NEW COLLEGE FRANKLIN

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“As the classical renewal has matured and become increasingly familiar with its own rich heritage, more and more people are discovering the value and power in the liberating arts as understood in that heritage. I know of no college that pursues the wisdom of those arts, especially as embodied in the quadrivium, with the intensity and insight of New College Franklin. If you want a deeper harmony and a higher wisdom, consider NCF!”

- Andrew Kern, President of CiRCE

www.newcollegefranklin.org

It is easy to rhapsodize when speaking of Malcolm Guite. An English poet, priest, singer-songwriter, and author of several volumes of poetry, scholarship, and spiritual contemplation, Guite is that rare poet who writes intensely while living joyfully. In a literary landscape populated by subversive themes and free verse, Guite remains a jubilant composer of accessible formalist poetry with both intensely human and deeply spiritual themes. Although an academic by training, Guite is no elitist. He writes “from the church and for the church,” making his poetry readily available to all on his blog. During the troubled months of the international pandemic, Malcolm Guite has been living simply with his wife in their small village in the English countryside, where he has written a series of poetic contemplations on the sorrows and the joys of life in lockdown. I spoke with him about God, life, poetry, and pandemics.

This has been quite an intense year worldwide. It’ s an international season of collective trauma. What have you noticed about the world as you have experienced 2020?

I've certainly found that poetry—both reading and writing it—has come into its own in this crisis. Suddenly we have the time and the focus for it. It speaks into the depths in this crisis; asking fundamental questions about the shape of our lives, about when all our plans and dreams are suddenly cast aside. We have to exist in the moment and think, who am I and why should I be this way? We need the best resources available, and certainly the imaginative arts and the deep resources of faith are there to help us.

How has this season of widespread crisis impacted you as a poet?

The very early days of our lockdown weren’t gradual, but very sudden. One March day, the prime minister said, “Everybody stay at home.” Suddenly everything stopped. Gradually we became aware that the skies were clearer. There were no jet trails; the air was purer. The constant sound of traffic on nearby roads, which fringed and shadowed any attempted silence, was gone. The silence was suddenly there like a very deep gift. You heard the bird song much more. You felt a kind of kindred kindliness towards your neighbors because we were all going through the same sort of thing. So certainly the very things that are the conditions for writing poetry were suddenly much more present and available.

The first part of the lockdown, particularly with this sort of rewilding and return of nature felt really quite like a gift. But of course, alongside that there was a gradual awareness of the tragic side of everything that was going on. Even in our small village, one became aware of people who had fallen ill or people who knew people who had fallen ill. Then, for those who were suffering, there was the dreadful isolation from their loved ones; you couldn’t visit or touch. That kind of sorrow needed to find a poetic expression.

How have you developed that poetic expression during the days of lockdown?

One of the first things that I found myself doing was rereading various old favorite poems. One of those was the lovely little translation of a medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. There’s a translation made in the nineteenth century by Fitzgerald which has reflections on mortality, but also on the grace and beauty of the present moment. It has a kind of romantic element to it as well. There’s a lovely bit where the poet addresses his beloved. They’re in a little garden all by themselves on the edge of the wilderness and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t need anything else. There’s a famous verse and it goes:

Here with a Flask of Wine beneath the Bough, A Loaf of Bread, a Book of Verse — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

I was rereading this, which is written in these beautiful quatrain forms; four lines chiming on just one rhyme on the unrhymed line. I felt drawn to write my own kind of quarantine quatrains—to reply across the centuries to this poet. I’ve just published it with a fine artist doing illustrations. We are offering a limited edition to raise money for the care workers’ charity here. I wrote it in seven parts and as the crisis deepened it became like a journal.

What aspects of lockdown did you contemplate in the Quarantine Quatrains?

I started with this celebration of nature and gradually moved into what it was like to have Zoom meetings. I’ll share one or two verses from the different sections that will give you a sense of my own journey as a poet through those early parts of lockdown. Here are the opening three verses. The original poem, the Rubaiyat begins:

AWAKE! For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And lo! The Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light

I echoed that opening line. This is what I wrote for the beginning of lockdown.

