A SCRIBBLER'S FAREWELL By Asithandile Gxumisa

To the few and faithful friends who have consistently devoured the many articles I have written over the last three years for their enjoyment and edification, I owe these last and parting words as I intend by the close of this year to draw the curtains on this lowly and short-lived career of scribbling. At the start, what drew me to this challenging and elevating activity were an abiding personal interest in public affairs and a patriotic desire to contribute in what little way I could to conversations aimed ideally at confronting the troubles and remedying the wrongs that threaten the welfare of our Republic. Be it on the subject of political leadership, or be it on the question of the socio-economic future of the country, or on those metaphysical themes of ethics and religion, I have always stood firmly on behalf of voices long banished from the marketplace of ideas by the near-unanimous judgement of the apostles of the reigning Liberal Order.

 

Truly, I harbour no grudges against a great deal of the prevailing notions of my contemporaries, and my reverential attachment to the wisdom of the past could never wholly raise me above the fashions and prejudices of my Age. So, in taking to writing my objective was - and ever will be as long as I write - merely to induce some willing minds to soberly probe the foundations of those convictions which they have grown to regard as aeternal certitudes. If, indeed, my chief end were to confirm rather than disconfirm the prejudices of my peers, then there might be reason to aim higher, to wit: to move a maniple of hearts to positively embrace those beliefs and values which are hopelessly out of fashion at present. But ours is a Century of presumption and stubborn conceits, whose children have been taught to look upon anything remotely traditional with suspicion if not enmity. Consequently, I always understood from the beginning that there would be very few minds open to the outlandish suggestions contained in my articles.

 

The general bias against the philosophical tradition which underpins my opinions is further exacerbated by the ill-founded assumption of well-meaning friends, that I seek, as it were, to ‘drag them back to the past’. While this supposition is often subtly employed by many, as a manoeuvre to eschew the awkward task of facing up to doubts evoked by an encounter with alien ideas; still I feel the need to reassure those who innocently feel this apprehension that nothing could be further from my mind than such a design. As it is a thing utterly inconceivable for the water of a stream to flow in reverse towards that spring from whence it proceeds, so is every naive and unnatural attempt at a return to the past doomed to frustration and failure. However, notwithstanding the inaccessibility of the past, I protest vehemently against the hostile and uncritical posture assumed by the generality of the world towards the example and wisdom of the ancients.

 

Ideas and institutions should never be judged on the basis of their antiquity or novelty, but in accordance with the principle of logic and the degree to which they contribute to the general wellbeing of the nation. Not seldom does one hear now of a man or a woman agitating for the abolition of private property, or for the abandonment of revealed religion - all because these belong, if you will have the the expression of a celebrated French philosopher, to the childhood of the human race. To be sure, I can think of a thousand things which we have inherited from the past without which our world would be fairer and richer - yet do I not think this out of regard merely to their antiquity. So much for that.

As a way of bidding goodbye to everyone, I thought it would be interesting to dedicate this final article to these five exemplary models of virtue and classical learning: Russell Amos Kirk, Augustine of Hippo, St John the Evangelist, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and Marcus Porcius Cato. In shaping the conceptions of my mind and the leanings of my soul, they come second only to the primal and subconscious influence of the valleys and mountains of my homeland. To them, if space and time allowed, I might add names like J.R.R. Tolkien, Plutarch, Tiyo Soga, Titus Livius, Polybius, Edward Gibbons, Eric von Kuenehlt-Leddihn and William H. Mallock. But I will have to make do with those of them whose lives and writings have left the strongest impression upon me - hence the choice of the five: an African, an American, an Hebrew, and two Romans. I will make a very bold attempt to give a sketch of their lives and ideas - according to each of them no more than three paragraphs. If I should violate this voluntary promise, I hope that the reader will understand that it was not, after all, given under an oath.

