Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #380:The Revolutionary Spirit: Christianity's Role in Shaping Western Civilization

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Being Catholic #380:The Revolutionary Spirit: Christianity's Role in Shaping Western Civilization · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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on Catholic Spirit Radio,
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We're going to have a great show for you today. I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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because we're brought to you by you and couldn't do the show or have the station without you.
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And as I said, I'm here with my wife Lynn today. We're going to talk about the
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genius of Christianity today.
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We talked about the fact that even in the Catholic Church in Germany,
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there is a movement to try and fall away from the Catholic tradition.
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And it is the Catholic tradition that has brought us Western civilization.
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We're going to talk about how the genius of Christianity brought us that civilization
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and what can happen without it.
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And we'll talk about the French Revolution and how it applies actually so much today.
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If we see what's going on today and read from a young man who lived through
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the French Revolution, wrote about it, and a lot of what he wrote about is very
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applicable and apropos to what's going on today.
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I think you'll see the comparison very well. But before we get to that.
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I'm going to turn this over to my wife Lynn and see what she has to say.
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Good to be with you this week.
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Hope that you're all keeping money. We've got to keep cool when it's heat.
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I'm not a summer person. I was born in the summer, but I don't like it.
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It's not my favorite time of the year, but it's been hot and humid.
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You can have it if you like it. The program today should be very interesting.
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There are a lot of things that we don't realize happened during the French Revolution.
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It's a very interesting time.
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You know, I think Americans take it as they followed us and they had the revolution.
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Wasn't it great? Well, I think you're going to find out some things about it you didn't know.
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Well, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, it's all right. I was going to say the American
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Revolution was turned out a lot.
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The American Revolution was one of the very few revolutions that actually turned
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out fairly well compared to most revolutions that have happened in the world.
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And probably because they had a very strong plan for a government that was very,
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very workable, you know, after the revolution was over.
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And it was a radical revolution, too. I mean, it overthrew an established country.
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And, well, actually, it didn't overthrow that country itself.
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And overthrew the government of that country in our country here.
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And we were 3,000 miles away from England. And, of course, you know, that helped immensely.
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And we're drifting apart and so forth. And so there was a big difference between
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the French Revolution and the American Revolution in that respect.
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But perhaps what's going on today in America is more apropos and comparable
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to the French Revolution than actually the American Revolution was in the first
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place. So we'll talk about that a little bit.
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But I'm going to read from an article.
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A guidepost in our current misery, Chautabrian's The Genius of Christianity,
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and it's an article by Alexander Riley, and it's in Touchstone magazine,
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and it's in the July-August 2025 issue of Touchstone magazine,
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A Journal of Mere Christianity.
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It's a very interesting, again, article, and we'll read from that.
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But we have to remember that there's no substitute, really, for the fact of our civilization.
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People compare, you know, they go back and look at the glory,
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I guess, that was Greek and the Roman civilization and so forth.
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And we sort of admire that.
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But take a look at what happened after Rome fell and Christianity rose.
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It built Western civilization and all of the genius and science and literature
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and so forth that exists in the world, the rationality, the overcoming of superstition,
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the understanding of the universe,
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the building of universities,
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the application of logic and so forth to farming and agriculture, the end of slavery.
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All of these things took place under the rule and guise of Christianity.
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And it was Christianity that permeated all of Western civilization.
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And we can see as we read this article, I think that even now,
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as in our own society, as it becomes more and more secularized and falls away
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from its Christian base,
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we are actually becoming more and more superstitious with all of the things
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that we believe in anymore today, such as transgender and other impossible things.
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And the idea that government is some kind of magical...
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Process that will lift us out of everything, and it really hasn't been the case
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at all, that we can have freedom without religion and all of the rest of the things.
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All of these things are not true, and we'll see in this article,
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I think, why that's the case.
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We can lose our science, our rationality, lose our good form of government,
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our education, our great art, all of our freedom, and once all of this is lost,
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it's very, very hard to regain it.
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I mean, Western civilization is a jewel, and no other thing has ever existed
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in the entire world from all of history until now.
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And it's something that people take for granted and don't understand how precious it is.
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And so we're making a case here not to let it go.
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Anything further that you want to say, Lynn? No.
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We can get on with the article because it's got some very, very appropriate
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points. And before we start, I want to read something, a little piece here from G.K.
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Chesterton, preserve the tradition, how important it is to preserve the Catholic tradition.
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I mean, the fact is, is the Catholic tradition is the bedrock actually really
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of the American tradition.
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It's the bedrock actually of, you know, the Protestant religion in America has
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been the predominant and prevalent religion in this country.
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But we have to remember that Protestantism came from Catholicism.
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It was the church that came first, and the Catholicism and the Catholic tradition
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that came first, and it's the roots of Protestantism.
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All the Protestant different denominations and so forth have their roots in
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the Catholic church and Catholic tradition,
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whether some of them realize it or not, and that's where it all came from,
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and that prevailed for 1,500 years before the Protestant Reformation.
