It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. (ch. 18; unless otherwise noted, all emphases added)

I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs. (Introduction, emphasis in original)

Benedict’s example gives us hope today, because it reveals what a small cohort of believers who respond creatively to the challenges of their own time and place can accomplish by channeling the grace that flows through them from their radical openness to God, and embodying that grace in a distinct way of life. … This is not just about our own survival. If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have. (ch. 1)

    Put more plainly, unbelievers today who cannot make sense of the Gospel’s propositions may yet have a life-changing wordless encounter with the Gospel through Christian art or works of Christian love that pull them outside themselves and confront them with the reality of Christ.
    The first Christians gained converts not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful—and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth. (The Benedict Option, ch. 5)

Though unabashedly rooted in the rich and fertile conservative tradition, Crunchy Cons seeks to go beyond the shopworn ideological categories of left and right. … It’s time we stopped asking what’s conservative and what’s liberal. Maybe instead we should create a new politics by asking: What’s good? What’s true? What’s beautiful? What’s authentically human?”

The original subtitle of this book … promised ideas that might save the Republican Party. But now I doubt it’s worth saving in its present form. … This suggests that the crunchy cons should embrace the practice of what Vaclav Havel called “anti-political politics”—choosing to combat the cynicism and emptiness of formal politics by living virtuously and generously in one’s own community.

I mean that in great fiction we obtain the distilled wisdom of men of genius, understandings of human nature which we could attain—if at all—unaided by books, only at the end of life, after numberless painful experiences. I began to read Sir Walter Scott when I was twelve or thirteen; and I think I learnt from the Waverley novels, and from Shakespeare, more of the varieties of character than ever I have got since from the manuals of psychology.

And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore. … He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. (1Ki 4:29-33 ESV)

Even after we have shared these thoughts, feelings, and images, we will still have much to learn: We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something—not much, but something—of our position in space and time. We will know how we have emerged from our long human history. . . . Just as important, we will have acquired models of high thought and feeling. (Fadiman & Major xix-xx)

First page of The Wanderer from the Exeter Book. Courtesy of Wikipedia. Click on the link above for additional information.

Though most writers hold setting as an important part of the overall effectiveness of a poem’s imagery, the author of The Wanderer is especially astute in bringing his poem’s setting (the sea, the darkness, and time) into direct association with the narrator’s own feelings (loneliness, sorrow, and helplessness). The reader encounters the image of the sea in the very first stanza of the poem: Often the solitary one finds grace for himself the mercy of the Lord, Although he, sorry-hearted, must for a long time move by hand along the waterways, the ice cold sea, tread the paths of exile. Events always go as they must. (lines 1-5)

Sorrow is renewed
when the mind surveys
the memory of kinsman;
He greets them joyfully,
eagerly scans
the companions of men;
they always swim away. (50b-53)

Indeed I cannot think
why my spirit
does not darken
when I ponder on the whole
life of men
throughout the world. (58-60)

Now there stands in the trace
of the beloved troop
a wall, wondrously high,
wound round with serpents.
The warriors taken off
by the glory of the spears,
the weapons greedy for slaughter,
the famous fate,
and storms beat
these rocky cliffs,
falling frost
fetters the earth,
the harbinger of winter;
Then dark comes,
nightshadows [sic] deepen,
from the north there comes
a rough hailstorm
in malice against men.
All is troublesome
in this earthly kingdom,
the turn of events changes
the world under the heavens.
Here money is fleeting,
here friend is fleeting,
here man is fleeting,
here kinsman fleeting,
all the foundation of this world
turns to waste! (97-110)

The Pearl Poet (flourished circa 1375-1400), manuscript painting. Depicted as the father in his poem, Pearl.

Of Jerusalem my tale doth tell,
If you will know what His nature be,
My Lamb, my Lord, my dear Jewel,
My Joy, my Bliss, my Truelove free.
. . . . . . .

In Jerusalem was my True-love slain,
On the rood by ruffians fierce was rent;
Willing to suffer all our pain
To Himself our sorrows sad He lent.
With cruel blows His face was flain
That was to behold so excellent:
He for sin to be set at naught did deign,
Who of sin Himself was innocent.
Beneath the scourge and thorns He bent,
And stretched on a cross’s brutal stem
As meek as lamb made no lament,
And died for us in Jerusalem. (792-795, 805-816; see 2Co 5:21; 1Pe 2:21-24)

To please that Prince, or pardon shown,
May Christian good with ease design;
For day and night I have Him known
A God, a Lord, a Friend divine.
This chance I met on mound where prone
In grief for my pearl I would repine;
With Christ’s sweet blessing and mine own
I then to God it did resign.
. . . . . . .
Amen, Amen. (1201-1208)

In the Greek west, the tyrant Agathokles of Syracuse took the royal title in 304, some twelve years after seizing power over his city from an oligarchic regime, ‘since he thought that neither in power nor in territory nor in deeds was he inferior to them’ (the Diadochoi; Diod. 20. 54. 1.). (Diodoros, 19.5-31. 17 passim, is our main source, mostly using Timaios.) Already exiled twice, Agothokles was apparently recalled by the people and, with Carthaginian help, returned in 319/8, becoming ‘strategos (general) with full powers over the strongholds in Sicily’ (Parian Marble (FGH 239), B 12, Austin 21, Harding 1 a). Three years later he overthrew the six hundred oligarchs and became strategos in charge of the city, in effect a tyrant (Diod. 19. 9. 4.).

The Spartan sort of education, [Aristotle] observed, was systematically defective, in that it aimed to inculcate only one kind of virtue, martial courage, and tended therefore to turn out . . . ‘beast-like’ . . . Spartans [who held to a] practice that presumably not even Roger Scruton would wish to invoke as ancestral legitimation of his own pastime of choice. (Cartledge 281)

“Oh! certainly,” cried his [Mr. Darcy’s] faithful assistant [Miss Bingley], “no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” (ch. 8)

Sin affects everyone, male and female, in every station, from the noble to the peasant, and so (continues Kantor) Austen’s novels are defined by this fundamental conviction “that every member of the human race, male or female, is capable of vice and folly and has a duty to struggle against them. This struggle – not the war between the sexes or a campaign of subversive resistance to the patriarchy – provides the drama in Jane Austen’s novels.” (Wiker 242)

A seed was being planted; women’s communities were demanding a more central intellectual role in European life. This seed would blossom into the revolutionary feminist works at the end of the century: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Women.

Neither in her life, nor in her writings, was Jane Austen a rebel. Her chief concern was virtue, not rebellion, and against the liberal attempt to erase the distinctions between man and woman, Jane always distinguished between the particular virtues appropriate to men and women, as well as their particular vices and follies. (Wiker 228)

Sadly, both original species presented by Austen are largely extinct. Women like Elinor [or Elizabeth] have been driven out of the culture by force or ridicule, and the Mariannes [and Kittys] have given way to something even more alarming. The Romantics might have been destructive of themselves and others (as they are in Austen’s novels), but Romanticism has been replaced by something far worse, nihilism  – what is really the fulfillment of Romanticism and liberalism. (Wiker 231)

If we are to continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of Nature. It can be valid only if it is an offshoot of some absolute moral wisdom, a moral wisdom which exists absolutely ‘on its own’ and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature. (60)