1

Awake to what was once a busy day

When you would rush and hurry on your way Snatch at your breakfast, start the grim commute But time and tide have turned another way.

2

For now, like you, the day is yawning wide And all its old events are set aside It opens gently for you, takes its time And holds for you -whatever you decide. 3

This morning’s light is brighter than it seems Your room is raftered with its golden beams

The bowl of night was richly filled with sleep And dawn’s left hand is holding all your dreams

After a couple of other sections, I talk about the strangeness of Zoom. On the one hand we feel deeply isolated without it and yet at the same time it teases you. You feel like your friends are there but they’re not quite. You open your heart to the possibilities of this deeper exchange and in the end it’s only a screen. Here’s a few little verses about

Zoom that might resonate with your readers.

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Some days I am diverted by a call: The soft computer chime that summons all To show a face to faces that we meet Mirages, empty mirrors on the wall.

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Alas that all the friends we ever knew Whose lives were fragrant and whose touch was true Can only meet us on some little screen Then zoom away with scarcely an adieu.

The section finishes with the hope and promise that one day we’ll break bread and share wine together. I began with the celebration of the return of nature, but as the crisis progressed, the poem changed.

How so?

Every evening my wife and I would listen to the radio. Every evening they told us the number of people who were dying—and the number kept growing. We had friends who were nurses. One was a nurse in a COVID-19 intensive care ward. She was utterly worn out and yet, again and again, kept giving of herself. So I ended the poem with a more somber tone. It invites us to discover how faith meets this crisis. This is the final section—section seven of Quarantine Quatrains:

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At close of day I hear the gentle rain Whilst experts on the radio explain Mind-numbing numbers, rising by the day, Cyphers of unimaginable pain

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Each evening they announce the deadly toll And patient voices calmly call the roll I hear the numbers, cannot know the names Behind each number, mind and heart and soul

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Behind each number one beloved face A light in life whom no-one can replace, Leaves on this world a signature, a trace, A gleaning and a memory of grace

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All loved and loving, carried to the grave

The ones whom every effort could not save Amongst them all those carers whose strong love Bought life for others with the lives they gave.

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The sun sets and I find myself in prayer Lifting aloft the sorrow that we share Feeling for words of hope amidst despair I voice my vespers through the quiet air:

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O Christ who suffers with us, hold us close, Deep in the secret garden of the rose, Raise over us the banner of your love And raise us up beyond our last repose.

In this poem I hear this contrast of life and death: the paradox that they exist in the same space and that we feel them intensely at the same time, both the sorrow and the joy. I also hear the cradling of formal elements—the cadence and the iambs. The contrast and the paradox in the poem are held by the form.

The form is very dear to me. One of the things that is distinct about the kind of poetry I write is that it is a bit of a rebellion against the free verse that’s fashionable in modern poetry. But I love the music and sound of it.

Perhaps the best way to explain my feel for rhythm and rhyme and the musical pattern of sound is if I tell you a story. I once had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney when he won the Wilfred Owen Memorial Prize. Of course, Wilfred Owen was a great war poet. Giving Heaney that prize was a way of acknowledging that in his patient and steadfast witness to the eternal verities in the midst of the Irish troubles he too, in his own way, had been a war poet. So of course we talked about the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I asked Heaney about the way he read Owen. I started to recite Wilfred Owen’s extraordinary “Anthem for Doomed Youth”— “what passing-bells for those who die as cattle.” Heaney’s eyes lit up and he took it up with his own voice. He recited [those lines] by memory:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.

And then he stopped to look at me and he said, “It’s the music that makes that both poignant and bearable—the music as it speaks into atrocity.” And he said, “I think of the musical elements in a poem—the assonance, the meter, the rhyme, all play with sound as being a bit like the joists under a floorboard or the springing under a dance floor that you don’t see it at first, but it’s there holding the weight and sustaining the step.” As he looked at me he just suddenly came out of nowhere with this great line: “And I think the greater the weight of grief a line of poetry is asked to bear, the more musically must it be under sprung the joists beneath it must be. There has to be a beauty to sustain the grief.” I thought it was just such a beautiful image. I learned a lot from that conversation with Heaney. It confirmed my view that I should continue to care about meter and rhyme, to use form, and to find in the form a way of both sustaining and honoring the subject of the verse.