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If you want to call it a Reformation, I really don't call it a Reformation myself.
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I think it was more of a defamation than a Reformation.
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And I'm not, you know, trying to downgrade or, you know, in any way demonize
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Protestants at all when I say that.
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It's just that the fact is that the very bedrock of Christianity lies essentially
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in the Catholic the church.
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It came for 1,500 years before and laid the whole foundations for all the good
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things that we have in Protestantism today and in our country and so forth with
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the religion that we have, the Christianity that we have.
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So, it's an article here, a little tiny piece here entitled Preserves Its Tradition.
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And here's what Chesterton says about tradition.
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He says, Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.
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It is actually giving credence and understanding and credit to our ancestors
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for what they did and what they built.
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And we have in our, I think we have today, this attitude a lot of times of focusing nothing on,
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on nothing but the faults and so forth of our ancestors, on the bad things that
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came before, instead of all the good things that people did.
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Every generation of people, all people, scratch anybody, scratch a Catholic,
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a Protestant, or anybody else, and you'll find a human being, and we all have faults.
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And no society is perfect, and there are always things wrong with it.
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But we need to look at some of the great things that they did and give our ancestors
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credit for what they did and keep those things in existence that they accomplished.
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And so he goes on here, he says, tradition means giving votes to the most obscure
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of all classes, our ancestors.
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It is a democracy of the dead. And I've said that before.
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Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who
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happen to be walking about.
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In other words, people of any particular given time think that somehow or another
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everything centers around them and that they live in the most important time in all of history.
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And maybe, you know, to a certain extent that's true in the fact that they happen
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to be alive at a particular time.
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And certainly that time has to be important to them.
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But the point is, is that unless we understand history and where we came from
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and give credit to the people that came before and have a little bit of humility,
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we can destroy all of the good things that they built for us.
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We should be very, very grateful for and try to understand the situation in
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which they existed and how and why they handed on what they handed on to us.
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And if they handed on some things that were faulty, it's up to us to correct
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them, not to constantly criticize.
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So, at any rate, it's here a guidepost in our current misery by Alexander Riley.
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Hopelessness is a looming threat in our contemporary world for those of a traditionalist bent.
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Everywhere, it would seem, we suffer losses, and our hold on our own culture weakens.
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It is not too much to say that a revolution is ongoing in American society.
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And just take a look around us. I mean, I happen to be looking here at a piece
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of political literature that I got in the mail, and it's from someone,
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you know, campaigning for election.
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And it says here, it's from the progressive side of the aisle.
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It says here, defending our health and rights by empowering doctors to prescribe
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reproductive health medication, regardless of what extreme politicians in Washington do.
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In other words, this person is for defending the right of doctors to prescribe
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reproductive health medication.
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What is reproductive health medication?
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Glenn, in this case, reproductive health medication, what the person here is
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referring to is the abortion pill.
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In other words, a pill that poisons and kills the baby and also,
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to a certain extent, poisons and harms the mother as well.
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And this is referred to as reproductive health medication. And if anyone opposes
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this, according to this blurb here, the person is extreme.
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In other words, if there's a politician in Washington that opposes this,
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they are extreme politicians.
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I mean, this is newspeak. Why does something have to be hidden in speech like
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this as if somehow poisoning and killing our reproductive health benefits from something?
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You know, that's what's going on. That's one of the things. That's for sure.
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I mean, you have to be careful and be observant of what words they use. That tells you a lot.
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Exactly. And this is what this
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means, but, you know, there is a revolution going on in American society.
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Basic aspects of social structure are being uprooted and dismantled,
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and deep cultural patterns of belief and behavior are now stigmatized and steadily attacked.
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All of this organized by factions of political and economic elites enthralled
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through a morally totalitarian ideology.
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A healthy sense of the enormity of what we face is not to be disdained.
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It is hardly unrealistic to believe that the worst is possible.
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And I think in New York, we have a communist running, and the person tries to
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deny that and say that they're a democratic socialist, but anybody that says
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seize private property and take it.
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And that's exactly what this person said. Now, of course, it's backing off from all of that.
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But people that talk in that respect are not socialists.
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They're communists because that's exactly what the communists did,
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was to seize private property for the state and take it away from people,
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you know, without compensation.
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And this is what this person actually has said. Now, of course, backs off from this.
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But the fact is, is that, you know, this has never worked anywhere in the world.
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And it's always been a total failure. And it always leads to a totalitarian system.
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And it always leads to a system that degrades people and actually goes backwards
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in its ability to serve the public.
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But how to stave off despair. The traditionalist often does well to look to
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historical precedents and taking on contemporary situations,
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however unique they might be or appear.
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Revolutions have, after all, happened before, and traditionalists have found
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ways to stand against them.
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And, of course, this has happened. The Russian Revolution turned into seven
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years of horror for the Russian people, but people stood up against it,
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and eventually it was changed.
