Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 8

National Review: Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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For its 1937–38 “Christmas Lectures for Children,” the Natural History Society of Oxfordshire announced forthcoming talks on coral reefs, birds, whales, horses — and dragons. The latter topic was taken up by J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of English literature who had just published The Hobbit, an immensely popular book involving a dragon. Tolkien’s lecture, before an audience packed with children of all ages, tackled a decidedly adult subject: the problem of evil in the world and the heroism required to combat it.

Tolkien began, disarmingly, with a slide show of prehistoric reptiles, including a Pteranodon in flight, to remind his listeners that “science also fills this past with dreadful monsters — many of the largest and most horrible being of a distinctly lizard-like or dragonish kind.” These ancient creatures, he said, embodied legendary qualities found in dragon mythology. The dragons with whom he had an acquaintance “loved to possess beautiful things.” Greed and hatred motivated them. “And how can you withstand a dragon’s flame, and his venom, and his terrible will and malice, and his great strength?”

It probably was not lost on the children present that Tolkien’s mythical dragons sounded a lot like the people who inhabited the real world. The adults might have discerned a more ominous message. Tolkien delivered his lecture on January 1, 1938. Nearly a year earlier, on January 30, 1937, Adolf Hitler had officially withdrawn Germany from the Treaty of Versailles and demanded that its colonies be returned. In August, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in the midst of “the Great Purge,” authorized mass executions for 750,000 citizens deemed enemies of the Communist revolution. In December, Benito Mussolini, after brutally invading Ethiopia, pulled Italy out of the League of Nations.

Tolkien’s analysis went deeper still. Drawing on the epic English poem, Beowulf, he said that the English people had a special insight into the moral significance of dragons. In the poem, Beowulf defeats the demon Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a fearsome dragon — but at the cost of his own life. Tolkien was fascinated by such tales, with their portrayal of the persistence of wickedness, the danger of pride, and the value of heroic sacrifice for a noble cause. “One might say that the chief morals that such stories teach, or rather awake in one’s mind, are all shining in this story,” he told his audience.

These were not popular themes in a post-war England awash in pacifism and moral cynicism. In 1933, for example, students at the Oxford Union Society had famously approved the motion “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” A veteran of the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, Tolkien nevertheless rejected the disillusionment that seized the minds of many in his generation. He loved England and its cultural achievements without glorifying war or exalting nationalism.

A few months before Tolkien delivered his dragon lecture, his publisher asked him to produce a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien was reluctant. “I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits,” he replied. But of course, Tolkien would have a lot more to say about hobbits, in part because the world around him seemed threatened anew by the appearance of dragons.

Soon after Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, the story took on a profound sense of foreboding not seen in his earlier work. “But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord,” Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins. “The rumors that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again. . . . Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” On October 13, 1938 — barely two weeks after the Munich Agreement, which effectively delivered Czechoslovakia into Nazi hands — Tolkien confessed to his publisher that his new story was no bed-time fable: “The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.”

In the perpetual fight against dragons, Tolkien suggested, modern weapons would not be decisive; something else was required. “Dragons can only be defeated by brave men — usually alone,” he said. “Sometimes a faithful friend may help, but it’s rare: Friends have a way of deserting you when a dragon comes.” Politically speaking, those words would become something of a prophecy: After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, triggering World War II, Britain’s chief military ally — France — abandoned its treaty obligations and signed a peace agreement with Germany.

Many have assumed that Tolkien drew from the events of the 1930s and ’40s for his story about the battle for Middle-earth, an epic struggle between good and evil. Under this view, the Orcs represent Nazi stormtroopers and the terrifying dragons of Nazgûl are like the German Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain.

But Tolkien disliked allegory. The truth is that the catastrophic rise of fascism and communism merely confirmed his insights into the human condition: the nearly irresistible appeal of the demagogue, the schemes for a utopian future, the insatiable will to power. “For the dragon bears witness to the power and danger and malice that men find in the world,” he said. “And he bears witness also to the wit and the courage and finally to the luck (or grace) that men have shown in their adventures — not all men, and only a few men greatly.”

However dark the modern world might appear, Tolkien could never give up on the older concepts of virtue, valor, duty, sacrifice, and grace. As he told his audience: “Dragons are the final test of heroes.” If Tolkien is right, then what does that say about us? The lust to possess and subjugate is as strong and widespread as ever; dragons continue to roam the Earth. We seem to have a terribly difficult time, however, finding authentic heroes to fight them.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Affairs: Two Revolutions for Freedom

This article was originally posted at National Affairs.

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Shortly after the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789, the English political theorist Edmund Burke wrote a letter to Lord Charlemont, the first president of the Royal Irish Academy. It is Burke’s earliest known statement about the French Revolution:

The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner…if it should be character, rather than accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a strong hand, like that of their former masters to coerce them. Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves, and a perfect nuisance to every body else.

We know the rest of the story. The French revolutionaries proved themselves to be unfit for liberty. Barely a decade after executing their hated monarch — and after years of political instability, social chaos, and the remorseless violence of the guillotine — the freedom-loving revolutionaries installed an emperor to replace him. Napoleon Bonaparte, dictator for life, would become a perfect nuisance to the rest of Europe.

Burke’s fullest assessment of events in France, his 1790 letter Reflections on the Revolution in France, written while the revolution was still unfolding, reveals a mind quickened by its moral insight into human nature and the nature of free societies. In his Reflections, Burke warned of political revolutions that despise everything that came before them: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

The impulse to damn with indifference the wisdom of an earlier generation is no longer confined to the French avant-garde or the cultural left. It is taking root in ultra-conservative circles in the United States, where a revolt against the core tenets of liberal democracy is underway. A small but growing cadre of Christian conservatives — mostly Catholic — has decried the American experiment in self-government as a fool’s errand: a quest for the fully emancipated self, unconstrained by the ties of custom, tradition, family, or faith. Classical liberalism, argues Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame political scientist and author of Why Liberalism Failed, was based upon a “fundamental commitment to the liberation of the individual…from nature’s limitations.” Its malicious strategy, he claims, is to enlist an omnicompetent state to enable “the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites.”

This conservative — and, at times, conspiratorial — critique of liberal democracy is sustained by a grievous conceptual mistake. It is the failure to grasp the profound differences between the two great revolutions for freedom in the 18th century — between the events of 1776 and those of 1789. Not unlike the radical left, a vocal wing of the religious right seems contemptuous of the achievements of the Anglo-American political tradition.

Intoxicated by visions of a truly egalitarian society, the revolutionaries in Paris took a wrecking ball to the institutions and traditions that had shaped France for centuries. Virtually nothing, including the religion that guided the lives of most of their fellow citizens, was sacrosanct. “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic,” warned Maximilien Robespierre, “or perish with them.” Their list of enemies — past and present — was endless. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, by contrast, did not share this rage against inherited authorities. Although the Americans, in the words of James Madison, did not suffer from a “blind veneration for antiquity,” neither did they reject the political and cultural inheritance of Great Britain and the Western tradition. They did not seek to invent rights, but rather to reclaim their “chartered rights” as Englishmen. From both classical and religious sources, the American founders understood that human passions made freedom a vulnerable state of affairs: Political liberty demanded the restraints of civic virtue and biblical religion.

America’s deepening political crisis is not, as some claim, the inevitable result of its liberal-democratic ideals. Rather, we are witnessing a culture war waged by the defenders of two radically different revolutions, two competing views of human freedom.

TO BUILD A FREE SOCIETY

On one side we have the republican project of the American founders. Their revolution for freedom was grounded in a Lockean understanding of natural rights, in the moderate Scottish Enlightenment, and in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by…morality and Religion,” wrote John Adams. “Avarice, ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.” On the other side is the French project, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Francois-Marie d’Arouet (better known as Voltaire), by the most radical strain of the Continental Enlightenment, and by a supreme confidence in human reason to chart man’s destiny. “Man is born free,” Rousseau declared, “but he is everywhere in chains.” One of the first chains to be cut was the authority of the Christian churches.

The fundamental assumptions of these competing visions are widely divergent. The architects of the French Revolution believed that the task of establishing a free society was straightforward. In Rousseau’s 1762 work The Social Contract, a secular bible for the revolutionaries, “the general will” of political society was easily discoverable by every citizen. In their version of a democratic state, there would be “no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.” What is more, every citizen would gladly submit his own interests to the common good. In the early phase of the revolution, the concept of the general will was elevated into a nearly infallible national conscience.

The confidence of the French philosophes in a beneficent human nature is perhaps the most striking note in their writings. It animated the thought of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, one of the most influential French philosophers of his day. Here is how he summarized it in his 1772 book Common Sense:

The human mind, confused by its theological opinions, ceased to know its own powers, mistrusted experience, feared truth and disdained reason, in order to follow authority. Man has been a mere machine in the hands of tyrants and priests, who alone have had the right of directing his actions. Always treated as a slave, he has contracted the vices of a slave….To learn the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or gods: They have need only of reason. They have only to enter into themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, consult their sensible interests, consider the object of society, and of the individuals, who compose it….