You also have conversations in the Quarantine Quatrains that reply across the centuries to Omar Khayyam, T.S. Eliot, and others.

A number of poetic allusions all the way through. I’ve got one where I have a conversation with Yeats, a poet whom I love. I was thinking about Yeats’ famous poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats is talking about his home. He’s in London and he’s “treading the pavements grey,” but always in his heart, he hears the water lapping. “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” So I wrote one of my Quarantine Quatrains about being in my garden on a Sunday morning, feeling the sense of Sabbath rest, but in absolute stillness. At that time we were seeing pictures in the news of Piccadilly Circus and Marble Arch and all these empty London streets. So I entered into a conversation.

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From Marble Arch and all along The Mall Only the pigeons still stand sentinel And all the streets that thronged with rush and fret Are soaked in silence almost magical.

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No needs to find the Isle of Innisfree, Or seek with Brendan Islands in the sea For now the town and countryside alike Partake the Sabbath rest of Galilee

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And all that smudge of noise, the muffled roar Of distant rush hour traffic is no more The ‘roadway and the pavement grey’ both keep A greater silence in the deep hearts core.

That’s lovely. I resonate with how the Quarantine Quatrains engage with shared suffering throughout the world. We have an opportunity right now as individuals and as an international community to participate in shared suffering and to bear it on behalf of others.

If you think about it, there could not be a more vivid demonstration of the truth that although we’re all individuals and separate we are one humanity. We’re all physically connected. If you think about it, since the virus is spread by touch and breath, there is a chain of physical human touch and connection unbroken which actually binds us together.

Now, sadly, in terms of COVID, that touch is actually a chain of illness and suffering, but there’s absolutely no reason why there shouldn’t be a similar chain of love and redemption. We are not so separate from one another, as we once thought. No country is isolated from another and no individual is really isolated from their community.

We have to see this revelation of the commonness of our humanity, which has come to us in a shadowed form, and we have to readdress it and speak light, a common light, a shared light, back into the shadow.

Then what is intended for evil becomes redeemed through a different way of seeing it. It is an illumination of grace.

That is what redemption is. Redemption is taking something bent, twisted, awry, and making it good again. Restoring it. It’s not about zapping and eliminating something. It’s about setting something back again in the place and order that it needs to be.

How can those of us who have felt lost under the shadow experience that illuminating redemption?

There’s certainly a lot for us to learn. I’ve found that I often reread passages that I have known and loved but have lain fallow in my mind. I’ve been reading a lot of the poet John Donne, both the poetry and the prose meditations. He wrote a little book which was effectively his own sort of pandemic journal called Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, which he wrote when the plague came to London in the early seventeenth century. He was a parish priest at that point and stayed in London rather than going off to the countryside as some people did. That is where the famous passage that everybody quotes comes from: “Therefore, send not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for thee.” It tolls for every man. He says: “any man’s death diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind.” Everybody quotes that famous petrarch: “No man is an island, / Entire of itself, /Each is a piece of the continent” but they don’t quite have the end of it. The end of it is a wonderful new image: the image of a book. To paraphrase, he says that when a person dies a page is not torn out of a bound volume of the book of life, but is wrought out of the book of our life here. Each page is translated into a better language so that that same page may be open forever as we will always be open forever to one another in that library, where every book lies open. Of course, he is referring to heaven. It’s a wonderful idea that we are somehow bound together in a volume. Death is a kind of translation so that everything we are is not lost, but reexpressed in an eternal language.

That’s the language of the church—the translation of the saints. Your poetry often reflects on the liturgical life of the church. What has it been like in the pandemic to be disconnected from the church? How have you maintained that connection?