Of whom shall we treat first? Why - Cato the Young will do, who, of all these illustrious men, was first to behold the Sun ninety and five years before our Christian Era. His was the turbulent aera of extraordinary personages: Cicero, and Caesar, and Pompey were his coevals. It was also, sadly, a time when the yeast of decadence and populism began to ferment the body politic and to undermine the foundations of the Roman Republic. From his youth Cato exhibited an inflexible aversion to servitude and a magnanimous love of country, both of which peculiarly qualified him under the most unpropitious circumstances to perform the unrewarding role of custodian of the decaying constitution of the Republic.

While opportunistic politicians were in the detestable habit of employing the corruption and venality of the populace of the City as passports to the acquisition of power, Cato took up the cudgel, and at length the sword too, for the ancient liberty of Rome and for the restoration of the mores majorum. And at that dreadful moment when the Republic expired in the universal combustion kindled by the vile and boundless ambition of the innovators Caesar and Pompey, he became the champion of every worthy cause and the mainstay of every honourable patriot in the state. The study and practice of virtue were the lustrous qualifications of Cato, and as only the virtuous man is truly free, he was the most eligible candidate to teach his countrymen, by word and example, of the invaluable advantages of civil freedom.

 

“A Day, an Hour, of virtuous Liberty

  Is worth a whole Eternity in Bondage.”

Yielding to no one in that which he esteemed as the greatest good, to wit, the preservation of the constitution of the Republic, Marcus Porcius Cato gave the last full measure of devotion to his country. When the Sun finally set upon his life, on that mortal hour when he tragically fell by his own hand in Utica, virtuous liberty, Rome's true title to greatness, forsook the great Republic, and, like her staunchest champion, never to return. Unfortunate in the achievement of his lifelong political wish, still he won, by the virtuous course of his inspiring life, the thankful admiration of men such as I, who, though endowed by Providence with less strength of will, aspire to win that high Roman virtue in a Century of Democracy. For a complete and detailed account of his life and exploits, I highly recommend Plutarch’s Lives Of The Noble Greeks And Romans and Sallust’s Catiline’s Conspiracy.

Thirty-eight years on, long after Cato had gone the way of all flesh, Lucius Annaeus Seneca entered upon the troublous stage of life, a stranger to the customs and manners of the citizens of Rome, and impatient to play the role of a man. By the time he was elevated to the dignity of senator, that venerable deliberative body called the Senatus Romanus had degenerated, by reason of the increasingly despotic system of the Empire, into a slavish assembly of men, who, together with everyone else, so writes the historian Tacitus in his Annals, “regarded the orders of the prince as the only rule of conduct and obedience.” Thus, for a model of republican virtue I find Cato the better of the two, although Seneca, in conjunction with the praetorian Burrus, did selflessly employ his eloquence and statecraft for the maintenance of a balance of power between the Senate and imperial court. For which kind of labour, not particularly helpful to the self-aggrandising power of the Caesars, he was almost condemned by one emperor to death and was exiled by another to a far-away island.

However, the decree of Fortune conspired with the fame of his learning to recommend him to the attention of the lady Agrippina, who, after securing his recall from exile, appointed him, in 49 A.D., to tutor the youth Nero, a man who turned out to have been created in the very image of Satan. What especially entitles Seneca to the grateful homage of every reasonable man is the charming simplicity and ennobling sublimity of his Stoic philosophy - a body of moral wisdom which essayed unavailingly to arrest the career of widespread wickedness in the Roman Empire. In his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, which are the culmination of his ethical knowledge, we encounter a cornucopia of wise instructions, of stirring exhortations, and of such refined erudition as to sway the dullest of minds and to provoke the meanest of souls to emulation.

The collection of these letters, written between 63 and 65 A.D., comprehends the richest and widest variety of topics, to name only a few: the attraction of the simple life (“For the soul is never greater than when it has laid aside all extraneous things, and has secured peace for itself by fearing nothing, and riches by craving no riches.”; the merit of ‘liberal studies’, that is to say, the pursuit of wisdom for its own sake; and the immortality of the soul (“That day, which you fear as being the end of all things, is the birthday of your eternity”). As the purest and loftiest scheme of heathen morality, the Stoic philosophy taught that the supreme duty of man in life was to subject both appetite and will to the constant governance of reason. In a morbidly materialistic world such as ours has become, wherein man has evolved imperceptibly into an acquisitive organism styled homo economicus, the highest aim of whose whole existence is getting and spending, the welfare of one’s psyche, I venture to suggest as a millennial, may not be little improved by an earnest exercise of the unworldly discipline of the Stoics.