This sanguine — and thoroughly secular — view of human capacities underwrote the inevitability of their political project. In their democratic society, all of the base and cruel passions would be enchained, while the sentiments of generosity and brotherhood would be awakened by the laws. According to the French intellectual vanguard, a new age of political nirvana was on the horizon. “Let France, formerly illustrious among the enslaved lands, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples who have existed,” Robespierre wrote, “become the model for the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the world — and let us, in sealing our work with our blood, see at last the early dawn of universal bliss — that is our ambition and our goal.”

This was an anthem to political utopianism the likes of which had never been heard before in Europe. The Americans rejected it as dangerous nonsense. Instead, the founders articulated a hopeful but deeply sober view about the prospects for republican self-government. Indeed, a major concern of the Federalist Papers, one of the most significant reflections on the nature of political societies ever written, is the problem of human self-interest. Though defending, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, the American Constitution, Madison identified the threat of factions as the “mortal disease” of popular government:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society….So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

In the view of the founders, the fearsome reality of factions — what today we might call tribalism — was too deeply rooted to be solved by the mere presence of prudent political leadership. “It is vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good,” Madison wrote. “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

This belief in the dark propensities of human nature was the mainstream view among the founding generation, reinforced by the pulpit oratory of the day. Indeed, the urgent need for moral and spiritual awakening was a drumbeat theme throughout the Protestant churches of colonial America. An evangelical sermon preached in May 1776 by Reverend John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration, was typical: “I do not blame your ardor in preparing for the resolute defense of your temporal rights,” he said. “But consider, I beseech you, the truly infinite importance of the salvation of your souls.” Whatever the precise theological beliefs of the founders, the biblical concept of mankind’s fall from grace was firmly embedded in American culture. “What is the present moral character of the citizens of the United States?” asked Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration, in 1791. “I need not describe it. It proves too plainly that the people are as much disposed to vice as their rulers; and that nothing but a vigorous and efficient government can prevent their degenerating into savages.”

Thus, one of the great objects of the American Constitution was to “break and control the violence of faction.” Could it be done? Not even Thomas Jefferson, in his most intoxicated mood about their accomplishments, expected the arrival of the kingdom of heaven. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote, “that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Benjamin Franklin, as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, knowing the kind of government the delegates had created, was circumspect. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” he was asked. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

In the American and French revolutions, we encounter starkly different journeys toward freedom: two conflicting visions of human nature and the nature of political societies. A republic — if you can keep it — or the dawn of universal bliss.

TEMPLES OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Near the heart of the divide between these revolutions was their view of religion and religious authority. To be sure, the political leadership in America and France agreed that the lust for power was often concealed under the cloak of piety. They saw the national, monopolistic churches of Europe — either in Catholic or Protestant form — as a major obstacle to a more democratic and egalitarian society. But they drew opposite conclusions about the relationship of biblical religion to liberty.

The French revolutionaries were as vicious in their attacks on the Church as they were on the monarchy and the nobility. A program of “de-Christianization” was launched with a fury. “We will strangle the last king,” they said, “with the guts of the last priest.” In 1789, the National Constituent Assembly nationalized Church property and turned the clergy into salaried government employees. The following year, the assembly approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which, among other things, ordered all Catholic ministers to take a loyalty oath to the revolution. Half refused, further dividing French society. Some bishops removed their episcopal hats and put on a cap of freedom, declaring that the only religion of a free people was that of liberty and equality. Churches were vandalized, and the clergy were physically attacked. By 1794, only 150 of France’s 40,000 parishes were openly celebrating Mass.

The climax of the French Revolution’s assault on religion occurred at its most famous cathedral, Notre Dame, on November 10, 1793. For more than 600 years, Notre Dame had been a symbol of the Catholic-Christian identity of the nation of France. It was the place where marriages were sanctified, children were baptized and brought into the faith, and people confessed their sins before a Holy God. But now it was viewed as the great opponent of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The priests were banished, the saints desecrated, and the altar removed, replaced by the Goddess of Reason. The cathedral was renamed the Temple of Reason. This was the logic of the radical Enlightenment.

The American Enlightenment, by contrast, was a Lockean Enlightenment: Faith and reason were staunch allies in the quest for a more just and democratic society. Scottish theorists such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith — both of whom drew heavily upon the Bible — were favorites in early America. Yet, in establishing a tight bond between liberty and the Judeo-Christian tradition, no thinker had a greater influence over the founders than English philosopher John Locke.

Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise of Government was devoured by educated Americans, who agreed with his theological basis for the natural equality and freedom of every human being: “[F]or men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” Most of Locke’s readers probably would have recognized his allusion to the book of Ephesians: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Similarly, Locke’s argument in 1689 for religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration, helped to establish liberty of conscience as a natural right, perfectly consistent with reason and with the ethics of the Gospel. “Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine Reason of Mankind,” he wrote, “that it seems monstrous for Men to be so blind, as not to perceive the Necessity and Advantage of it, in so clear a Light.”

Freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution because the colonists were heirs of the Lockean tradition. This outlook was exported to America in a legal sense through the English Act of Toleration of 1689, which offered protection to Protestant minorities dissenting from the Church of England. The principles of the Act of Toleration were applied to the American colonies either by charter or by instructions to royal governors. Meanwhile, the Lockean approach to freedom was also validated by the pluralism of colonial society: the waves of Protestant immigrants who brought with them every strain of European Christianity. Alec Vidler, in The Church in an Age of Revolution, describes the effect:

But just as the early colonists had been political and religious radicals who had wanted not to transplant European traditions and institutions but to escape from them, so the subsequent waves of immigrants were mostly dissatisfied seekers after a better kind of life and a better kind of religion than Europe had afforded them.

Unlike the French philosophes, Americans considered religious belief and expression an intrinsic aspect of human nature — a natural right that must be enshrined in law and culture. Thus, Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, a 1785 tract against church-state alliances and probably the most important defense of religious liberty ever written by an American, captures the consensus of the founders: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” For the founders, our fundamental and prior obligations were to the Creator, and these obligations could be fulfilled only in a political society that honored the aspect of human nature that houses our spiritual yearnings. Religious freedom — the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience — became the cornerstone of our civil liberties.

Following Locke, the founders established the legal separation of church and state; there would be no national or established church. This, they reasoned, was the safest way to uphold justice, protect the independence of religion, and ensure its moral influence in society. This last objective, strengthening the attachment between religion and republican virtue, was crucial in the American context. In contrast to the enlightened intellectuals in France, no revolutionary leader in America imagined that freedom could be sustained without civic virtue, which in turn required religious belief.

In his farewell address as president, for example, George Washington took a swipe at the French philosophes: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” In a letter to Benjamin Rush, John Adams called religion “essential to morals” and doubted that skepticism could produce an ethical life. “I never read of an irreligious character in Greek or Roman history,” he wrote, “nor in any other history, nor have I known one in life, who was not a rascal. Name one if you can, living or dead.” Reverend Witherspoon — president of the College of New Jersey and mentor to a generation of future colonial leaders, including Madison — reinforced the prevailing view: No form of government could prevent social breakdown if virtue and piety were in short supply. “What follows from this?” Witherspoon asked. “That he is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”

CHRISTIANITY AND EMANCIPATION

It is true, of course, that the founders embraced these principles while condoning slavery and the African slave trade — the greatest moral evils of their day. Few acknowledged a sharp contradiction between the teachings of the Bible, with its themes of emancipation and redemption, and the practice of chattel slavery. The framers of the Constitution, desperate to establish national unity, made their peace with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, to the most enlightened Americans, slavery in any form was, in the words of Benjamin Rush, “repugnant to the Genius of Christianity.”

This conviction that Christianity was an emancipatory religion was largely absent from the political debates in revolutionary France. Although the French Republic officially outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1794, it would soon be reinstated. More important, the French intelligentsia never viewed the Catholic Church as a force for liberation. The French state could make use of a subservient religion that shared its aims — a civil religion whose doctrines supported “the sanctity of the social contract.” Toward this end, the philosophes concluded, Christianity could contribute nothing. “Far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the state, this religion detaches them from it as from all other things of this world,” Rousseau wrote, “and I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” Rousseau spoke for many when he denounced Christianity as an ally of oppression: “Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime.”

It’s not hard to understand the rationale for such skepticism. The Catholic Church enjoyed a privileged legal position in France’s national life, militantly enforced by the state. Four years before the English Act of Toleration was established, the French monarch in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had offered limited toleration to Protestants. Thus, the Church thoroughly integrated itself into the political and economic power arrangements of pre-revolutionary France. As Vidler observes, “It was said that they administered more provinces than sacraments!” The Catholic Church was undoubtedly a pillar in the ancien regime, viewed as one of the great opponents of democratic reform. Like the other supporters of the old order, it would be swept away in the maelstrom of the revolution.