That has been a great challenge for all of us. I’ve often felt that although it’s wonderful to have virtual meetings, I feel very strongly that the physical presence of one with another and of our Lord with us through the sacrament of communion is essential. I haven’t changed my mind about that, but I also recognize that in extremis we have to honor and love one another by not spreading a disease. So we had to close down our churches.

As a priest I could have celebrated communion at home with and for my family. I did consider that, but in the end I thought it was part of solidarity with the church to wait with everybody else. I found that music became a huge resource. We gathered beautiful music and poetry together to enrich the liturgy in as many ways as we could. But really I was waiting for that moment of return. We’ve been able to return for a bit, although, sadly, I think we may be going into another fairly strict lockdown. Return may have just been an interlude.

What has been the hardest part of separation from the church?

For me, the real focus was Easter. I could not imagine an Easter without communion. Again, I found that I had to ask the question, where is Christ?

The only way I could answer was with poetry. I wrote a poem called “Easter 2020.” When I put this poem out on my blog, it was the single most read and downloaded piece

I’ve ever written. We’ve obviously tapped a cord. In fact, later on the New Testament scholar and theologian N.T. Wright produced a very good short book of theological reflections on the COVID crisis, and, with my permission, he quoted the whole of my poem in the book. I wrote it on Holy Saturday, anticipating Easter day. I wrote so late on Holy Saturday that it was practically the dawn of Easter day. I just kept asking this question, where is Jesus? So here’s the poem:

And where is Jesus, this strange Easter day? Not lost in our locked churches, anymore Than he was sealed in that dark sepulchre. The locks are loosed; the stone is rolled away, And he is up and risen, long before, Alive, at large, and making his strong way Into the world he gave his life to save, No need to seek him in his empty grave.

He might have been a wafer in the hands

Of priests this day, or music from the lips

Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips

Away from church, shakes off our linen bands

To don his apron with a nurse: he grips

And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands

The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

On Thursday we applauded, for he came And served us in a thousand names and faces Mopping our sickroom floors and catching traces Of that corona which was death to him: Good Friday happened in a thousand places Where Jesus held the helpless, died with them That they might share his Easter in their need, Now they are risen with him, risen indeed.

I am so moved by your poetic record of this international crisis. That’s one of the functions of poetry over the centuries. As we suffer and engage in the mysteries of being human there’s somebody keeping a record of those paradoxes and contradictions and creating beauty out of them so that in the darkness, we can see threads of light

Think about Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and other poets taking on the immense crisis of the First World War. They found a way to speak of the pity of war, but also just the sheer humanity of those who gave their lives. There were poets there and there needed to be poets there. Of course, it is the same with a writer like Heaney in the course of the Irish troubles. When the Good Friday peace agreement was signed, politicians and journalists were quoting Seamus Heaney’s poetry. It is extraordinary how it spoke to them, and the same is true of a poet like Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Lithuanian and Nobel Prize winner, who wrote his poetry in exile. We always need poets in crisis.

What have you experienced in terms of writing in this season versus writing in more settled times? Does it feel different to you? Does it have a different kind of weight?

There’s always a time when you’re writing, when suddenly it becomes intense and necessary to write. The combination of an emptier diary and a sense of shared crisis made the concentration of writing easier. As you mentioned, a lot of my writing responds to the liturgical year; it is a kind of conversation with either the liturgy or the texts of Scripture.

One of the things that I found in the pattern of the Daily Prayers within the Church of England is that the core of morning and evening prayer is the Psalms. You say two or three psalms at each of those offices and eventually, over the course of a month or so, you work your way through the Psalter. I suddenly found those psalms coming alive for me in the crisis. De Profundis: “out of the deep I have called to you, Lord hear my voice.”

There’s so much in the Psalms about people being fearful for their lives, about the sense of having been abandoned, about yearning for God to come back and to reassure; and then also wonderful moments of reassurance and depth of praise and the sense of things being transfigured. All of them have got this tremendous sense of being rooted in something more than the passing of events in your world. The Psalms are the poetry book of the Bible embedded in the heart of the Scriptures.

