, stand up, and refuse — to be sure, it is mostly an inchoate, angry, feral refusal, but a refusal nonetheless. And who can blame them for this? I can’t blame them, but I can counsel them — as long as I am not a Piers Morgan, wholly dedicated to (and richly rewarded for) my willful failure to see the betrayal of my fathers.

This is the world that we are facing. And not just we Amerikaners: every nation is facing this situation, because the forces ranged against us all, ranged against the real, concrete diversity of the peoples of the world, grinding and crushing and reducing us to a demographic slurry, with embodied culture replaced by the ersatz schlock and pabulum of vapid mass “culture” delivered to the terminally online (increasingly, and by design, to everyone), are global.

What is of utmost importance is that the current situation spark the rebirth of our national consciousness by means of the rebirth of our culture in the deepest sense — that our national awareness take first of all a positive form, an axiological form of service to the transcendent value of our national existence as the embodiment of God’s wisdom in creation, under the guidance of angelic powers, rather than a merely negative form, a nihilism of rage that can only end by descending into cruelty, barbarism, and destruction. In other words, that finally betrays both itself and God.

There was a great man, the son of a noble folk, who saw his people persevere through this kind of darkness.

Pope St John Paul II said: “I am the son of a nation which has lived the greatest experiences of history, which its neighbors have condemned to death several times, but which has survived and remained itself. It has kept its identity, and it has kept, in spite of partitions and foreign occupations, its national sovereignty, not by relying on the resources of physical power, but solely by relying on its culture…. [I think] with deep interior emotion, of the cultures of so many ancient peoples which did not give way when confronted with the civilizations of the invaders: and they still remain for man the source of his ‘being’ as a man in the interior truth of his humanity.”¹

All of this great man’s meditations on colonialism, on national identity and a properly rooted Christian humanism that environs it without negating it, lay the foundations for the kind of national rebirth for which I am advocating here. All of these deserve utmost consideration by hearts that see the mortal danger of the present moment but want to respond from the depth and truth of the Gospel rather than from some recrudescent barbarism. They bring the sublime hope of the Gospel, the story of humanity’s deliverance from death, into the intermediate ontological spaces of our historical flesh — giving hope not just for our own individual deliverance from death, but for a personal deliverance from death that includes the regeneration of the family, the tribe, and the nation.

This courage under mortal existential danger, this determination for a national rebirth where we must trust not in princes, in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation — this is our task.

What We Must Hold Together

And yet, even for those who are willing to look outside the Overton window and acknowledge everything I have already said, there are mortal dangers. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. Nietzsche, that great and tragic anti-nihilist and Yes-sayer, knew that we could become monsters. In this, on the cusp of a century of murder and dissolution, he was prescient, as always.

There are two essential components to our proper response, when we have seen and cannot unsee. It’s here, in holding these two components together with martyric determination if necessary, that there is a noble way to bear the agony that arises after we have seen — after we have seen the beauty of our nation, and the diabolical cunning and mortal hostility of its enemy. (And again — it is not merely my nation that faces this enemy — it is every nation.)

One: we must defend our nation — foremost through exhortation, through awakening, through a deeper personal possession of the vision of its beauty and through our participation, in whatever way God’s gifts enable us, in the service of the nation by kindling the love of it in the hearts of our people. There is a great deal of radically important work here for artists and philosophers and theologians and religious leaders. But that is only first. After that comes the political and metapolitical task which demands, and not merely demands, but builds, from within the ruins if necessary, a state in service of this nation, rather than one dedicated to its destruction.

Thinking through the character of this state — which perhaps might be modeled more on the multi-ethnic empires of old, rather than on the modern attempts at the constitution of a nation-state — is something that comes into view as a great work and one that, given the forbidden character of the concern, languishes still without cultural and institutional resources for its elaboration, if not without the sporadic genius of a brave vanguard. Above all, we must develop the resolute determination to refuse acquiescence in our own destruction and express this determination in whatever way we can, both within established structures and movements and outside them.