Having rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, the revolutionaries in France turned toward other deities: liberty, equality, fraternity, and “the rights of man.” Ironically, it was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who confirmed Burke’s worst fears about the events in France. “Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than the reform of France,” he wrote, “it lit a passion which the most violent political revolutions had never before been able to produce.” The revolution, he said, took on the appearance of a religious crusade. “Or rather, it itself became a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”

With this messianic mission in view — ”the regeneration of the human race” — the democratic zeal of the revolution, epitomized by the radical Jacobins, turned with fury against its alleged heretics. The Catholic Church in France only ever partially extracted itself from the debris of the revolution’s discredited political theology. Despite the French Republic’s professed commitment to religious liberty, the idea of Christianity as a collaborator in the struggle for equality and human rights never resonated in French society. Freedom of religion has meant freedom from religion, and a pervasive secularism characterizes French society to this day.

THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

There was a completely different result, of course, in the American experience. The genius of the founders was to learn from the wisdom, and the folly, of their ancestors. In The History of Rome, Titus Livius drew this sage conclusion: “The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” The architects of American democracy studied the classical threats to liberty, as well as the resources for sustaining it over time. Perhaps their singular insight was in how they conceived of the role of religion in preserving democratic freedom.

In Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, his magisterial analysis of American culture written more than half a century after the American Revolution, we find a stunning description of American exceptionalism with regard to the progress of religion in democratic society:

The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual weakening of beliefs in an altogether simple fashion. Religious zeal, they said, will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase. It is unfortunate that the facts do not accord with this theory. There is a certain European population whose disbelief is equaled only by their brutishness and ignorance, whereas in America one sees one of the freest and most enlightened peoples in the world eagerly fulfill all the external duties of religion. On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye….Among us [the French], I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil.

To Tocqueville’s surprise, every priest and minister he spoke with pointed to the Constitution, to the separation of church and state, as the reason for the vitality of the faith communities in America. By taking away government support for religion, Tocqueville observed, “one came to increase its real power.” This is precisely what the American founders intended.

It is hard to imagine two revolutions for freedom so different in their core beliefs, in their conduct, and in their results. Most Americans perceived this long before the French Republic collapsed into tyranny. By 1800, when Napoleon began dismantling the last vestiges of representative government, the verdict was in. As John Quincy Adams put it in a letter to Prussian leader Friedrich Gentz: “It cannot but afford a gratification to every American attached to his country to see its revolution so ably vindicated from the imputation of having originated, or having been conducted upon the same principles, as that of France.”

Nevertheless, these salient and long-established facts appear to have eluded America’s conservative critics. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, likens the United States to Napoleonic France: “an ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalistic power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.” Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule argues that the classical liberalism of the founders would “betray its inner nature” were it to respect the institutions of family and faith. “Both politically and theoretically, hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.” Patrick Deneen denounces America’s Lockean liberalism as “a catastrophe for the ideals of the West,” based upon a “false anthropology” that exalts “the unleashed ambition of individuals.”

It is difficult to see how such views can be maintained with anything like intellectual honesty. These critics are correct, of course, to lament the radical individualism that defines much of modern liberalism. But in their feverish denunciations of the many ills afflicting liberalism, they have failed to treat seriously the actual origins of the American experiment in self-government: what Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gratefully called “the sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage” and “those great wells of democracy” dug by the founding generation.

At times, these intellectuals appear nearly blind to the remarkable achievements of the Western political tradition, expressed supremely in the American project. The freedom of religion, speech, and assembly; the campaigns to defeat racism and human slavery; the elevation of the status of women; the vast improvements in the workplaces of modern industry; the lifting of millions of people out of desperate poverty; the establishment of a vibrant civil society, energized by churches, synagogues, and faith-based charities of all kinds — none of these accomplishments are conceivable without a foundational belief in the God-given freedom, equality, and dignity of every human soul. Indeed, this was the theological lodestar of classical liberalism.

To belittle these achievements is to contribute to the great divorce between religion and republican self-government. “Collective freedom — a society that honors the equal dignity of all — depends on constant vigilance, a sustained effort of education,” warns Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “If we forget where we came from, the battle our ancestors fought and the long journey they had to take, then in the end we lose it again.” Both liberals and conservatives would do well to consider Burke’s brutal critique of a political revolution untethered from the permanent things, from the transcendent truths that guided earlier generations:

In some people I see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive degrading servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.

Virtuous liberty — ordered liberty — is the only kind of liberty for which the American republic was designed. And it cannot be sustained without religious belief. Unlike in France, this was the settled conviction of the founding generation. More than that, it was a doctrine considered axiomatic for political and civic life. “Every just principle that is to be found in the writings of Voltaire,” concluded Benjamin Rush, “is borrowed from the Bible.” Nevertheless, many ignore our debt to biblical religion. The result is liberty without wisdom, the path of folly and madness. Many Americans, indeed, are discarding the duties and the blessings of revealed religion for the empty promises of a counterfeit and degraded freedom.

Herein lies the source of the current crisis: the willingness to trade the legacy of the American Revolution for that of the French. Social thinker Os Guinness, author of Last Call for Liberty, summarizes it this way: “There is a long tradition that when Americans are disillusioned with America, they look to European ideas that are fatefully different from the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution. Once again America has become a house divided, and Americans must make up their minds as to which freedom to follow.” Tocqueville anticipated the danger. He concluded Democracy in America with a warning about the responsibility of the nation’s citizenry to remain true to their principles: “It depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.”

What path will we take? Perhaps the welfare of the City of Man really does depend, after all, on our belief in the City of God. Perhaps no political society can survive for long when it excludes those spiritual truths that alone can judge, inspire, and transform our earthly politics. Maybe, more than anything, we need a recovery of faith in what C. S. Lewis called the “far-off country,” a renewed quest for the virtues and ideals of that bright Kingdom that lies beyond the Sea. “Because we love something else more than this world,” Lewis wrote, “we love even this world better than those who know no other.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The Hill: An immigrant’s journey to US citizenship rebukes extremists in immigration debate

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

When the United States began sending troops to Europe during the First World War, European and Latino immigrants living and working in America — often amid intense discrimination — were given a chance to prove their patriotism and civic worth. If they joined the U.S. military and survived the trenches of France, they would be put on a fast track to citizenship. My Italian grandfather, 23-year-old Michele Loconte, was one of them.

Like the vast majority of the roughly 2 million Italians who arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, my grandfather was looking for a better future. He found it in Brooklyn: a world away from his impoverished, small-town roots in Bitritto, a village outside of Bari. Like so many other immigrants, his journey toward citizenship — his love of country, commitment to family and entrepreneurial spirit — offers a rebuke to the extreme voices on both sides of the immigration debate.

In the years leading up to the Great War in 1914, my grandfather moved from job to job, across the United States, wherever he could find work: at an automobile assembly plant in Michigan; at the Hoover Dam in Nevada; in the vineyards of northern California. It could not have been easy. Southern Italians endured vicious stereotypes and discrimination. Referring to the influx of Italians at the turn of the century, a New York City newspaper complained: “The dam is washed away. The sewer is unchoked. Europe is vomiting!”

The influential immigration study by the congressional Dillingham Commission, released in 1911, concluded, among other things, that various types of criminal behavior “are inherent in the Italian race.”

My grandfather never played the victim. He was an exceptionally hard worker and felt lucky to be in the United States. But he also was an unskilled laborer with little education and meager English-language skills. Today, under the White House plan to favor immigrants with “professional specialized vocations,” he probably wouldn’t make the cut.

Yet my grandfather loved America. When war came, he could have chosen to serve in the Italian army, but instead he enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force, was attached to the 91st Division, and sent into some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict, at the Meuse-Argonne. He rarely spoke about the devastazione — the devastation — which he must have witnessed in France and Belgium. But his war experience deepened his attachment to his adopted country, and America made good on its promise: A hundred years ago, on Sept. 13, 1919, Michele Loconte became a U.S. citizen.

Conservatives often talk as though most of the people trying to make America their home are indolent, tribalistic and uninterested in becoming part of a larger political community. Like many recent Italian arrivals living in New York City, my grandfather found community with relatives and other Italians in his neighborhood, typically from his hometown. His parish priest was Italian. Conte Farms, the egg-butter-and-cheese delivery business, was a family affair.

But his loyalties shifted. After the Dodgers left Brooklyn, he cheered for the Mets. More importantly, he cheered for America. When Benito Mussolini seemed to be successfully modernizing Italy, many Italian Americans admired him. Once he brought fascist Italy into an alliance with Hitler’s Germany against the United States, however, Mussolini became persona non grata. When my grandfather heard Il Duce’s voice over the radio, he would holler back, “Il bugiardo!” — the liar — among other epithets.

For all of its contradictions and injustices, the American melting pot did a remarkable job of transforming millions of immigrants — often poor, uneducated and unfamiliar with stable, democratic government — into productive citizens. How, within a single generation, did it succeed?