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When François-René Vicombe de Chateaubriand, however that's pronounced,
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published The Genius of Christianity in the spring of 1802, he was newly returned
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to France after a lengthy period of exile in a country that had been at war with his own country.
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And, you know, when you think about 18-2, the spring of 18-2,
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at the time that this was happening, you know, with him in France,
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at about that time, wasn't the Lewis and Clark expedition going on in our country?
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Sure was. They were exploring the Louisiana. They were also fighting with Britain.
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Yeah. We were going up the Missouri River and exploring the Louisiana Territory,
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which, you know, was purchased, at that time, it was purchased from what? From Russia, wasn't it?
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Louisiana. Yeah. No, wasn't that Louisiana, Berkta? Yeah.
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France. From France at the time? Yeah. Okay, yeah. All right.
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From France. The United States bought... Oh, I was thinking...
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I was going to mix up Alaska.
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That's right. I was thinking of Alaska. I'm sorry.
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From Russia. Yeah. That was a little bit later.
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The Treaty of Amiens had just brought an end to the chaos of the French Revolutionary Wars.
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Though war would quickly return to Europe by the following year,
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once a certain Corsican general had risen to the status of Emperor of France.
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The young and still unknown Chateaubriand anticipated a rough reception for
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his book, to say the least.
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So he didn't expect the book to get much attention in all of this that was going on here.
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It was by 1802, the French Revolution, of course, was dying down,
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but still there was a lot of turmoil going on and a lot of other things happening in the world.
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And a lot of people who had names such as, you know, Voltaire and so forth,
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much bigger than his, and he really didn't expect that his book would make much
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of a splash, but he went ahead and wrote it and got it out into the public anyway.
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And he says, what hope could I have nameless and without any to praise me to
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destroy the influence of Voltaire?
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Well, I better stop here and we'll start over on that. We're coming to the end of our.
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Segment here, so stay with us. We'll be right back. You've been listening to
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking about the genius of Christianity.
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We're talking about a book written by a young man who lived through the French
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Revolution and coped with it.
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And during the time and the turmoil, he took the time to write this book,
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The Genius of Christianity.
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And he is getting it out to the
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public and he is talking about the fact that he doesn't
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have much hope that people will pay a lot of attention to
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it on account of there are so many bigger names out
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there than himself that he really doesn't have a reputation like Voltaire and
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some of the other French philosophes and so forth that he'll be competing for
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attention with and then just the fact that the French Revolution had just taken
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place and actually was winding down but was still very much in effect yet.
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And so here's what he says. He says, what hope could I have,
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nameless and without any to praise me, to destroy the influence of Voltaire,
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who had been dominant for more than half a century? What?
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He goes on. He says, and others, Diderot, de Lambert, Duclos,
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DuPois, Alvicious, Condorcet, were minds without authority?
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I mean, all of these people were much greater authorities than me,
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what could I expect to accomplish among such giants?
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The world ought to return to the golden legend, renounce its acquired admiration
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for the masterpieces of science and reason in order to listen to me?
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Was it not as ridiculous as it was reckless for an obscure man to oppose a philosophical
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movement so irresistible that it had produced the French Revolution,
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and he just says it had produced the revolution.
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Reckless and ridiculous, perhaps.
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Though the years of the terror had passed by then, the revolutionary impetus was far from blunted.
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The old regime, in all its elements, the monarchy, the established institutional
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order, and the cultural backbone of the church, and the faith that undergirded
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it, seemed forever vanquished, and the future was fraught with uncertainty and danger.
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Chateaubriand had himself, for a time, doubted whether the former order could,
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or should, withstand the pressures applied by the revolutionaries.
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He was born into an aristocratic family that had, in his grandfather's generation,
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fallen considerably in rank.
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But his father had made a fortune at sea and subsequently purchased a castle
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at Comberg on the stormy Brittany coast.
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There, Chateaubriand was born in 1768.
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As he reached adulthood, he took up a military career, and the cataclysm of
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the French Revolution struck just as he was entering his twenties.
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He was in this period a disciple of the epoch's literary spirit of revolution.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as were so many other bright and idealistic men in the Europe of his time.
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So he had some philosophical sympathies with this political revolt,
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but then its visceral and extreme realities began to be revealed.
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After the fall of the Bastille, a violent mob made its way to his family's residence,
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burying the heads of victims on pikes.
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Years later, Chateaubriand recounted this horrifying experience thus.
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He said, If I had had a rifle, I would have fired on these wretches as if at wolves.
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They screamed and hammered, renewed blows on a courtyard door to knock it down,
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and add my head to those of their victims.
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Those heads changed my political disposition. I was horrified by these cannibal feasts.
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Should have been. I mean, most people were. People suffered so much during that revolution.
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Yes, they did. It was a terror going on, people.
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The idea of leaving France for some way of country was born in my mind. I mean, it was horrible.
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And the fact is, is that the revolution devolved into nothing but bloodthirsty terror.