So after I’d finished the Quarantine Quatrains I found myself writing a series of personal poetic responses to the book of Psalms. That project occupied the rest of my lockdown. It wasn’t a monumental task. It felt like a spiritual necessity. It felt like needing to breathe while you’re swimming or running. Every psalm was a new breath in, and every poem was a breath out. It became a completely natural pattern to my life. I’ve just completed a sequence of 150 poems. Really, it's just a kind of prayer journal. As I wrote it, I found that more and more of the psalms were speaking into the crisis for me.

It has long been a deeply held sense in my soul that poetry and prayer are nearly the same thing.

They are two sides of the same coin. Seamus Heaney has been cropping up a lot in this conversation, but he’s one of the great poets. He has a sequence called “Station Island” which he wrote at one of the worst points of the Irish troubles—poems that gradually move their way towards hope. There’s a bit in one of these poems where he remembers having been to confession.

The father confessor spoke about the need “to salvage everything, to re-envisage / the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift / mistakenly abased . . . / ‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance / translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’” In the poem he goes on to give you the translation of John of the Cross’ “although it is the night.”

What a wonderful thing for a priest to say in spiritual counsel to a poet. Read poems as prayers. When I read that poem, I’d been a follower of Seamus Heaney since I’d discovered him as a teenager in the seventies. But in the mid eighties, that poem struck me with the force of revelation. Up till then I hadn’t quite realized my priestly vocation yet, but I had my church life sort of in one hand and my poetic life in the other. They weren’t in sync. They weren’t quite speaking to each other. Reading that poem of Heaney’s, suddenly I opened up the communication doors, as it were, between those sides of my life, with fruitful results.

“Read poems as prayers.” How does somebody put such a great weight of truth into four words? I suppose that’s the poet’s vocation.

There’s a wonderful poem by George Herbert, which is simply called “Prayer.” In that poem, he offers a series of phrases, each of which, if you meditate on it, is a prayer. That poem gives you twenty-six new ways of understanding your prayer life. The poem begins:

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth

The poem is full of dense phrases and images, like “Heaven in ordinary” or “the soul’s blood.” It finishes with the words “something understood.” Prayer is all of those things. The book of poems that I published last year is called After Prayer. In that book I meditated on that one sonnet of George Herbert’s. I wrote a sequence of twenty-seven sonnets on one after the other of his phrases and images. I wrote whole poems out of each because the images are so rich.

How can we find Quarantine Quatrains and the other books you have mentioned today?

While I was working on Quarantine Quatrains, I was collaborating on another project with a very fine English artist called Roger Wagner. He did a series of very beautiful miniatures—lovely painted illustrations for each section. We produced a little limited edition signed set of them. All the profits, in entirety, go to the care workers’ charity. We printed six hundred, but they may have mostly gone. But if you can’t find a copy of the book, I posted the entirety of the Quarantine Quatrains on my blog. You can find them there as well.

What about the Psalms project?

The Psalms book will come out soon. I have been live blogging my journey through the Psalms. I’ve been gradually posting those. So again, if people go on my blog and in the little search box, if they just put the word “Psalm” they’ll find them all and they can read them in any order. In those, I give a little prose introduction. Obviously there are so many different, beautiful translations of the Psalms, but as an Anglican, I use the 1660 Book of Common Prayer. I have a happy arrangement with my publisher. Since I am writing from within the church and for the church, I want my poems to be freely available to my fellow Christians for their personal prayer life and for their liturgy, if they want to use it. All I ask is that people acknowledge where it came from. You don’t need to write to Canterbury Press to ask for permission. Canterbury Press also allows me to post on my blog, even though they’ll be gathered into a book. We believe that in the end, people don’t want to read poems on a screen, however slick the tablet may be. There’s nothing like having an actual book in your hand. I offer my poetry on trust, in the hope that eventually people will have enjoyed enough of the poems on the web that they might like to buy the book.

Thank you. You are always extravagantly generous with your work and it has blessed and permeated the church here in America, as well.