Many liberals seem to believe that protecting our national borders is a hate crime and that upholding clear standards for citizenship is a form of cultural imperialism. But the historical record suggests just the opposite: Good policy reinforces democratic norms which, over time, convert immigrants into patriots. A 1948 graduation message from the principal at my father’s public high school in Brooklyn, printed in his journal, put it this way: “You, as graduates of P.S. 10, in an era of peace, have a great responsibility in the further building of an America of which we can continue to be proud. You will be the new car-makers, the new engineers, the new statesmen, the new voters. I hope that you will develop the good traits of character and citizenship that you have learned here.”

It was the same basic message of opportunity — and responsibility — that countless immigrants absorbed from the moment they arrived at Ellis Island.

Of the more than 1 million American soldiers deployed in Europe in 1918, about a quarter of them were foreign-born. Like my grandfather, many had seen enough of the world to believe that the future belonged to the United States. They were the kind of people that America’s leaders always expected the country to attract. As George Washington expressed it: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: John Locke, Catholicism, and the American Founding

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In the summer of 1704, English philosopher John Locke began writing a response to a critic of his controversial treatise on religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). It was, in fact, the third letter from Locke addressed to Jonas Proast, a chaplain at Oxford University, who insisted that government coercion in religious matters was necessary to preserve social order. Locke fired back: “Men in all religions have equally strong persuasion, and every one must judge for himself,” he wrote. “Nor can any one judge for another, and you last of all for the magistrate.”

Locke died before finishing the letter, but his revolutionary voice is being heard once again. A manuscript titled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others,” written in Locke’s hand in 1667 or 1668, has just been published for the first time, in The Historical Journal of Cambridge University Press. The document challenges the conventional view that Locke shared the anti-Catholicism of his fellow Protestants. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the radical quality of his political liberalism, which so influenced the First Amendment and the American Founding. “If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployed by the Prince,” he wrote, “the Papist[s] have an equall title.”

Here was a visionary conception of equal justice for all members of the commonwealth, regardless of religious belief — a principle rejected by every political regime in the world, until 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. “Locke was willing to contemplate the toleration of Catholics in a fashion which others would never countenance, and he did so with startling impartiality,” write independent scholar J. C. Walmsley and Cambridge University fellow Felix Waldman, who discovered the manuscript. “The tone is emollient, and nowhere replicated in Locke’s works.”

They have it half right. The attitude of English Protestants toward Catholicism in Locke’s day was shaped by over a century of religious conflict. To the Protestant mind, the advance of “Popery” and “priestcraft” represented a temporal and spiritual threat: ranks of religious believers loyal to a foreign potentate, blinded by superstition, hungry for arbitrary power, and latent with schemes of papal domination. Protestant sermons routinely identified the pope with the Antichrist. Locke’s career coincided with the Restoration (1660–88), when Catholics were excluded from public office and their rights of religious worship were severely restricted. By the 1660s, the rise of Catholic France under an absolute monarch, Louis XIV, instigated a fresh round of anti-Catholic fervor. In this acrimonious climate, Locke’s plea for political equality for Catholics was remarkably egalitarian.

Yet — contrary to Locke’s modern interpreters — it was consistent with his views about Catholics and other religious minorities throughout most of his political career. As an assistant to Sir Walter Vane, for example, Locke’s first diplomatic mission in 1665 took him to the Duchy of Cleves, in modern-day Germany. In one of his reports, Locke admits that

the Catholic religion is a different thing from what we believe in England. I have other thoughts of it than when I was in a place that is filled with prejudices, and things known only by hearsay. I have not met with so many good-natured people or so civil, as the Catholic priests, and I have received many courtesies from them, which I shall always gratefully acknowledge.

Locke also records his surprise at the social harmony between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics, who each practiced their faith in relative freedom: “The distance in their churches gets not into their houses. . . . I cannot observe any quarrels or animosities amongst them upon the account of religion.” It was his first encounter with religious pluralism, and it left a deep and lasting impression.

In his first major treatise supporting religious liberty, An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), Locke constructs an argument, a defense of the rights of conscience, that he will build upon for the rest of his life. He argues that magistrates have no right interfering in religious beliefs that pose no obvious threat to the social order: “In speculations & religious worship every man hath a perfect uncontrolled liberty, which he may freely use without or contrary to the magistrate’s command.” The challenge of accommodating different religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism, is front and center. “If I observe the Friday with the Mahumetan, or the Saturday with the Jew, or the Sunday with the Christian, . . . whether I worship God in the various & pompous ceremonies of the papists, or in the plainer way of the Calvinists,” he wrote, “I see no thing in any of these, if they be done sincerely & out of conscience, that can of itself make me, either the worse subject to my prince, or worse neighbor to my fellow subject.”

It was an extraordinary claim for an Englishman of his era: that Catholics, Calvinists, Jews, and Muslims alike could all be good citizens and good neighbors. Twenty years later, in the throes of another season of anti-Catholic anxiety, Locke delivers the same argument, yet even more forcefully.

In A Letter Concerning Toleration — now considered foundational to the Western canon — Locke insists that the equal protection of civil rights for all religious groups is “agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind.” He uses Catholicism as a test case for explaining why religious doctrines should be of no concern to the magistrate: “If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor.” Locke applies his argument not only to Catholics but to the most despised religious minorities of 17th-century Europe. The best way to safeguard the rights of conscience, he concludes, is “to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion.” The American Founders took note.

Nevertheless, Locke has his critics. Political progressives find his religious outlook — he considered the pursuit of God’s gift of salvation the “highest obligation” facing every human being — outdated and offensive. Many conservatives are also ambivalent or even hostile. Catholic thinkers such as R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, not only take Locke’s anti-Catholicism for granted, they view it as evidence of animus toward biblical religion, underwritten by a contempt for the sources of “traditional authority.” In Why Liberalism Failed, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen faults Lockean liberalism for “the destruction of social norms” and the “untrammeled expansion of private identity.” Others, such as Yoram Hazony, in The Virtue of Nationalism, denounce Locke’s entire approach to politics as “a far-reaching depreciation of the most basic bonds that hold society together.”

We are entitled to wonder whether these critics have the slightest idea of the actual political and cultural catastrophe that had engulfed Western society when Locke made his most famous arguments for human liberty. The sources of “traditional authority” wistfully recalled by these writers — the state churches and social hierarchies of European society — had transformed much of Europe into a violent, sectarian battlefield. Under the banner of the cross of Christ, the “basic bonds that hold society together” — such as compassion, forgiveness, and mutual respect — were being shredded without a twinge of conscience.

It was Locke’s moral outrage over the widespread abuse of power, reaching another crescendo in the 1680s, that drove him to compose his Two Treatises of Government (1689) and A Letter Concerning Toleration. English society was in crisis: riven by a brutal crackdown on religious dissent, by the return of political absolutism, and by the growing threat of militant Catholicism. “The idea of a Counter-Reformation design against English Protestantism was far from absurd,” writes historian John Coffey, “and we should resist the temptation to treat Protestant fear as irrational paranoia.” The Dutch Republic, where Locke was living in political exile, was absorbing thousands of religious refugees fleeing Catholic France. The reason: On Oct. 22, 1685 — a few weeks before Locke began composing his Letter — Louis XIV invalidated the Edict of Nantes. France’s brief experiment in religious toleration of its Protestant (Huguenot) population had come to an end.

And a bloody end at that. At least 200,000 Protestants fled in the first wave of persecution. Locke met and befriended many of them. It would have been impossible to ignore the reports of Protestant children taken from their parents, of churches demolished, of ministers beaten, imprisoned, or executed because of their faith. Princeton historian Jonathan Israel describes the mounting Catholic–Protestant tensions thus: “The resurgence of anti-Catholic sentiment, in reaction to the persecution of the Huguenots in France, pervaded the entire religious and intellectual climate of the Republic.”

Despite all of this, Locke defends the civil and religious rights of Catholics in his Letter, as part of a broader argument for freedom of conscience. “I will not undertake to represent how happy and how great would be the fruit, both in church and state, if the pulpits everywhere sounded with this doctrine of peace and toleration.” It is a curious doctrine coming from a man supposedly hobbled by anti-Catholic bigotry.

Why, then, do Locke’s critics conclude that he opposed equal protections for Catholics in the commonwealth? Because in his Letter and other writings, Locke objects to tolerating those who teach that “faith is not to be kept with heretics” or that “kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms.” Such views were a matter of Catholic policy, and it seems clear that Catholic leaders were the chief subjects in Locke’s mind.