A cynical and unsparing criticism of latter-day biographers has endeavoured to stigmatise the legacy of Seneca upon the curious consideration that this Stoic did not live in precise harmony with his own moral maxims. With all due respect to eminent historians like Niebuhr, Macaulay, and Schaff who lended the weight of their scholarly credibility to this view, I strongly suspect that a calmer and soberer appraisal of the life of Seneca will one day very likely show that all the lingering suspicions which threaten to blacken his memory are founded on nothing more solid than his fateful proximity to the Emperor Nero, whose miasmatic deeds left everybody who was ever intimately connected with him in a bad odour. Until that happy day, I think we may still observe the actions of this great man, in the light in which they appeared both to his admirers and detractors, and affirm with the tragedian that most assuredly, “Tis a boundless kingdom - the power without kingdoms to be content.” For a fuller account of his public service and heroic death, the two books The Life Of The Caesars and the Annals, by Suetonius and Tacitus respectively, are the best that I can recommend.

How shall we introduce the brother of James? Let his own words discharge that office: There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. To him is attributed the authorship, though surely not the inspiration, of the Apocalypse, the Fourth Gospel, and three lovely Epistles of the Bible. He belonged to the Apostolic Age, when the disciples of Jesus still spoke in the tongues of angels, trampled exultantly upon serpents, and terrorized the kingdom of Beelzebub. And John, the son of Thunder, stood among them, heart aflame with the love of Christ and hatred of Anti-Christ. If Peter was the prince of the apostles, then John was beyond peradventure of doubt the coryphaeus of the prophets.

His far-seeing vision soars, if I may borrow the poetic expression of the psalmist, upon the wings of the morning, speeds through the silent assembly of the stars, and comes to rest in the bosom of the Most High. Thence the Apostle who alone of all the Twelve knew the pulsations of Jesus’ divine heart proceeds to instruct mankind of the excellency of the way of love, of brotherly fellowship, and of the doctrine of the Last Things. The purity and magnanimity of his soul, which did not merely originate from a mechanic discipline of the will, but were the living fruits of the power of the indwelling Holy Ghost, were complemented by the vigour and vastness of his imagination. And his mystic and prophetic cognition reaches its zenith in the inexhaustible subjects of the Apocalypse, to which neither Isiah, nor Ezekiel, nor Jeremiah, for all the profundity of their oracular perceptions, could ascend. Of this mysterious and edifying book, the locus classicus of sacred prophecy, we may boldly say: the best comes last.

Amidst the peal of angelic trumpets and the roar of heavenly thunders, you witness through his seraphic eye those eschatological scenes of the passing of the world, the end of all things, and the judgement of the dead and the living before a White Throne. Indeed, I cannot think of a book, religious or secular, that so far has made a stronger impression upon me than the Apocalypse of John. The visio beatifica was the glowing crown of this Apostle’s Christly virtues, and I fear greatly that its effulgence begins to grow dim amid the manifold and delusory delicacies of the Babylon of our bourgeois Age. Even so, the amusements and flux of the Brave New World may dull our beatific vision, yet may we still believe together with the elderly Galilean that in the beginning was the Word. For have you not heard, dear friends? Blessed are are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

In the Year of Our Lord, 354 A.D., on the thirteenth of November, Aurelius Augustinus was born in a lowly village of Numidia, a province of the Roman Empire in North Africa. In this impressive man, the world of man was blessed with an excellent philosopher who rivaled the fruitful genius of Plato; and the Age of the Church Fathers welcomed a gifted theologian who, in the laudatory words of his friend Jerome, “established anew the ancient Faith.” That was no empty hyperbole, for, during the anthropological and soteriological controversies of the early Fifth Century, the bishop of Hippo, drawing inspiration from the holy scriptures and from his own afflictive experience with sensuality, devised elaborate and profound doctrines of sin and grace.