That amazes me. I still can’t get over the fact that I write these poems and I read them to my wife or to my friends. And after I’ve typed them into a computer in the corner of my little room in my little village I suddenly find that I have friends in America. I find that astonishing. I’m not a super high tech person, but I’m able to blog and I think there’s a real blessing in that. I know there are deadly, shadowed sides to the internet, but I do feel there’s also a kind of gift that we can give each other.

Heidi White teaches at St. Hild School in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor at The Close Reads Podcast Network, the host of the FORMA podcast, and the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal.

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It would be hard to argue with the observation that within the lifetime of many of those reading this, American society has transitioned from being vaguely theocratic to explicitly secular. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t from the beginning an explicit commitment to non-sectarian values or that many Americans may not still practice their religious beliefs or regard their country as “Christian.” But for certain, as many have observed, references to God, biblical terms and injunctions, prayers, religious instruction, and all that—the courts have interpreted the Constitution to mean that none of these have any place in the public square. Religious belief, to the extent citizens wish to embrace it, must be practiced in private and should in no way influence the laws of the State or interfere with the rights of others to act in ways that may give offense to believers or ridicule specifically Christian sensibilities.

This is not to say that there was ever any intention, except perhaps in Puritan New England, to form a Theocracy, a state in which priests rule in the name of God, or that the State would mandate belief in a god. On the contrary, most of those fleeing to America wanted nothing to with religious establishments and the persecution that often attended them. But they were by-and-large a religious people, many of them fervent in their beliefs, and they derived and defended from Scripture the laws they wrote and the norms they lived by. So when Jefferson, no Christian himself, penned the Declaration of Independence on behalf of the Founders, it was natural and in no way controversial to root the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed “with certain unalienable Rights” in the intention of “their Creator.” Not, it is important for the purposes of this essay to note, in the will of the people. He then famously proceeds to enumerate these equal rights as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” It is this divine sourcing of America’s laws and norms that I have in mind when I describe our society as once “vaguely theocratic.”

This theocratic consensus appeared to serve the country quite well for the first two centuries after its birth. It was of course a perennial challenge to live up to its creed, and doing so sometimes entailed violent conflict, but the arch defenders of the creed, whether a Lincoln in the nineteenth century or a King in the twentieth, never shied from making that defense in religious terms and reminding Americans of the religious roots of their national creed. But that consensus began to fragment in the 1960s as the influencers of public opinion—intellectuals, academics, popular entertainers, filmmakers, and political activists—began questioning religious belief and satirizing believers as bigots and hypocrites. It was during this period that the courts began to play a leading role in exorcising religion from the public square and reframing the concept of rights. It was no longer the Creator who endowed us with “certain unalienable Rights,” but the Courts that decided—often in the absence of legislation, although presuming to represent the will of the people rather than the intention of the framers of the Constitution— what might qualify as a “human right.”

Many court decisions contributed to this subtle yet profound shift. Roe v. Wade is the one often cited, since it touched on an issue that pitted an ancient Judeo-Christian taboo against a modern secular demand, namely, the prohibition against killing a human life in the womb and a woman’s freedom to choose whether or not to give birth. Abortion and infanticide were common and accepted practices in the ancient world, and we know from our earliest sources that Christians firmly rejected these practices. Some sociologists and historians have cited this refusal to abort their fetuses as one reason for the highly improbable growth of this outlawed and persecuted Jewish sect. But any mention of a Creator, of the “unalienable Right” to “Life” of the human within the womb, or of the religious sensibilities of millions of American citizens is significantly absent from the court’s decision. Instead, the court denies the “personhood” of the fetus and declares a “right of privacy” to the mother. It also attempts to make a scientific argument for when the “viable life” of the fetus begins. I am not here to argue either for the woman’s right to choose or the fetus’ right to live, but merely wish to point out the elements of the shift to a secular belief system as the true source of what we now call “human rights.” These rights, far from being unalienable or deriving from a Creator, are now decided by the vote of a Court in a somewhat democratic process and are subject to arguments deemed “scientific” and in no way religious.