Yet Locke makes a crucial distinction between Catholics who pledged loyalty to the political regime under which they lived and those who sought its overthrow — a fifth column “ready upon any occasion to seize the government.” Locke’s detractors fail to acknowledge the machinations of the Catholic Church, in England and elsewhere, in which the Holy See acted to destabilize political authorities or condemn them as heretics and see them toppled. What Locke found intolerable was not Catholic theology per se but rather the agents of political subversion operating under the guise of religious obedience. As he put it in the newly discovered manuscript: “It is not the difference of their opinion in religion, or of their ceremonys in worship; but their dangerous & factious tenets in reference to the state . . . that exclude them from the benefit of toleration.” On this point, Locke could be as tough on Protestants as he was on Catholics.

Today we take political stability and civil order for granted; we do not exist in fear of sectarian forces sweeping away our liberties. But no one living in Locke’s tumultuous times enjoyed this luxury. Some ideas threatened the moral taproot of civil society; they could not be tolerated. In Locke’s world — as in ours — the constitution must not become a suicide pact. Political philosopher Greg Forster insightfully observes that Locke “towers over the history of liberalism precisely because virtually everything he wrote was directed at coping with the problem that gave birth to liberalism — religious violence and moral discord.”

Such is the world as we find it. If prejudice taints Locke’s political legacy, perhaps it is the prejudice of those who prefer false and comforting narratives to difficult moral and historical realities. Locke’s critics have blinded themselves to the bracing nature of his democratic vision: “But those whose doctrine is peaceable, and whose manners are pure and blameless, ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects.” Here is the only tenable solution to the challenge of religious diversity: equal justice under the law for people of all faith traditions.

No political doctrine has been more integral to the success of the United States, for no nation has been so determined to regard religious pluralism as a source of cultural strength. America’s experiment in human liberty and equality is profoundly Lockean. It is also, in some important respects, deeply Christian. Locke believed that the gospel message of divine mercy — intended for all — implied political liberalism. The founder of Christianity, he wrote, “opened the kingdom of heaven to all equally, who believed in him, without any the least distinction of nation, blood, profession, or religion.”

It would be hard to conceive of a better doctrine on which to build a more just and humane society. A revival of Lockean liberalism would do much to tame the hatreds now afflicting the soul of the West.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Oxford Don vs. the Devil

This article was originally posted at National Review.

‘The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk.” That was the opening sentence of the Time magazine cover story for September 8, 1947. The subject of the story, who swiftly exited the classroom for the nearest pub, was the Oxford University don and best-selling author Clive Staples Lewis. How did a scholar of medieval literature, with no formal theological training — a strident atheist in his youth — become, in the words of Time, “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world”?

This is one of the questions taken up by James Como in C. S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, a recent title in the Oxford University Press series of compact introductions to wide-ranging topics. Como’s unlikely achievement is to deliver a brief (under 200 pages) yet compelling literary survey of Lewis’s works, which include over 40 books, 200 essays, 150 poems, short stories, a diary, and three volumes of letters. I can think of only a handful of authors qualified to take on such a project, and Como is among them. A professor emeritus of rhetoric at York College (CUNY), a founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, and the author of Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis (1998), he is a leading Lewis scholar.

Nevertheless, the task is daunting. Lewis’s writings — his fantasy, science fiction, apologetics, and theological essays — were as diverse as his public personae. He excelled in his roles as a university lecturer, literary historian, broadcaster, debater, preacher, and public intellectual. His series of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia, has sold over 100 million copies in over 40 languages. Though he was a lifelong Protestant (Anglican), his works could be found at the bedside of Pope John Paul II. Como puts it nicely: “Withal it is easy to lose sight of just how complex, productive, influential, charismatic, and steadfast this portly, rumpled man was.”

Indeed, Lewis was a force of nature — and, we are entitled to suspect, of something beyond nature. As Como notes, Lewis’s first published writing was a collection of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919), a work he began when he was serving with the British Army in France during the Great War and which bears the imprint of the soldier turned cynic:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,

For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.

The good is dead. Let us curse God most High . . .

We built us joyful cities, strong and fair,

Knowledge we sought and gathered wisdom rare,

And all this time you laughed upon our care . . .

Lewis’s diary, All My Road Before Me (1922–27), offers clues about what lured him away from his egoism and materialism. The last line of the diary reads, “Is there never to be any peace or comfort?” He would find both in the teachings of the Bible. But only with the help of many Christian authors and friends — including George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, and J. R. R. Tolkien — did Lewis overcome his fierce doubts and embrace the Christian faith. Explains Como: “The great value of his diary is this: it shows us the man Lewis converted from, and the reader is relieved to be done with it.”

What offended and confounded many of Lewis’s peers at Oxford was his supernaturalism: an unapologetic belief in the traditional Christian doctrines of heaven and hell and in Jesus as the incarnate Son of God. The concepts are embedded in his science-fiction mythology, The Space Trilogy. The series begins with Out of the Silent Planet (1938), which traces the adventures of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who battles the forces of evil that have turned earth into a quarantined and “silent” planet in the cosmos.

As Como reminds us, the sin of pride, and its fatal consequences, lie near the center of the story. Ransom travels to Melacandra (Mars), a planet with a benevolent guardian spirit, the Oyarsa, who presides over creatures untouched by sin. To the inhabitants Ransom tries to explain earth’s history of hatred, war, slavery, and oppression.

“It is because they have no Oyarsa,” said one of the pupils.

“It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,” said Augray.

Ransom’s adventures continue in Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945), in which the malignant powers of perverted science endanger the entire human race. “Finally we understand what is at stake,” Como writes. “Earth may be one small part of a larger design, yet the reader sees with fresh eyes the enormity of the Fall and the magnitude of the forces that range both against us and for us.”

Walter Hooper, Lewis’s personal secretary and renowned editor of his works — to whom Como dedicates his book — observes that many of Lewis’s best books were conceived under the shadow of the Second World War. He began writing The Problem of Pain (1940) in the summer of 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In the same year, within weeks after the first air-raid sirens were sounded in London, Lewis wrote a fragment of what would become The Chronicles of Narnia, probably his best-known work. The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), tells the story of the Pevensie children, who travel through a magic wardrobe into Narnia, the kingdom ruled by Aslan, the Great Lion: “This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.”

Likewise, it was during a church service on Sunday, July 21, 1940—at the start of the Battle of Britain — that Lewis got the idea for The Screwtape Letters (1942), the fictional correspondence between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his apprentice, Wormwood. His most significant apologetic work, Mere Christianity (1952), was based on a series of radio talks he delivered over the BBC, beginning in 1941, when the survival of Western civilization was an open question. Like no one else, Lewis could transform dry religious dogma into something plausible and appealing. Not only has Mere Christianity been bought, translated, and quoted more than any of his other works but, Como says, it “has catalyzed many conversions.”

Comprehensive, lucid, rich in moral insight, C. S. Lewis pays homage to Lewis’s talent for uniting Christian teaching with the deepest yearnings of the human heart. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis describes what he calls “the dialectic of desire,” when we experience a sudden stab of joy and longing, which quickly vanishes and sends us on a search for its source. “Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all,” he wrote. “All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.”

Lewis concluded that this experience, which he mediated through books, or music, or nature, could not be a cruel fiction. Thus we read in Till We Have Faces (1956), a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche: “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from. . . . Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?” Como writes that Lewis “lost interest in Joy itself after his conversion.” Perhaps it is better to say that Lewis redirected his attention: from his own experience to that of his fellow travelers.

Joy was the subject of probably his most famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” Preached on June 8, 1941, in the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Oxford, it must rank as one of the most profound and poignant messages about divine love ever delivered from any modern pulpit:

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

If Lewis’s vision of God’s glory is correct, then perhaps no other author over the last century has done more to help others to taste the divine happiness, to find their way home, to reach Aslan’s country. “A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside,” Lewis wrote. “The following Him is, of course, the essential point.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: An Insider’s Guide to Italian Insults

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The tragicomic irony of Chris Cuomo’s pugilistic outburst earlier this week — cursing and physically threatening a man for taunting him with a reference to the movie The Godfather — is that the CNN anchor reinforced the usual tropes about Italian Americans. We are all wise-guys, goons, and Mafiosi, just itching to beat the stuffing out of anyone who gives us the malocchio, the evil eye.

“No, punk-ass b—es from the right call me ‘Fredo.’ My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN,” Cuomo says in a video that went viral. Cuomo is painfully aware that conservative talk-show hosts routinely refer to him as “Fredo,” i.e., Frederico Corleone, the dumb, wimpish brother from the Godfather trilogy.

The argument between the two men escalates:

Cuomo: “It’s a f—ing insult to the people. … It’s like the N-word for us.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Cuomo: “I’ll f—ing ruin your sh—t. I’ll f—ing throw you down these stairs like a f—ing punk…Take a swing, c’mon boy.”

In his feverish imagination, Cuomo is gallantly defending his honor and ethnic heritage in front of his wife and nine-year-old daughter. In his stunted emotional world, threatening to maim or murder a man for calling him an idiot should inspire admiration.

