"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

"Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set."
Proverbs 22:28

"Thus says the LORD, Stand you in the ways,
and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way,
and walk therein, and you shall find rest for your souls."
Jeremiah 6:16

There is a continental shift in conservative Western thinking these days.

It used to be that parents were content to let their children be carted off to government schools five days a week for a steady diet of what was assumed to be hearty values and self-actualizing lessons. When parents discovered the privation of government schools, there began a wave towards homeschooling, where the head of the family regained his long-neglected deuteronomic duty to educate his children in a biblical manner, and in a classical manner to read what the rest of the world contributes to literature.

It used to be that the Christian Christ was content to set aside one morning each week to dress up smart, sing some songs, hear a sermon, all packaged as the latest, most contemporary seeker-sensitive service. When the church of Christ began to feel the dearth of fellowship, community, and accountability, they knew should be shaping their Christian walk, they left to find small group fellowship in house churches.

The heart of education and of Christian living has found its way, after centuries of experimenting with large factory-style programs, back to its Center. It is emerging from a hundred-year experiment of schooling into a renaissance of old. For my life, I have begun a similar shift back to the old traditions, the "ancient boundary" of my forefathers, as I sift through the many waters of opinion and editorials, bestsellers and college lectures, for the gold that can be found at the center.

It is not an easy task to try to educate and anchor oneself in tradition amid today's pluralist society. Those who seek to erode the definitions of family, education, and orthodoxy, as well as people understandably unfamiliar with your "antiquated" ideas, may throw their fear at you with disparaging barbs such as: "Oh, I suppose you would have us shun all technology and return to the Dark Ages!", or "What backward, sexist ideas!", or "Sounds like those fire-and-brimstone Puritans!" Yes, I have heard all that and more, and than once I have wanted to shout back, "Yes, exactly! Of course, it's medieval — what's so wrong with that?"

Even more difficult is that fact that the grand traditions of old, those murky reflections in us that pique interest at the words "chivalry" and "heroic epic", or the odd alliance you find in reading Beowulf or St. Augustine, are rather hard to come by in any coherent form today. While bookstores may be devoted to harlequins, gender studies, and homoerotica, there is no section entitled "Heroic Values and Classic Doctrines." As a former inmate of government schools, I often lament the long journey I had piecing together that section of the bookstore for myself. But fret not, for it is not an impossible quest.

In the struggle to feed myself on the hidden knowledge of old tomes, I happened upon an Edmund Burke or the occasional C.S. Lewis, and gradually began to find those writers who influenced them and traced the tributaries back to the fountainhead. These were men who combined the order of the classics and the wonder of the romantics, the form of the arts in the content of Christianity, who could say with William Morris, "Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization" or with Lewis, "I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable."

These writers were of much the same cloth. Lewis, for instance, had a circle of fellowship with J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. Lewis owed much of his thought to George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and William Morris (protégée to John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle). Chesterton himself learned from MacDonald. Chesterton's collaborator, Hilaire Belloc, studied William Cobbett, who knew Edmund Burke. MacDonald, Carlyle, and others gleaned many of their ideas from German Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century, et cetera. And, of course, all of these men drew from the common pool of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. Like any good conspiracy theory, you have circles within circles. One can look at Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce, The Pilgrim's Regress, and Perelandra and directly see Apuleius, Dante, Bunyan, and Milton.

What is more, and indeed the subject of this essay, is how there began to surface kindred sentiments that seemed to flow between all my favorite writers. Eventually, three of these principles or what I will henceforth term "boundaries" (Prov. 22:28) that separated the values of yesteryear from the modern age coalesced in my mind with such clarity and authority that I can hardly write a paper without paying homage to one or two of these truths that have stood the test of time. One might find other main principles or corollaries to these, but a belief in (1) the Providence of a Creator God, (2) the order of hierarchy and headship in the world, and (3) the need for a return to a simpler, more pastoral time of economic freedom permeate the writings of these men of letters.