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It accomplished nothing. And of course, after the revolution,
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all they got was Napoleon and war and more violence and more terror.
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And France, it took a long time for it to recover. And frankly,
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I don't think it has really recovered fully to this very day.
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Might not have. I mean, really.
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Think about it. Jeez.
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And so, pushed by the forces of these events, and this can happen here.
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I mean, look at the mobs we have now running around in the streets and so forth,
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trying to terrorize the...
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ICE for deporting criminals. I mean, people who are perverts and people who
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are murderers and thieves and drug runners and everything else.
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And yet we get this reaction to it. So it isn't difficult to whip up mobs into
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all kinds of irrational behavior. And that's exactly what happened in France.
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And it got totally out of hand and started, you know, killing all of you.
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A person simply because of their rank would be killed, even though the person
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may have done nothing to harm anybody or do anything to anybody.
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And then the distortions of things. Look at Marie Antoinette.
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She was a very, very strong, faithful Christian woman, actually.
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If you look at the real history of Marie Antoinette, she had never done anything
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really harmful to her constituents.
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And the idea that when somebody said that people have no bread,
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she was supposed to have said, let them eat cake, it's more likely,
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she said, don't they have cake?
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Cake was a form of rough bread, and usually peasants all had cake.
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She was concerned, and of course, this was distorted into some kind of,
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like, you know, she was some snobby person who said, let them eat cake.
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A lot of this stuff that you read and so forth about revolutions and the slogans
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that they have are distortions.
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Pushed by the forces of these events, he left France in early 1791,
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bound for America and the adventure of a literary and philosophical project.
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His desire was to study and depict what he and many others in Europe believed
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to be the existence of humankind and the pure state of nature in the indigenous
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peoples of the New World.
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And this was another thing. This was promoted by Rousseau, this idea of the
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natural man, And, yeah, the natural savage, you know, this innocent person living
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in a state of nature, pure and clean. There was no such thing, of course.
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The Indians in America didn't live that way. No human beings on the face of
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the earth ever lived that way.
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And the Catholic Church turned to be outright that we all, you know,
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suffer from concupiscence, the tendency to go downhill.
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And the Indians were no exception to that.
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When he arrived, he spent months gathering observations and experiences that
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would inform the Romantic tales, Les Natchez, Atala, and René,
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that are today his primary legacy in his native France and elsewhere.
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By the end of 1791, though, he had resolved to return home as the revolution
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was turning in a still more radical direction, and Chateaubriand now felt compelled
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to enter the struggle against his excesses.
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After the return voyage across the Atlantic, he joined the army of Condé,
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a force made up of royalist aristocrats who had been forced from France by the
27:30
revolution, but now had returned to fight against it.
27:34
And probably this was the forces that were fighting in the Vendée,
27:38
a region of France that fought against the revolution, and almost all of these
27:42
people, these royalties, were Catholics.
27:44
And they were fighting against the overturning of the faith and against the
27:48
revolution that was turned out to nothing but bloody violence.
27:51
He was severely wounded at Thionville in 1792 and fled to Jersey and into exile.
27:58
He would not see France again for seven long years.
28:02
While abroad, and while the revolution raged on in France, he was tortured by
28:06
thoughts of his family back home.
28:08
He gives an emotional account of this in his multi-volume masterpiece of biography.
28:15
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the sense not only that his country was doomed,
28:20
but also that members of his own family who stayed would suffer overwhelmed him.
28:25
What were our chagrins in a foreign land compared to those of the French who
28:29
remained in their country? And moreover, what unhappiness amid the sufferings of exile,
28:35
to know that our leaving itself became the pretext for the persecution of our loved ones.
28:40
A lot of these people were killed simply because their relations.
28:46
Close relations, or loved ones left.
28:48
They left France, and so therefore the ones behind must somehow be guilty.
28:52
Guilty of what? It's never really said.
28:55
Mostly their rank. Guilty of their rank. Their rank was their crime.
29:00
The dangers were palpably real. the revolution took the lives of his brother
29:04
and sister-in-law on the scaffold, and it imprisoned his wife and both of his sisters.
29:10
In the memoirs there is a profoundly moving passage in which he describes being
29:15
brought the wedding ring of his sister-in-law,
29:18
which was found broken and discarded in the gutter of the rue Cassette,
29:22
a stone's throw from the Palais du Luxembourg, where she had been imprisoned.
29:27
In anguish, he wonders where and under what circumstances she had lost it.
29:33
Had she passed through the ruckus head on the way to the scaffold?
29:36
Had the ring been torn from her finger after her execution?
29:40
I was gripped by the sight of that symbol, which, by its brokenness and its
29:45
inscription, recalled to me such cruel destinies.
29:49
Something mysterious and fatal was attached to that ring, my sister-in-law seemed
29:53
to have sent me from the land of the dead in memory of her and of my brother.
29:59
The history and context of the composition of the genius of Christianity is
30:04
essential to its deepest meaning.