And it does, beginning with CNN. “Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup,” wrote CNN spokesman Matt Dornic in a statement. “We completely support him.” People as ideologically diverse as actor Alec Baldwin and Fox News host Sean Hannity — who seem to know as much about Italian Americans as they do about anger management — offered their support. What Cuomo and his defenders cannot understand is that rather than exonerating himself, he reduced himself to a cultural stereotype.

Other than Chris Cuomo, no Italian American thinks that “Fredo” is the moral equivalent of the N-word to African Americans. In fact, we have a much more colorful stock of words to insult people for their lack of intelligence or other infirmities. Let me share a few.

There is the provocative scungille, which literally means a large snail. We might toss them in a salad or serve them in a red sauce (scungilli a la marinara). But, as urban dictionaries indicate, we often use it to mean “a slow person who cannot perform ordinary tasks.” At a baseball game, for example, if an infielder for the home team keeps bobbling routine ground balls, we might say, “Get that scungille off the field.”

There is the rhythmic mammalucco. It means a chump, a patsy, a guppy. As the older Italian brother might say, “My sister is dating a real mammalucco.”

There is the innocuous-sounding ciuccio, which literally means a baby’s pacifier. But we use it (along with the abbreviated slang chooch) to mean a moron or a jackass: “Tony gambled away his nest egg for retirement. What a chooch.”

There is the unpleasant fa schifo, which means “you make me sick, that’s disgusting.” Italian mothers use this phrase all the time, usually aimed either at their husbands or whatever mess their children are getting themselves into.

And there is the lyrical mezza stunad, a Loconte family favorite. It is derived from the Italian stonato, “out of tune.” It means you have your head in the clouds, or you’re not paying attention to reality: “Hey, mezza stunad, you walked right past me and didn’t say hello.”

My father was born in southern Italy, near Bari, and my mom’s family (Aiello) emigrated from an island off the coast of Naples, and so these were everyday expressions in the Loconte household.

I should add that throughout the years of the Clinton administration, my father became very fond of the word bugiardo, which means liar. Which brings us back to Chris Cuomo. There is nothing racist about being called Fredo. It means you are dimwitted and insecure, if sometimes well-intentioned. It was a lie to pretend otherwise — a race-baiting slander that has become the immoral reflex of the disciples of modern liberalism.

Although Cuomo has shown a glimmer of regret for his unhinged, violent outburst, he has revealed himself fully for what he has long appeared to be: a teppista, a thug in a thousand-dollar suit. Cuomo is the ugly embodiment of what is happening in elite circles in America — in politics, in the academy, entertainment, and journalism. Rational debate is being replaced by self-righteous rage, the citizen displaced by the stormtrooper.

Fredo, in fact, would be an improvement.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

Wall Street Journal: The Versailles Treaty Gets a Bum Rap

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

The agreement that officially ended World War I has borne an impossibly heavy burden: The harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, embittered Germany and set the stage for the rise of Nazism and World War II. This is mostly a myth. It was the Great War itself, not the treaty that concluded it, that set loose the forces and ideologies that would convulse Europe and initiate another global conflict.

The year 1919 was, in fact, a catalytic moment in the history of the West. In January, the German Workers’ Party, the fiercely nationalistic and anti-Semitic precursor to the Nazis, was launched in Munich—nearly six months before the terms of the Versailles treaty were known. In March, Benito Mussolini, a war veteran, founded what became the Fascist Party in Milan. “The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value,” he declared. Mussolini became prime minister in 1922. The first European state to dispense with constitutional government and embrace fascism was Italy—one of World War I’s victors.

Also in March 1919, 51 representatives from two dozen countries met in Moscow at the Founding Congress of the Communist International. Long before Versailles, the other great totalitarian ideology of the 20th century, Marxism-Leninism, was on the march.

Civilization itself had been ravaged by the Great War. Empires collapsed; national economies were ruined. More than 40 million people were killed, injured or permanently disfigured—and for what? The shellshocked veteran became a walking metaphor for the mental outlook of many Europeans.

Yet historians often neglect the spiritual calamity brought about by the conflict—the emotional and moral vertigo that afflicted both elite and middle-class Europeans in the first decade after the war. Erich Remarque’s blockbuster novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), described ex-soldiers returning to civilian life as “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.” In The Ordeal of This Generation (1929), Gilbert Murray, a leading classicist scholar, warned of “a large and outspoken rejection of all religion and particularly of all morality.” Before he became a Christian, C.S. Lewis—who was nearly killed in the trenches in France—confessed his newfound atheism to a friend: “I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (and already decaying) superstition.”

Skepticism was all the rage. American journalist Walter Lippmann lamented the decline of traditional religious beliefs and the moral order they provided. “The acids of modernity have dissolved that order for many of us,” he wrote in A Preface to Morals (1928), “and there are some in consequence who think that the needs which religion fulfilled have also been dissolved.”

The watchword of the decade was disillusionment. Nearly everything associated with the ideals and institutions of liberal democracy, including traditional religion, was taken to the woodshed. It was, after all, the “enlightened” nations of Europe that had engaged in what amounted to a remorseless suicide pact. “When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves,” observed Winston Churchill, “and these were of doubtful utility.”

It is true that Hitler and the Nazis exploited resentment at the reparations demanded of Germany for its role in the conflict. The “war-guilt clause” of the Versailles treaty—making Germany and its allies responsible for causing “all the loss and damage” of the conflict—was widely denounced as “the war-guilt lie.”

The real deception, however, was the fantastical narrative of victory concocted by Germany’s military leaders. Even after the terrible losses during their failed spring offensive in 1918, even after American troops began pouring into France at the rate of 200,000 a month, the German people believed that their army was invincible—and undefeated in the field. So why did they capitulate at Versailles? The German nation, its leaders claimed, had been “stabbed in the back” by socialists, Jews and other enemies of the Reich. No treaty could have undone the psychological damage the German leadership inflicted upon its own citizens.

The catastrophe of the Great War left a hungry void. Communist predictions of the self-immolation of capitalist societies seemed to be stunningly validated. Fascist warnings about a “sickness” in the racial stock of European society found support in educated circles, where the new “scientific” theory of eugenics was already established. No treaty, no matter how just or generous, could puncture the utopian delusions that were displacing the political and religious beliefs of entire populations.

Traditional religion, in its most prophetic and morally serious expression, might have held back the forces of bigotry and terror. But the teachings of the Bible were being discarded throughout Western society. “The modern man has ceased to believe in it but he has not ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him,” wrote Lippmann. “It is no wonder that his impulse is to turn back from his freedom, and to find someone who says he knows the truth and can tell him what to do, to find the shrine of some new god, of any cult however newfangled, where he can kneel and be comforted.”

Secular idols—new and fearsome political religions—had appeared in Europe, and no treaty could have kept them from capturing the hearts of millions of worshipers. In 1919, a new age of faith had begun.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

Providence: 1919: Wilson, the Covenant, and the Improbable League

This article was originally posted at Providence.

VERSAILLES, France—From a window in the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace, the view of its famed gardens and fountains is a welcome reward for negotiating the crush of tourists throughout the palace chambers. Here is a haven of natural and man-made beauty, serenity, and order. Yet a hundred years ago the view from this room would have been much different.

Beginning early in the day on June 28, 1919, onlookers gathered outside the palace, waiting for the outcome of diplomatic negotiations that had dragged on for months. The scene was a swirling mix of emotions: anxiety, grief, bitterness, resignation, and hope. Collectively, they had endured the industrialized slaughter of their youth, the near collapse of their economies, the shattering of their political institutions. The diplomats, who had assembled in the Hall of Mirrors at 3:00 pm, emerged less than an hour later to announce that the Treaty of Versailles—the agreement officially ending the First World War—had been signed. The crowd showered the delegates with flowers and erupted into cheers and shouts of relief.

The man of the moment was US President Woodrow Wilson. More than any other statesman, Wilson imposed his will upon the Versailles Treaty: a breathtaking attempt to redesign the entire international order based on democratic ideals.

Wilson’s brainchild and crowning achievement, the League of Nations, offered a new vision for international relations: a peace-loving “community of power” to replace the “balance of power” that had dominated European politics for centuries. It would be based on “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” This was the central democratic truth that the League was meant to embody. “We have accepted that truth,” Wilson said, “and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”

Barely 20 years later, in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting the Second World War.

Diplomatic historians invoke the phrase “Wilsonian idealism” to describe the American president’s outlook as he tried to reimagine the new world order. Yet many fail to grasp how Wilson’s humanistic and religious assumptions turned his democratic project into a fool’s errand.

Up until the First World War, European diplomacy was based on practical and materialistic factors, such as economic competition, access to markets, and military strength. It was rooted in realpolitik: in the observable fact that nations were engaged in the acquisition and maintenance of power, and that they made alliances and went to war to defend their national interests. After the defeat of Napoleonic France, the equilibrium in Europe was maintained by a balance of power, a network of alliances that sought to prevent any single state or combination of states from dominating the continent.

