14 Once a Caian...
by John Casey (1964) Dan White
Dr Casey preached the following sermon in the College Chapel on the centenary of Armistice Day, 11 November 2018. ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept.’ (Psalm 137)
W
hat is patriotism? A hundred years ago most would have thought that they knew what patriotism was, even if few of them could say what it was. But now it is doubtful that we even know what it is. Nor is that surprising. Patriotism has long since become a bitterly contested idea, tainted by direct association with the horrors of the last century, and especially its wars. ‘These fought in any case, And some believing, Pro domo, in any case.
Some quick to arm. some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter…’1 The poets of the Great War of 1914-1918 ensured that the innocent complacencies of the previous generation became inexpressible. The lines I have just quoted, by Ezra Pound, are virtually a reply to a hugely popular poem for English public schoolboys, written only six years before the War began. Replete with lines such as: ‘To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes,’ it ends: ‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ – The frontier grave is far away – ‘Qui ante diem periit: Sed miles, sed pro patria.’ 2 The writers of the years leading up to the Great War have been accused, not without justice, of making a religion out of love of country, of turning nation, empire, England herself into objects of worship. We think of Rupert Brooke’s wish, if he should die, to be thought of as reposing eternally ‘under an English heaven.’ But perhaps we should also think of that liberal, gentle sceptic of Empire, EM Forster, who, in Howard’s End, has a vision of England ‘sailing as a ship of souls, with all the world’s brave fleet accompanying her towards eternity.’ The religious note sounds again and again in patriotism, from that psalm ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…’ to the primeval Shinto conception of the islands of Japan as ‘the land of the gods.’ If patriotism has become for us a fugitive thing, this may be because we find it to be, in its truest form, so rare. For we see it almost always harnessed to the pursuit of power. That love of one’s country is not the same thing as contempt of one’s neighbours, that patriotism is not to be confused with nationalism, is an elementary distinction. But European history shows how hard it is to separate the pure gold (if such it be) of the one from the dross of the other. For in how many countries of Europe does the separation really exist? The Spanish sense of nationhood was forged in the Reconquista and culminated in the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from the peninsula. The same idea of a reconquest from alien