Arguably, the end of the Cold War, the embrace of multiculturalism, and the huge influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa and from formerly

Communist countries have contributed to this shift. The end of the Cold War meant the end of the supposed fight against “godless Communism” and removed the religious rhetoric that attended the struggle against Marxist regimes. The embrace of multiculturalism required a deliberate and at times painstaking removal of those symbols, traditions, and practices that appeared to give American culture a Judeo-Christian flavor and favor this flavor over any other (except, of course, the absence of religion). And for different reasons, the sudden influx of immigrants from officially Muslem and atheistic countries underscored the potential conflicts that might arise by allowing religious diversity into the public square. Both these groups entered America from countries with hostile views toward Judeo-Christian beliefs and believers as well as with political, legal, and educational systems heavily invested in promoting and enforcing either Islam or atheism. Clearly, if we were to avoid problems arising from these new groups of citizens, we must distance ourselves from anything smacking of religion.

Finally, enough has already been written about the sexual revolution coming out of the sixties and its devastating effects on institutions like the family, the school, and the church—as well as on the physical health of the nation’s citizens. The sexual revolution explicitly and effectively advanced its agenda by attacking the religious taboos that traditionally governed sexual behavior, further distancing society from the idea that “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are “unalienable Rights” endowed by a Creator who has offered guidance as to how those Rights should be exercised and enjoyed. This revolution, perhaps more than anything else (as we saw in Roe v. Wade where Liberty trumps Life and the right to privacy is enshrined), contributed to the shift. The State no longer has a say in anything that happens between consenting adults, regardless of the burden this may place upon the State. It’s as if the lessons of tragedy no longer apply to the human race. Private sexual acts no longer have public consequences, or if they do, the public ought to accept and ameliorate the consequences of these acts over which it has no say or control. This is simply the price of liberty and the “right to privacy.”

As a consequence of this shift, American society now faces extraordinary and growing challenges. Some of these are merely pragmatic and measurable. How much of our “coming apart” is due to the shift? Can secular society find a way of healing the sense of alienation felt by many Christians? Can it pay for the “rights” it is handing out along with the conflicts and contradictions attending them? How long can it borrow against the future in order to provide the services and support that the institutions it is destroying once provided for nothing? How long will bull markets and cutting-edge technologies blind secularists to the natural family’s breakup and dysfunction, the pandemic of depression and addiction, the worsening trend of failing health and schools, the signs of social unrest and inequality, and the general loss of consensus concerning any of the problems that plague society? Will our secular society’s reliance on science and material resources enable it to solve these problems, all of which have statistically grown apace with the shift? But even these tough problems, as real and pressing as they are, may be a distraction from the insoluble contradictions underlying the shift. Two immediately come to mind:

First, if human rights derive from the State, they are by definition no longer unalienable. What the State gives, the State can take away. Is this what the fans of our secular society really want? There are and have always been three forms of state: tyranny or monarchy; oligarchy; and democracy—and variations on each, some good, some bad. Rule by the One, by the Few, or by the Many. In our country, we say we favor democracy, although our Founders feared it, and it’s pretty obvious that we function most of the time like an oligarchy, granting the privilege of ruling to the wealthier and better educated among us. But when it comes to deciding on our rights in a secular state, it doesn’t really matter. An oligarchy, as we have seen with the courts, is more likely to create rights than is something closer to a democracy, like a state or federal legislature. Much closer for sure than the cumbersome process for granting rights spelled out in the Constitution.

Other than the problem of making rights “temporary” and subject to the desires of a small or large group of citizens, this method of establishing rights, as we have seen, politicizes everything and, as Socrates warned in his critique of democracy, makes what is right or just or true less important than who can make the best argument or garner the most votes. How ironic that having spent the last century in conflict with Marxist regimes, we have now adopted our former enemies’ Marxist view of history! We even talk like they did about “being on the right side of history” and viewing our kulturkampf as taking the form of a class struggle amongst identity groups. We are now beset by vocal, angry, often disruptive and threatening identity groups on all sides, claiming to be victimized in some way or other and demanding reparations, redress, or rights by “acting out,” marching on Washington, occupying state capitols, lobbying congressmen and women, attacking their foes on social media, defacing and tearing down statues, self-righteously rewriting history, spreading lies and fake news, etc. Do we really want to live in a world where right and wrong are decided by a show of hands or a street mob? As Nietzsche perhaps gleefully observed 150 years ago, now that God is dead, everything is permissible. Only the State makes the rules, sets the boundaries, writes the moral code. No wonder the Third Reich loved Ni- etzsche. One won’t find many admirers of the Third Reich among today’s fans of secular society, I suppose, but those same fans are building their edifice of “human rights” on the same shifting sands.