Wilson was determined to tear away and rebuild the entire foundation for international politics. He seemed to have recent history on his side. The political machinations of the European powers had failed to prevent the catastrophe of 1914–18, the costliest and most devastating conflict ever fought. No rational individual, Wilson reasoned, would want to undergo another global war—nor would any rational nation. “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind,” Wilson said in a 1919 speech defending the League. “It is the power of the united moral forces of the world, and in the Covenant of the League of Nations the moral forces of the world are mobilized.”

The treaty’s articles establishing the League of Nations bear the Wilson stamp. Article 10 provides that “the Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.” Article 16 builds upon this communal obligation: “Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants…it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League.”

It is a remarkable proposal, underscored by Wilson’s insistence on the use of the phrase “covenant,” an effort to endow the League with a sacred aura. (Wilson was a lifelong Presbyterian, though his commitment to historical Christianity is debated by his biographers.) Under the terms of the treaty, an act of aggression anywhere in the world created a moral and political obligation upon all other League members: a willingness to mobilize their economic and military resources to confront the aggressor state, whether or not their national interests were threatened. Unlike any other international arrangement in human history, Wilson’s League would be an alliance based not on national interests, but rather on the principle of peace and the defense of democratic ideals.

Although the US Senate failed to ratify the treaty, 63 other nations adopted it. Gilbert Murray, a British classical scholar who served on an advisory committee to the League, suggested that Wilson’s view was embraced by a growing number of politicians and ordinary citizens throughout the 1920s and ’30s. “The whole enterprise of the League is a great adventure, and an adventure based upon a great Repentance,” writes Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1928). “The abolition of war among the civilized nations is not yet assured, but it is within human power. It is almost within reach.”

The concept of national “repentance” has a long historical pedigree, of course, but it is fraught with intellectual confusion. Nation-states, after all, are not like individuals; they do not possess an immortal soul, with an individual conscience, to which they are held accountable to God. Yet Wilson seemed to believe that what applies to individuals applies to nations. He apparently believed in the essentially rational and pacific nature of man:

The most dangerous thing for a bad cause is to expose it to the opinion of the world. The most certain way that you can prove that a man is mistaken is by letting all his neighbors know what he thinks, by letting all his neighbors discuss what he thinks, and if he is in the wrong you will notice that he will stay at home, he will not walk on the street. He will be afraid of the eyes of his neighbors. He will be afraid of their judgment of his character. He will know that his cause is lost unless he can sustain it by the arguments of right and of justice. The same law that applies to individuals applies to nations.

It follows that members of the League will dissuade other members from taking aggressive action against their neighbors; their collective moral judgment, expressed through an international tribunal and other institutions, will deter international conflict.

Yet Wilson’s first premise—the belief that an individual ready to commit an act of aggression will be thwarted by the threat of public shame—is verifiably untrue. It might describe some members of the faculty at Princeton University, where Wilson served as president before entering politics. It does not describe human societies as we have known them since the dawn of civilization. And what is not true of the individual inclined toward evil could not possibly be true of nation-states, with their potential for collective evil magnified by the tools of modern science and technology.

Nevertheless, historian Margaret MacMillan writes that “Wilson kept alive the hope that human society, despite the evidence, was getting better, that nations would one day live in harmony.” Henry Kissinger, the quintessential realist during the Cold War, saw in this a deficient understanding of human nature. “European leaders had no categories of thought to encompass such views,” he writes. “Neither their domestic institutions nor their international order had been based on political theories postulating man’s essential goodness.”

Wilson’s League could not reckon with the ways in which the Great War had damaged the moral and spiritual outlook of European society. As Winston Churchill described it, “The fire roared on till it burned itself out.” Nations that had been so devastated by the mechanized horror of the war could not easily quell the resentments and grievances of their populations. Thus, the tragedy of Versailles is twofold. First, there was the belief that governments would be prepared to transform their foreign policies into expressions of the Sermon on the Mount. Second, there was the notion that a “community of power” would be capable of acting collectively to face down the inevitable threats to international peace and security.

“Truly, this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand,” writes George Kennan, US ambassador to the Soviet Union. “This was the sort of peace you got when you allowed war hysteria and impractical idealism to lie down together in your mind, like the lion and the lamb; when you indulged yourself in the colossal conceit of thinking that you could suddenly make international life over into what you believed to be your own image.”

Under this humanistic vision, no treaty, no covenant, no league of nations could effectively confront the Will to Power. By 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the forces of totalitarianism were already on the move: Italy’s Benito Mussolini founded the first fascist party in Europe; the German Workers’ Party, the precursor to the Nazis, was launched in Munich; and representatives from two dozen countries met in Moscow at the Founding Congress of the Communist International.

Perhaps an insight from the character of Elrond in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, about the nature of our mortal lives, offers a measure of Christian realism in the face of Versailles: “And the Elves believed that evil was ended forever, and it was not so.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Mussolini and the End of Liberal Democracy

This article was originally posted at National Review.

One popular myth about European fascism is that its roots were planted in the rancid soil of Versailles — the Treaty of Versailles, that is, signed a century ago, on June 28, 1919, which officially ended the First World War. The punitive terms of the agreement, we are told, enraged and demoralized a defeated Germany, making the rise of Hitler and Fascism inevitable. In fact, the origins of Fascism can be traced here in Milan, in the Piazza San Sepolcro. It was here, three months before Versailles, that Benito Mussolini, a former soldier who had fought on the winning side of the war, launched the Fascist movement.

It was a ragbag of a gathering. On Sunday morning, March 23, Mussolini addressed a group of perhaps 120 men and several women: dispirited socialists, ex-soldiers, futurists, anarchists, and other unclassifiable revolutionaries. What united them, among other things, was a belief that Italy’s horrific sacrifice for the Allied cause in the Great War — over 650,000 killed and 950,000 wounded — demanded national regeneration. She must not be denied the spoils of war: no vittoria mutilata, or mutilated victory. Barely three years later, 25,000 black-shirted followers marched on Rome, sweeping Mussolini into the government. “Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual,” he proclaimed. “Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.”

The Italian journey from constitutional monarchy to Fascist dictatorship is a cautionary tale for both liberals and conservatives. Although he is viewed as a creature of the political right, Mussolini often enlisted the ideals and tactics of the political left. His success — he ruled for 20 years — is not only a warning about the fever of nationalism. It is a reminder that leftist promises to create perfectly egalitarian societies can reap a whirlwind of violence and disillusionment.

Mussolini began preaching revolutionary change in February 1918, after returning from the front and resuming his job editing Il Popolo d’Italia. Although he had abandoned his socialism a few years earlier, he understood its appeal: “It is a question of organizing the state to ensure the greatest individual and social well-being.” Italy’s parliamentary government, he suggested, should be dominated by “a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep.”

Bombastic, charismatic, visionary: Mussolini presented himself as that man, ready to seize the historical moment. He organized his followers into a fascio di combattimento, a fighting group, who took the Roman fasces, the term for a bundle of sticks bound with ropes, as their symbol of unity. “We demand the right and proclaim the duty to transform Italian life,” he said at the Milan meeting, “if it proves inevitable using revolutionary means.”

Italy’s post-war economic situation, though not as severe as the one in Germany, was ripe for exploitation. There were painful divisions over Italy’s participation in the war. Parliament — denounced by Mussolini as “invincibly nauseous” — was widely discredited. The monarchy was unloved. Writes historian R. J. B. Bosworth in Mussolini’s Italy: “For Italy, least of the great powers, poorest of the great economies, most fragile of the great societies . . . the conversion from war to peace entailed a sea of troubles.”

The war appeared to ravage the assumptions of the old order. All over Eastern Europe, political legitimacy was in doubt and national borders were being contested. Meanwhile, the violence and disorder created by the advance of international Communism was causing a panic. The Bolsheviks had plunged Russia into a vicious civil war, and although Italian socialism proffered a more humane face, to many Italians it led to the same future: class warfare, the erosion of property rights, mob violence, and contempt for national and cultural identity.

Italy’s economic woes accentuated the socialist appeal. Inflation was rising faster than it had during the war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning from combat — including 220,000 who were disabled — struggled to find work. On a personal note: My Italian grandfather, Michael Loconte, was living and working in the United States when war broke out. He opted to fight with the American military in France, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen after the war, and settled with his family in New York City. His instincts were good: In the summer of 1919, of the 1.5 million Italian soldiers still serving in the army, roughly a quarter were deployed within Italy to guarantee public order. There was a palpable fear of a socialist revolution.

Those fears were magnified in the general election of November 16, 1919. Mussolini and his Fascist allies were on the ballot, but they suffered humiliating losses. Meanwhile, the socialists won roughly 1.8 million votes and claimed 156 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, making them the largest political party. The left-wing paper, Avanti!, declared Mussolini a political corpse; his coffin was paraded through the streets of Milan, along with dirge-singing demonstrators.