30:06
In other words, you have to understand what happened to his family,
30:09
what happened to him when you read the genius of Christianity to really fully
30:14
understand the passion that he gets into that book.
30:18
In the summer of 1798, his sister Julie de Farsi had written to inform him of
30:24
the death of the best of mothers.
30:26
Julie would herself die within a year of writing that letter,
30:30
having suffered immensely under lock and key during the revolutionary regime.
30:35
In her letter, she also suggested that her brother had brought much pain to
30:39
their beloved mother in her final days.
30:42
While in England, Chateau-Burin had written a first volume of a study of revolutions
30:47
that assumed a historical relativistic
30:50
position on the bloody events that were transpiring in France.
30:54
One of its final chapters, in its title, posed a question assured of provoking
31:01
any faithful adherent to traditional France.
31:05
The question is, what will be the religion that will take the place of Christianity.
31:10
Many in his aristocratic class, including members of his own family,
31:15
were outraged at his tone.
31:17
His mother, a deeply devout Christian, was devastated by her son's drift away from the faith.
31:23
And isn't that the question today, Lynn? I mean, we live in a post-Christian society.
31:28
We live in a secular society. You know, what is the religion?
31:32
It's sort of like secular humanism or progressivism seems to be the religion
31:37
that has replaced Christianity in our country. and what will be the result of that here?
31:42
That's a very good question. I think very often you have these people revolt
31:47
and have these revolutions and think everything's going to be wonderful.
31:51
They have no idea what they put in motion and how it ends.
31:56
Look at Russia. Look at France.
32:00
Look all around. How many revolutions? The Communist Revolution.
32:05
Did it end up, any of them end up like people thought?
32:09
And I think probably one of the reasons our revolution ended up good not only
32:13
was that they laid the groundwork for a decent government, but at the same time,
32:17
it was a strongly Christian nation and it retained its Christianity,
32:20
at least among the people.
32:22
Well, yeah. If not among our founders, it did among the people.
32:27
It says, His sister's announcement of their mother's demise and her charge of
32:32
the dire effect of his skepticism on her agonized Chateaubriand.
32:36
While the woman who brought him into the world was dying, he asked himself,
32:41
what was he doing in London?
32:43
Perhaps he had idled away the time on some pleasurable promenade at the very
32:47
moment his mother was sweating in the agony of her final hours,
32:51
her son unavailable to wipe her troubled brow.
32:54
The idea that I had poisoned the latter days of the woman who carried me in
32:58
her womb, he wrote, made me despair.
33:01
The deaths of mother and sister, the latter of whom had also turned to a vigorously
33:06
ascetic Christian practice in her final days, emotionally overwhelmed him.
33:12
He was struck, as he later wrote in the first preface to the genius of Christianity,
33:18
by these two voices escaped from the tomb.
33:21
Suddenly, overpoweringly, the truth of the cross returned to him.
33:26
My conviction came from the heart. I cried, and I believed.
33:30
The project of a fitting testimony to this return to the religion of his youth
33:35
and of his deceased mother, who had ceaselessly prayed for his return to the flock,
33:41
but who passed from this world before she could witness the coming to fruit
33:45
of those prayers, then came to him in a flash.
33:48
He began work on what is the anguished testimony of a son brought back from
33:53
the brink by the loss of his most dear one, weeping over her absence,
33:57
but now consoled by the certainty that he would see her again.
34:02
When he returned to France in 1800, he was carrying the nearly completed manuscript with him.
34:08
It is a remarkable testimony to the decline of the influence of the faith in
34:13
France and in the West more broadly that Chateaubriand's masterpiece has been neglected as it has.
34:19
It is a universal defense of the faith, an account of every angle of human life,
34:25
of the natural world, and of all physical reality from the lens of Christian belief.
34:30
The case is made in a poetic form unmatched in the rest of apologetic literature,
34:36
as Chateaubriand was perhaps the greatest of the Romantic-era French writers,
34:41
gifted with all the powers of that time in literature.
34:44
The genius of Christianity can be understood as a beautifully crafted encyclopedia
34:49
of the faith, covering every topic one could desire to be treated in the nature
34:55
of Christian belief, practice, and history.
34:57
It is a defense of Christianity, not only on theological terrain,
35:02
but also in the purview of virtually every other human pursuit.
35:06
Aesthetic and artistic, political, moral, civic, and social.
35:11
It can be read systematically, or one can move through it at random,
35:15
selecting from the myriad topics it takes up, from celebacy and marriage to
35:20
the natural philosophy of Christianity and significant historical Christian
35:25
writers and thinkers such as Pascal and Boussouet.
35:29
It would be impossible even to scratch the surface of this massive worst depth in a short essay.
35:35
One can do no more than pick a few telling examples.
35:41
Marriage is described here in all its Christian majesty,
35:45
in a language that any contemporary reader could hear she be made just for a
35:50
minute to put aside the easy cynicism and sardonic unseriousness that passes
35:55
our contemporary culture would find overwhelming in its pure descriptive elegance.