This practical work may fail, as Pope St John Paul II noted above with regard to his own people (though we should not become defeatists and assume it will fail, however grim the circumstances may seem). It may fail for periods of centuries. If we are facing such a national Sonnenuntergang, what will preserve us through the coming night is our culture, and that means, above all, the persistence of our embodied memory.

But there is something more that will, by God’s grace, preserve us, and here I arrive at the crux of what I wish to say to the persuaded and the half-persuaded; perhaps it will help bring the latter on board.

I desire the life of my nation — but I do not merely desire its life, I desire its thriving, its fulfillment. And therefore above all, I desire its growth in virtue, and that means, in the virtues, as these have come down to us in our tradition: originating in the propaedeutic wisdom of our ancients, and perfected and enlightened by Christian faith. I desire my people’s vital well-being — our physical and cultural health and strength: but I do not desire only this, and I do not desire this at any cost. There is an axiological hierarchy, as I noted above. Particularly, I do not desire the strengthening of our vital existence at the cost of sacrificing faith, hope, and charity, because I know that ultimately, that too is a path to an even deeper destruction. “Death before dishonor.”

The supreme good of my people is our free subjection to eternal truths, as those are mediated through Christian faith. Therefore “leadership” that is venal, vulgar, and vicious is finally no real leadership at all. I will leave aside the advisability of hitching our wagon to such “leadership” on some alleged ground of pragmatism; to me, it is a betrayal, and I am quite convinced that virtually all such “leaders” will prove to be wolves in sheep’s clothing at best, and enemies of our people (or perhaps, covert friends of the enemies of our people).

Of course, I am here thinking of Donald Trump and virtually every high-ranking person in his circle. At best, what is happening in this phenomenon, as is more than apparent to me when I see the foreign policy decisions and the execrable personal moral standards, the self-dealing that is characteristic of banana republics, is the cynical exploitation of my people’s despair and abasement. Here, an amoral charlatan harnesses the inchoate nationalist sentiment of my people to fuel his own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, indifferently and cynically furthering the national goals of the historical architects of my people’s marginalization in their own homeland. What use could we possibly have for such a leader? With friends like this, who needs enemies?

What applies to Donald Trump applies orders of magnitude more to the manifestations of the “Old Right” in the 20th century. The “great figures” of this movement were, almost to a man, grotesque and verminous caricatures of anything my people would recognize as true nobility. Himmlers, Görings, Goebbelses — pathetic, vicious beasts — are not wanted here.

The heroic righteousness of our greatest national heroes includes both a filial devotion to their nation, and a higher devotion that sees it in the light of truths that embrace all of humanity — and there is no contradiction between these things. On the contrary, they mutually condition and support one another. We can love the stranger, and not hate our literal brother according to the flesh.

We can say with Terence Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, and yet desire to live under the authority of a state constituted to defend and further the integrity of our life as a distinct people — because we love the divine beauty incarnate in our complete embodied existence, because we love the color of our skin and hair and eyes, because we love the shape of our faces, because we love the desirable and fruitful beauty of our young women and men, because we love the radiance of our children, because we love the nobility of our heroes and elders, because we mourn the abasement and despair of our poor, because we love the epic of our history, because we love the pathos of our music and song, because we love our saints and their holy places, because we love the roots that extend over the great sea to our Urheimat, the cold northern Cuiviénen where at the Creator’s call we first awoke to the sight of the stars and the glory of the mountain fastnesses and cataracts and caves of our Dreamtime.

None of this love is contrary to the love of God; on the contrary, any supposed love of God that dogmatically excludes it is a deception. Properly ordered, it is gratitude for His Creation in the utmost intimacy of our life as persons incarnate in earthly history. And a noble and righteous wrath exercised in defense of this love is also something to be praised and devoutly desired.

1. From his address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980.