The funeral celebrations were premature. Efforts to reconvert the war economy were flailing; strikes and riots over the cost of living accelerated. All over Italy, trains, banks, and public buildings were attacked by mobs. Local “Soviets” were announced, and some areas of the country fell under complete Communist control. But neither the Socialist party nor the Italian Popular party (composed of Catholic socialists) offered any effective polices. Fascism found nourishment in socialism’s weakness. Writes Christopher Hibbert in Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce: “The Fascists put themselves forward as saviors of the country, the only force by which Bolshevism could be checked and strangled.”

There was a good deal of strangling to be done. Squads of Fascists, the squadristi, armed with knives, rifles, and revolvers, assaulted Communists and their sympathizers. With government complicity, roughly 3.000 anti-Fascists were murdered between October 1920 and the March on Rome in October 1922. Mussolini did not have to seize power; he was offered it by King Victor Emmanuel III. Immediately after forming a coalition government, he demanded from the Chamber of Deputies unrestricted authority to implement his reforms. He was granted these powers by a majority of 275 votes to 90.

It would not be long before Mussolini articulated his view of the state, which would captivate Adolf Hitler:

The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.

Thus, it was Mussolini, not Hitler, who introduced the Fascist disease into the bloodstream of Europe. And he succeeded not because Italian diplomats failed to deliver the goods at Versailles. Whatever his motives in his campaign to rebuild a battered nation, Mussolini understood something of the human longing for purpose and community. Perhaps our current political culture is not so immune as we think to the cant and propaganda of Il Duce’s Italy.

Italian Fascism, after all, promised national greatness, unity, spirituality, and a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Instead, it brought to the Italians World War II, the bombing and occupation of their cities, widespread poverty, and the loss of basic civil liberties. While claiming that the Fascist state “defends and protects” religion, Mussolini despised the teachings of Christianity and manipulated the Vatican to consolidate his power. Italy’s political unity was short-lived — achieved by a singular Duce with a violent disregard for dissent — and it left behind a deeply divided society.

With no sense of irony, liberals now invoke fascism as an epithet to dismiss their conservative critics. But is the echo of Mussolini more likely to be heard among the political Right? The animating spirit of fascism — its martial zeal for a statist utopian vision — seems quite welcome in the citadels of modern liberalism. The fascist negation of religious truths, by which all political choices are to be judged, has found countless disciples in progressive circles. The Fascist state “has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential,” Mussolini declared. “In such matters, the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.”

Benito Mussolini was the first political leader to write the epitaph for liberal democracy in Europe. Yet it was liberal democracy, through a recovery of moral vigor, that managed to defeat Fascism. In the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, the building in which Mussolini and his followers first vowed to overthrow the established order still stands. It houses a police station. The rule of law has replaced the rule of the dictator. Once worshipped like a god, Mussolini became a pariah because of his disastrous alliance with Hitler’s Germany. He fled Milan in April 1945 but was caught and executed: Shot in the chest, his body was strung up to cheers and mockery.

It was, according to an eyewitness, “as if the whole thing was a dream from which we would awake to find the world unchanged.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Tolkien Film Fails to Capture the Majesty of His Achievement

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Perhaps Finnish film director Dome Karukoski took on an impossible task with his biopic Tolkien. When J. R. R. Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, he hoped to give England something he thought it lacked: an epic and transcendent tale of its mythic origins. “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country,” Tolkien explained. “It had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought.” The astonishing appeal of the work — it has sold more than 150 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages — suggests that Tolkien has come closer to achieving that goal than any other author.

And therein lies the challenge: to produce a film about imagination. In Tolkien’s case, this requires much more than biographical knowledge. Screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford recreate some beautiful and authentic moments, especially in exploring Tolkien’s passion for languages. The relationship between Tolkien and Edith, the love of his life, is told with tenderness and reserve. Tolkien’s combat experience in the First World War — the plot is revealed through a series of flashbacks from the trenches in France — is a key ingredient in the story. Ultimately, however, the film fails to tap the deepest sources — both human and divine —  of Tolkien’s restless, creative genius.

It is refreshing to see a film that takes up the theme of friendship, especially robust male friendship, which was so vital to Tolkien’s life and career. Tolkien (capably played by Nicholas Hoult) establishes a rich circle of friendships at the King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Together with Geoffrey Bache Smith, Christopher Wiseman, and Robert Gilson, the boys fashion a literary-artistic club with no mean purpose: to change the world.

Yet the film devotes more time to idle bantering and boozing than it does to the group’s literary and moral purposes. It also overlooks a crucial exchange: a meeting in December 1914, dubbed “the Council of London,” which was transformative for Tolkien. “In fact it was a council of life,” writes John Garth, author of the magisterial Tolkien and the Great War. The prospect of the trenches had a sobering effect. Late into the night they talked and debated — about love, literature, patriotism, and religion. It was at this moment, and among this fellowship, that Tolkien began to sense his literary calling. “For Tolkien, the weekend was a revelation,” Garth concludes, “and he came to regard it as a turning point in his creative life.”

If the film’s writers wanted to depict such a revelatory scene — which they don’t — it would have required familiarity with an ancient source of wisdom. We no longer appreciate how the educated classes of Tolkien’s generation were schooled in the classical and medieval literary traditions. From works such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Tolkien not only read the mythic and violent story of Rome’s beginnings, but also absorbed the concept of the noble and sacrificial quest. Indeed, probably the most influential work in Tolkien’s professional life was Beowulf, which he read as a young man and considered one of the greatest poems of English literature. Declares its epic hero: “Fate oft saveth a man not doomed to die, when his valour fails not.” Tolkien taught, translated, and studied the poem throughout his career.

These older works — once taught as part of the canon of Western civilization — embody something that is almost anathema to our twitter-saturated minds: depth of imagination. “In all these works there was a sense that the author knew more than he was telling,” writes Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-Earth, “that behind his immediate story there was a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world about which he had no time (then) to speak.” This, of course, is part of Tolkien’s remarkable legacy. By drawing maps, inventing new languages, and creating histories and genealogies for the inhabitants of his world, Tolkien convinces us that Middle-earth was a real place where real things of great consequence occurred.

The literature important to the man who created perhaps the most beloved character of modern fiction  — the hobbit — offers a view of the heroic pointedly at odds with the Hollywood conception. Tolkien was attracted, aesthetically and spiritually, to works that exalted courage in the context of a tragic world — a world in which defeat is likely and there are no permanent victories. “The worth of defeated valor in this world is deeply felt,” Tolkien declared in his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The author of Beowulf, he explained, “showed forth the permanent value of that pietas which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned.”

These are deep waters. Like no one else, Tolkien retrieved the truths and virtues of the ancient myths and reintroduced them to the modern mind. And, remarkably, he accomplished this in a post-war European society — a “waste land,” in T. S. Eliot’s words — that had soured on the ideas of bravery, valor, virtue, and patriotism. “To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate,” wrote his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis in an early review. “Nothing quite like it was ever done before.”

Perhaps this is the most regrettable failing of Tolkien: For all of its impressive production values — and for all the respect its director brings to his subject — the film does not grasp the nature of Tolkien’s achievement, much less its potential sources. Instead, we are presented with World War I battle scenes where a shell-shocked Tolkien has visions, or hallucinations, of the fire-breathing dragons and Black Riders that will terrify us in The Lord of the Rings. Of course, no soldier who fought at the Battle of the Somme, where Tolkien tasted “the animal horror” of combat, passed through its hellish flames unscathed. But, as John Garth insightfully explains, Tolkien thought carefully about how the experiences of war can illuminate other, nobler aspects of the human condition. His epic work, Garth writes, “puts glory, honor, majesty, as well as courage, under such stress that they often fracture, but are not utterly destroyed.”

It is this aspect of Tolkien’s fiction that seems to demand something more than a purely materialist or humanist outlook: We cannot fully account for his staggering creativity absent his Christian beliefs. A convert to Catholicism in his youth, Tolkien was unambiguous about the importance of his faith to his life and work. He viewed myths, for example, not merely as human inventions but as a literary means by which God communicates a portion of his truth to the world: a “splintered fragment of the true light.” Tolkien likened the work of the myth-maker to that of a “sub-creator” who helps to fulfill God’s purposes as the Creator.

The author of The Lord of the Rings is still accused of “escapism,” of being so burdened by the loss and sorrows of war that he sought refuge in his imaginary Shire. It is a charge that Tolkien cannot refute, because the film lacks the author’s spiritual commitments. Tolkien’s entire conceptual approach, anchored in a belief in the fall of man and in the hope of redemption, helps to account both for the extraordinary realism and imaginative power of his fiction.

Here is what animates Tolkien’s fierce literary ambition, the central mystery that the film cannot penetrate: It is a belief in what he called the eucatastrophe — a sudden act of grace — whose expression he regarded as the highest function of the fairy tale. “It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance,” he writes in On Fairy Stories. “It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

Grief and Joy, as sharp as swords, reconciled by grace: that would be a story worth telling.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com