36:00
Christian marriage is an institution of a gravity and solemnity unattained outside the face.
36:07
Entering it, we understand how fundamentally our lives must change.
36:11
The husband is filled with profound awe by the nuptial blessing which was given
36:16
by God Himself to the world's first couple.
36:19
The husband becomes Adam, and the weight of the patriarch, the responsibility
36:23
to provide for a family is placed inexorably upon the shoulders.
36:28
The sobering duty of the wife, too, clears her head of frivolity as God speaks to her from the altar.
36:34
We're going to have to stop here and take a break, so stay with us.
36:37
We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston
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That's a lot in Central and Northern Illinois.
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Good. We'll easily be able to find another Mass time on catholicspiritradio.com.
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The Eucharist brings me such peace. Are Reconciliation Times also listed at
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
39:22
We're back from our break, and we're talking about the French Revolution,
39:26
and we're reading from an article about a man, a young man, who lived through
39:31
that French Revolution.
39:33
And it's talking here about the genius of Christianity,
39:36
a book that he wrote in response to the French Revolution,
39:40
understanding how much the overthrow
39:43
and the leaving of Christianity behind led to a violent revolution and a violent
39:52
culture and the destruction of a civilization in France and led to further violence
39:59
and a warlike culture under Napoleon.
40:03
And it goes on here talking about some of the things that are important in Christianity,
40:08
such as marriage, and in comparing it to our own culture,
40:12
the article says, how unsurprising that a culture that has trivialized marriage
40:18
into something akin to the leasing of a car, meaning our culture,
40:21
would fail to appreciate what a tremendous gift it is, and we don't,
40:26
precisely because it requires so much of us.
40:29
To make no demands of someone is to speak to his inability to measure up to anything at all.
40:36
Marriage is not the only extraordinary Christian rite of passage.
40:40
The death of a Christian, surrounded as it is by exacting ritual and the intimate
40:46
care of his fellows, is as remarkable as his way of life.
40:49
The Church prepares the perishing believer for his entry into another life with
40:55
a second baptism, this one not with water, but with the oil of extreme unction
41:00
which symbolizes celestial incorruptibility.
41:03
As the man of faith passes across the border from this world to the next,
41:08
a peace descends upon him that is remarked upon by all who observe.
41:13
Chateau-Beran writes touchingly of the deceased's friends, keeping silent watch
41:17
around his couch under the impression that he only slumbers.
41:21
So gently did this Christian pass from the earth.
41:24
The romantic Chateau-Beran gives us a soaring defense of the poetic and literary
41:30
profundity of Christianity.
41:32
He celebrates the Christian replacement of
41:35
the overpopulated pagan world of mythology with a realm in which silence and
41:40
solitude open space to give room to the prayerful Christian to make his pleas
41:45
to his God to allow his uninterrupted contemplation of the immensity of nature
41:50
that echoes the infinite extension of God who made it.
41:53
We're talking here actually about the understanding of nature,
41:57
the understanding of science, the understanding of the universe.
42:01
All of this took place under Christianity,
42:03
and it is beginning to die as Christianity is being replaced.
42:07
The capacity to express the instinctive melancholy in humankind is spoken by
42:12
this uniquely Christian view of nature.
42:15
Whereas non-Christian literature consists of descriptions of the busy commerce
42:20
of humans and mythological creatures of myriad varieties,
42:24
Christian literature develops an unchallenged perpiscosity in accounting for
42:28
the mystery and wonder of the human soul, before the marvel of the creation itself.
42:34
Who has not spent whole hours seated on the bank of a river,
42:37
contemplating its passing waves?
42:40
Chateaubriand asks. Who has not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the
42:44
distant rock, whitened by the billows?
42:46
We cannot but pity the ancients, who discovered in the ocean not but the palace
42:51
of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus.
42:54
Literary characters and personages become more profound with the more seriousness
43:00
of the Christian narrative.
43:02
Pagan heroes might be handsome of feature and physically imposing,
43:06
but Christian ones show a greatness of soul that makes them more beautiful and
43:10
courageous than any Ajax, Hector, or Achilles.
43:13
Even the frailness of knights, full of the spiritual energy of redemption,
43:18
faces the enemy without trembling and dies happily for his God.
43:22
A world without Christianity is contemplated by the author at the conclusion of the book.
43:28
Among the moral catastrophes imaginable in such a world can be numbered one
43:33
that our current multiculturalist opponents of everything Christian would do
43:37
well to address more closely.
43:39
Where would the abolitionist movement against slavery have come from if it had
43:43
no Christian philosophy of the human person to consult as its baseline?
43:48
Slaves and masters in the pre-Christian world shared the same depraved religion
43:53
of the passions that made moral improvement an impossibility.
43:58
It was only with Christian universalism that the awful institution of slavery
44:03
could be seen nakedly in its monstrosity.
