Seeking Christendom: An Augustinian Defense of Western Civilization

A brave, eccentric few stood at the precipice of evil in the twentieth century, peered into the Abyss, and defended what remained of the ancient and medieval realm of the West with all the force imaginable. “To repeat: in this twentieth century of the Christian era the real contest is between the power of transcendent faith and the power of the totalist revolt against order,” Russell Kirk wrote pointedly in 1963. “In our hour of crisis the key to real power, to the command of reality which the higher imagination gives, remains the fear of God.” Real men—such as Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Paul Elmer More, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Aurel Kolnai, Romano Guardini, Owen Barfield, Eric Voegelin, Nicholas Berdyaev, Thomas Merton, Frank Sheed, Wilhelm Röpke, Richard Weaver, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI to name a few—upheld the traditional concept of each human person as an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom, deeply flawed but also as a bearer of the Imago Dei. In their many works of faith and scholarship, these men analyzed and explained the innumerable terrors of the twentieth century and argued that the solution to such horrors was really quite simple: to reclaim our faith in the True God, to embrace the moral and beautiful image found in each soul, and to reclaim His gift to us, our humanity. “Man is man because he can recognise spiritual realities,” Eliot wrote, “not because he can invent them.” Each of these men was, to varying degrees, a Platonist, a Stoic, and a romantic. “Thus the whole universe is, as it were, the shadow of God and has its being in the contemplation or reflection of the Being of God,” Dawson wrote in 1930. The spiritual nature reflects the Divine consciously, while the animal nature is a passive and unconscious mirror.” Each of these men, again to varying degrees, also viewed St. Augustine as the saint of the twentieth century. Most importantly for this book, each desired a well-ordered Christian society, rooted in the ancient traditions of Athens and Rome and informed by the moral and ethical rules as understood from St. Paul to John of Salisbury and expressed, most successfully, in the Anglo-Saxon traditions of governance, common law, and inherited rights.