*          *          *

The first such boundary of Creationism is superbly easy to argue. Inductive scientific evidence and deductive logic weigh so heavily in its favor. To paraphrase the Lord, there is no point in going on to other topics if the foundation is not well in place. One can read a novel without a climax, but not a resolution without an exposition. For history to have any meaningful teleology, there must be a first purpose, and that in the mind of a transcendent God.

Just for starters, the 1st Law of Thermodynamics states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. That is, there is no natural explanation for how the universe came to be since "nothing comes from nothing" as old Aristotle used to say (and the Law of Biogenesis later proved). Add to that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which dictates increasing disorder and randomness, i.e. entropy. When a room is left alone for a few decades without any outside ordering influence, the wood slowly rots, the clothes strewn across the bed emanate a rancid odor, and the pizza in the corner decomposes. Just ask my mother, and she'll show you the documentary evidence.

Now, it is elementary to show from just those two laws of Thermodynamics that if things, including man, tend towards disorder, then, in theory, if the clock winds backward, the planets would spin faster, the sun would grow larger again, and the ruins of burnt ancient libraries would reform, etc. all the way back until the universe comes to its ultimate Beginning — the same created Beginning for which the limited purview of science cannot account. In other words, the 1st Law says that science is not the tool for discussing the question of origins, while the 2nd Law says there still has to have been one, nonetheless. The only explanation left is for a special, i.e., supernatural creation. Modern science, however, has been hijacked by philosophical sophists in a perverse hierarchy supposing that nothing begot matter- begot life- begot sentient man- begot God. I'll tolerate leaps of logic and leaps of faith, but not both at once.

Unfortunately, the masses are indoctrinated from preschool with the idea that time and chance forged the mind of man and people are raised blind to the lugubriousness of such self-contradictory dogma. Evolutionists claim everything is reducible to material phenomena and the collusion of atoms. They also claim that their reasoning for evolution is infallible and obviously superior to the superstition of scientific creationism. Yet rather than validating the second claim, the first claim undermines it. If the thoughts of man are not but the random mixtures of particles, one random mixture can be thought no more be superior to another than a bowl of tomato soup could be called more avant garde than clam chowder. In the philosophy of evolution, the worship of reducibility and material explanations becomes a Procrustean bed that dices rational thought into meaninglessness (a point Lewis and others raised over a half century ago, albeit, more succinctly). One could go into how the fossil record points to the Noahic Flood or how the inimical nature of mutations renders evolution as a theory without a mechanism, but we still have two more points.

It is often difficult to "happen upon" the real truth behind this upstart pseudoscience of evolution since creationist scientists (operating in a tradition which goes through the Scientific Revolution, Reformation, and Socratic philosophers) are shunned by their modernist colleagues with their prestigious journals. Thus creationists are forced to self-publish without the popular avenues of textbooks, the media, and government sanctioning which the evolutionists enjoy. Still, as with homeschooling and cell churches, people are returning to the Center and discovering the foundational flaws of evolution.

All the while, it seems the authors who have safeguarded tradition and the classics somehow knew of the Providence of a Creator all along. After all, their lives spent laboriously crafting epics and romantic fantasies would all be pointless were there no eternal truth to be conveyed in the narrative. Tolkien tells us "fantasy remains a human right in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made . . . in the image and likeness of our Maker." Far from seeing literature as a flight from reality, G.K. Chesterton believed that the "simplified and symbolic version of life . . . as a quest with a prize (especially a princess), is nevertheless, a true version of life; that is an enlightening symbol and a legitimate simplification." Their symbolic stories are not an escape from the world evolutionists and postmodernists see as chaotic and without a Center. Rather, they are actually more akin to natural realism than the writings of Stephen Crane or Jack London. "St. George must kill the Dragon, or the Dragon will kill the princess; that seems to me a truer picture of the aim of life and the lot of man than any realistic novel," Chesterton concludes. In faerie tales we learn spiritual truths in a palatable, child-like form that too often we cannot grasp as adults.