44:06
And we have a lot of monstrosities going on today, especially the transgender
44:10
monstrosity, people actually having their organs and so forth removed.
44:15
And we don't see through them and see and understand exactly the implication
44:19
and the tragedy of these things going on because we don't see them through Christian eyes anymore. more.
44:25
If hopelessness had descended upon Chateaubriand during his time in exile,
44:31
it would have been easily comprehensible.
44:33
The direness of the situation of his country and that of his own family was patent.
44:38
But he found another way, spurred as it happened by his own suffering,
44:43
to return to a faith he had for a time believed until for the world in which he lived.
44:50
Unfit for the world in which he lived. For a while, he believed that Christianity
44:53
was not fit for the world that he lived in. But the faith then returned to him.
44:59
This faith endured in him for the rest of his life.
45:03
In the last section of his memoirs, he looked at the seeming inevitability of
45:08
the arrival of socialism and saw that it would inexorably lead to despotism
45:13
and tyranny. And that's what we're leading into again.
45:16
Here is a country that developed the greatest civilization ever on the face
45:21
of the earth on America the greatest freedom and the most wealth for all the
45:26
people and probably the greatest solutions to a lot of the poverty.
45:33
And we're still developing those solutions and working to help more and more
45:38
people than ever before in all of history.
45:40
And so what are we doing as we lose our Christianity?
45:43
Reverting back to a socialism that is impossible. In other words,
45:47
what's going on is that the progressives have actually caused all of the problems
45:54
that we have, the high costs of living, the high costs of housing,
45:57
the failures of a lot of our government services and so forth.
46:01
And then the solution, of course, is more government and more extreme progressivism.
46:07
In other words, cause a huge crisis and then offer more progressivism as a solution
46:12
to the crisis. That's what's been going on.
46:15
The final work he published in his lifetime was a biography of Armand Jane Laboutier
46:21
de Rance, who left an aristocratic life as a young man in the early 1660s to
46:26
found the Trappist order of monks.
46:28
And Christianity founded a lot of these orders. It founded so many things to
46:32
help so many people, especially women.
46:35
And we might look back on those times and see that, you know,
46:37
compared to what we've been able to do in our more modern times,
46:41
it wasn't nearly as much, but it was a huge improvement over what the world was like prior to it.
46:47
We might do well to return to reading Chateaubriand now in what is a fearsome
46:52
time in the life of our own republic.
46:54
The revolutionaries are knocking at our doors too, and people like this Mandami,
47:01
who are actually advocating not socialism but communism again.
47:06
They do not yet literally bear heads on pikes, but there's a lot of mobs and
47:11
so forth that are coming close to it, beating up on people,
47:15
beating up on police officers, and beating up on the immigration officers,
47:20
and doing those things, easily being incited into mobs.
47:23
But the number of lives they have ruined through their corruption of our culture
47:27
and venomous attacks on those who oppose their revolution grows daily.
47:31
From seemingly every segment of elite American society, they tyrannically and
47:37
rabidly announce to us the shattering of the system of values our ancestors built.
47:41
And there we go again with G.K. Chesterton pointing out that Christianity is
47:48
the one faith that has a democracy of the dead that actually gives credit to
47:54
the people that came before us because the church looks at the three different aspects of our society.
48:01
The church militant, that is the people that are alive.
48:04
You know, the church triumphant, those people who are saints.
48:07
And the church suffering, those people who are in purgatory and who will eventually
48:11
become, you know, saints and will move into heaven.
48:14
So it looks at the life here on earth.
48:17
It looks at the life to come. It looks at the transcendental things,
48:21
and it treats all of those things.
48:24
It goes on here. It says, in March of 1817, speaking before the French Chambres
48:30
des Pères, which was the upper house in France's parliament between 1814 and 1848.
48:37
Chateaubriand made a statement about the role of Christianity in the life of
48:40
society and the consequences of its suppression that is timeless in its applicability
48:46
and superb in its expression.
48:48
It reminds us that our own struggle is of a peace with that of his time,
48:52
and the desired destination of the vandals and the weight of victory against
48:57
them is the same in both cases.
48:59
He says here, Sir Taubriand, in his,
49:03
In this piece, it says here, One may attack religion and its cult.
49:07
And there is a lot of attacks on religion going on now, especially on Christianity
49:11
and specifically on Catholic Christianity.
49:14
It goes on, he says, In its goods, in its ministers, but one cannot make it
49:20
so that a society can subsist without religion.
49:24
An ignorant monk, full of faith, can found an empire.
49:29
An unbelieving Newton can measure the world but not create a people.
49:33
And he's talking here about science being used as scientism.
49:39
In other words, a dependence on science is almost a religion.
49:43
And someone, an ignorant monk, can actually found something that lasts for centuries,
49:49
for thousands of years, an empire.
49:51
And yet someone as smart as Newton or maybe Einstein and so forth can found
49:57
something that lasts only maybe 10 years.