Second, the other contradiction that seems to me insoluble is this: in secular/Marxist society, science replaces Scripture as the basis for belief and the exclusive source of wisdom and moral judgment. If it is research-based, if it is data-driven, if it has been measured and tested, preferably in a laboratory under perfect conditions, we’re apt to believe it. Otherwise, the jury is still out. Never mind that science itself is continually revising its theories and predictions and that its application in the so-called social sciences has proven spectacularly speculative and unreliable while spawning theories that reliably support the predilections of their sponsors. All that aside, consider that one of the most fundamental observations of science flatly contradicts secular society’s bedrock assertion that all men and women are equal. After all, what proof is there—other than the concept of a God and Father of all Mankind—that we are all equal? There is no proof— just a seemingly arbitrary assertion that must be accepted or enforced. Without this religious belief, it is hard to find any evidence of human equality. Human inequality is what appears obvious and is, for that matter, a fundamental assumption of modern science and natural selection, although “survival of the fittest” is no longer deemed a politically correct way of describing a process of variation, inheritance, selection, and eons that guarantees a “progressive” outcome.

As the Italian political philosopher Joseph Mazzini pointed out long ago, “Certainly rights exist; but where the rights of an individual come into conflict with those of another, how can we hope to reconcile and harmonize them, without appealing to something superior to all rights?” (The Duties of Man, 11). He describes the situation in the nineteenth-century Italian peninsula in a manner that applies with equal force to the twenty-first-century West even without the accelerator of mass migration:

Liberty of belief destroyed all community of faith. Liberty of education produced moral anarchy. Men without a common tie, without unity of religious belief and of aim, and whose sole vocation was en- joyment, sought every one his own road, not heeding if in pursuing it they were trampling upon the heads of their brothers—brothers in name and enemies in fact. To this we are come today, thanks to the theory of rights. (Ibid.)

The new theory of human rights affirms secular man’s rejection of absolutes and his belief in the impermanence and relativity of all things. After all, isn’t the universe constantly expanding and everything in it constantly changing—from the tiniest subatomic particles to the largest collapsing stars? From this general observation, we move without hesitation, being fully indoctrinated with the scientific worldview, from the descriptive to the prescriptive. We embrace the Heraclitian flux, accepting the impermanence of all things, asserting the “progressive” creed and the novel theory of deracinated human rights, and rejecting norms and absolutes of any kind. We are, after all, enlightened men and women. We now know the world wasn’t created in 4004 BC and the earth is not the center of the universe. We are, as Pico declared in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, “the molder and maker” of ourselves, and now that God is dead, “everything is permissible.”

Unfortunately, many new problems now arise. One of these, as the statistical evidence indicates, is that only a small percentage of people, usually dubbed the “educated elite,” appear to be able to ride this Heraclitian wave. The rest drown in its turbulence. But this too might have had some scientific justification as a form of “survival of the fittest” if the elite were indeed re-producing themselves, but their enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle and their advanced social theories appear to be interfering with our species' biological imperatives. But I forgot: there are no imperatives! Yet again we have another example of why the social sciences fail and why the observations of science, panta rei, can make poor social, political, and personal prescriptions. The parable about “a man who built his house on the sand” comes to mind.

David Hicks is an author, translator, and former headmaster of Darlington School. He is the author of Norms and Nobility and The Lawgivers: The Parallel Lives of Numa Pompilius and Lycurgus of Sparta as Told by Plutarch.

Poetry Maryann Corbett

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law.

She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.