The oldest English literature in Caedmon was themed around Creation. The Creation song at the beginning of The Silmarillion, by the father of modern fantasy J.R.R. Tolkien, hardly loses a beat over 1200 years. The piercing anthropological insight in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man mocks the logic of an evolutionary worldview and reveals their belief in a rational, divinely-guided universe that can be judged according to objective standards. These are standards which do not evolve out of the shifting sands of popular consensus, but carry over from the Eternal Creator, even Christ Jesus. Consequently, these thinkers can view man as more then the sum of brute instinct, whose imagination and reasoning as well as his soul has been carefully crafted in the image of the Primum Movens Immobile, the Unmoved Mover.

*          *          *

The second boundary which authors of the old guard defend is the belief and obedience to hierarchy and headship found in the world. Our modern myth of egalitarianism is an absurdity to them, an infantile notion born of the nineteenth-century and alien to the rest of history. Without understanding hierarchy, "The Taming of the Shrew" reads as a barbaric tract (indeed, critics ignorant of the covenant of headship must dismiss the play as farce). Odysseus' speech to Therisites would merely be the elitism of a jack-booted aristocrat, and Lewis' proscription in The Chronicles of Narnia about how ugly it is when a woman has to fight in a war reeks of crass sexism. We would do well to heed Chesterton's words that a fence should not be torn down unless one knows the reason it was put up.

But what is this hierarchy that is ever-present in history prior to the 1840s? (The Seneca Falls Convention and Communist Manifesto were both in 1848, and the Origin of Species came a decade later.) C.S. Lewis explains that in the Preface to Paradise Lost, "degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferior. When it fails in either part of this twofold task we have disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the peccant being is either destroyed or corrected. One or the other it will certainly be; for by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed."

Egalitarianism is as hard to unlearn as evolution. Both have been ground into us without the choice of any other ideologies since we were young. It pervades our society because it has invaded our home life. Douglas Wilson notes in Angels in the Architecture, "Egalitarianism may be seen as the very skeletal structure of modernity . . . We see every relationship as a competition or struggle for power between individuals. The man has his perspective and the woman hers. With this assumption we then see the Scriptural requirement of submission as though God weighs in on the side of the males. We believe it is saying that whenever there is a disagreement, the man as an individual gets his way. But this is not the sense at all. The man is an individual, a private person, but as a husband he also holds a public office. He is invested with this office; he is called to wear a metaphorical robe. He and his wife are both individual citizens of this small republic, and they each have their own individual perspectives. But he is also a public person, and is called to function in that role as a representative head of his household. In a very important sense, he is that household. It is this sense of familial identification which modern men have lost."

John Ruskin, though writing a century before, continues the argument, "To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in the world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind . . . a man is raised by it which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him."

In other words, when people fail to obey their natural superior, or when men cease to be masculine and women cease to be feminine, they will end up obeying their inferiors. The mindless mechanisms of this industrial age is the result. Superior and inferior should not dismay us as terms of slavery and subjugation; after all, Christ humbled himself and submitted to the Father. He was modeling His inferior role and function without lessening His value, a life we are to emulate. Scripture gives the lead again: "Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.

Now I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you" (1 Cor. 11:1-2). Incidentally, Paul goes on to talk of headship, defending it as an order established since creation — amazing how everything ties back to the Beginning!

Lewis also guards against the flippant idea that equality is the obviously superior (oops, forget how they hate that word) choice and that older stratified traditions like monarchy are necessarily antiquated. "Monarchy can easily be debunked," he says, "but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach — men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served: deny it food and it will gobble poison." Such is our servile state today. We worship movie stars with our gold and porn stars with our bodies and applaud ourselves for our "enlightened" atheism.

"The Three Important Things" continues here