50:00
Paris, instructed by the modern doctors, and the word doctors here means teachers
50:05
or philosophers, Paris, instructed
50:07
by the modern doctors, produced a republic that lasted 10 years.
50:12
A monarchy of 14 centuries emerged from the town of Lutetia,
50:16
where St. Denis preached the gospel.
50:19
If we seriously want to save our country, let us return to sane doctrines.
50:24
And this can apply to us today. Let us return to sane doctrines.
50:29
Let us defend ourselves from those who would desire religion without freedom,
50:33
but we must fear still more those who want freedom without religion. That's right.
50:40
Exactly. Sure, we don't want religion without freedom. We want a religion that
50:45
allows for freedom, but it's even worse if we try to have freedom without religion. It won't work.
50:53
We must not introduce what is false into morality. And boy, have we ever reduced
50:57
what's false into morality.
50:59
Look at the words there that I used at the beginning of the show when I talked
51:03
about this idea of doctors prescribing reproductive health medication,
51:09
regardless of what extremist politicians want. Imagine that.
51:15
Poison being called reproductive health medication. It's good.
51:20
Right. It's good. And he goes, we must not introduce what is false into morality.
51:25
We will arrive at the frightful result that there is no longer anything illegitimate
51:31
in France but legitimacy.
51:33
In other words, he's saying exactly what's happening in our society,
51:37
that everything has to be tolerated.
51:40
In other words, the only thing in France that will be illegitimate will be legitimacy itself.
51:46
In other words, morality itself will be illegitimate. legitimate.
51:49
What he's saying here is that evil will be good and good will be evil.
51:54
Isn't that exactly what's happening in our society? We're starting to call sin
51:57
good, you know, and good sin.
52:01
Isn't that what Paul predicted? Yeah, they'll call evil good and good evil.
52:06
They won't see the difference. And they won't see the difference.
52:09
And that's what happens when you don't have religion to tell you the difference.
52:12
He said, when atheism was professed in France during the revolution,
52:17
who would have ever thought these impious extravagances would prevail?
52:21
Well, who would ever thought that some of the stuff that we have today,
52:24
when it was first being preached 25, 50 years ago, would prevail as it has today?
52:29
But it is. Yes, it's accepted as a norm.
52:33
We see the consequences of these insane doctrines that professors made students.
52:38
And he's saying here exactly a lot of this has happened in our schools.
52:42
The professors in our schools have made students who believe in all of these
52:47
things, such as, you know, that tolerance is the supreme virtue.
52:50
We must tolerate everything.
52:52
That somehow or another, any kind of intolerance leads to fascism.
52:57
Or, you know, no, it's the tolerance that's actually leading to communism,
53:01
which is just as bad, if not worse, than fascism.
53:05
The professors made students, and the great nation, robbed of its religion and
53:10
its morality, was at the same time robbed of the arms that could protect it against anarchy.
53:17
It was reserved for our modern thinkers to uproot from the heart of man all
53:21
respect for the divinity in order to prepare their contemporaries to become
53:26
merciless assassins. And isn't that exactly what is being done in our society itself?
53:32
People are being motivated to violence, and that violence is getting worse.
53:37
Oh, yes. They're motivated and pushed to commit murder.
53:42
And the bloodthirstiness of the French Revolution can easily happen again today.
53:47
And look at the superstition of the French Revolution as they started to believe
53:51
in things that Christianity had overcome. I'm in the same thing here,
53:55
starting to believe in all kinds of superstitions that under rationality of
54:00
Christianity. Look at the tattoos. Right.
54:03
Exactly. That's a decline in the culture. It's a big sign of it.
54:07
Yeah, a big sign in the culture of a retreat from reality is the type of art you have,
54:20
and especially the art that we have in a lot of the tattoos and so forth. Oh, yeah.
54:24
And the personality, in other words, the emphasis on the individual and the
54:29
lack of humility and so forth there being.
54:31
And we see more and more of it. We see more and more perversion,
54:35
more and more rudeness and crudeness in public, the lack of humility and that kind of thing.
54:43
And if you think things are bad now, you get some communist in and the state
54:50
owns the grocery stores. Don't you think that you're going to be rationed?
54:55
And it doesn't mean people aren't capable of being better, as,
54:58
you know, the tragedy in Texas shows how people will come together and how they
55:03
want to be helpful. They want to...
55:07
Take care of each other and be good and so forth. But it's their Christian actually
55:11
training and teaching and so forth that compels them to do that and creates that kind of society.
55:18
And if we lose Christianity, we will not have the freedom and the America and
55:24
the government that was put into existence by the founders and by the beginning of our country.
55:31
So we're going to have to stop here, say our prayer.
55:34
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. We are a protection against
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the wickedness and snares of the devil.
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May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
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by the power of God, trust in the hell's sake and all evil spirits who wander
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through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
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Come Holy Spirit, renew the hearts of men.
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You've been If you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
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Again, that's bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
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Please help keep Catholic Spirit Radio on the air with your generous support.
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