In the development of his singular views about grace and sin two special works, tracts for all times, stand out as most instructive: the Confessions and De Civitate Dei. Augustine’s Confessions, an autobiography without equal in its self-effacing candour and universal appeal, are a beautiful memorial of the gratitude of a son to a mother who bequeathed to him the precious hope of the catholic faith, and an anthem of adoration dedicated by a penitent soul to the praise of the all-embracing grace of Our Heavenly Father. In them, he unreservedly bewailed and confessed the folly and concupiscence of his youth, and lamented with pious anguish in his heart that he had been won to the love of God so belatedly: “I have loved thee late, Thou Beauty…I have loved thee late!”

His burning longing for a deeper fellowship with Christ, and the miserable bankruptcy of the idols and philosophies of heathendom which could not anchor his wandering soul found expression in this memorable prefatory assertation: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee." By the same words, Augustine confirmed what every sinner with a living conscience infallibly appreciates: that we may all offend God securely, yet no man ever did so with peace of soul. Of De Civitate Dei, a much larger work than the Confessions, I once wrote a short and immature review in which I expressed myself as forthrightly as I could on the invaluable lessons I gathered from that masterly treatise. Therefore, it may be enough for the purpose of this article to illustrate summarily the merits of the book. So, I hope the following will suffice: to those who seek a highly edifying and compelling Christian theodicy, or a fairly satisfactory discussion of the mystery of the freedom of the will and God's omniscience, I can recommend no better than De Civitate Dei. His Enchiridion, a much smaller book than the Confessions, is similarly of fairly good value on the question of the freedom of will - although it is not primarily concerned with it.

Apart from the Confessions, two moving accounts of St Augustine's life can be found in Philip Schaff's third volume of the History Of The Christian Church and Russell Kirk's Roots Of American Order. As John was destined to reconcile once for all the two great branches of primitive Christianity in the First Century, the Jewish and Gentile, the privilege of undoing the Wall of division between Catholics and Protestants might be reserved for Augustine, not least because of the catholicity of his theology and the undiminished popularity he still enjoys among Catholics and Protestants. In C.S. Lewis's Simple Christianity one discovers that cracks in that Wall have begun to appear; and before him John Bunyan did indicate his dissatisfaction with the current state of disunited Christianity in the following quote: "I would be, as I hope I am, a Christian. But for those factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from Hell or Babylon." To which all those who look forward with St Paul to perfect unity among God's children must respond, "Amen!"

It is our duty to distrust those who seek to divide our apostolic faith by accentuating our doctrinal or denominational differences to the suppression of those fundamentals of Christianity which, if given the priority they deserve, should weld us together into a richer and stronger unity. These preach, with sectarian enthusiasm, that the way everlasting is open only to those who either esteem Authority above Scripture or who contemn Authority in the name Scripture; and others declare, with uncharitable fanaticism, that either the experimental or the sacramental is the sole basis of genuine communion with God. Every one of these things will soon pass away, and the confusion and division they engender proves that we can only know in part in this fallen world. Not so charity, hope, and faith - I have it on good apostolic authority that these alone will abide forever: and without them no man shall be saved, though he may be crowned with the magnificent Triregnum or distinguished for doctrinal purity. I, therefore, challenge all those who are involved in ecumenical labours always to recall that graceful and hopeful principle by which St Augustine was guided in his encounter with the party of Donatus: "Nothing conquers but truth, and the victory of truth is love." So be it!

"Like the Celts of the Twilight, we go forth often to battle, but rarely to victory:" these were the words of a Raymond Thomas Montrose, a Jamaican-American rector at the Church of the Holy Ghost, in a dreadfully cautionary ghost story by Russell Kirk. Of the Celts of the Twilight I have nothing to tell, but I can safely attest to the truth that Russell Amos Kirk, the last of an old song, did often sally forth to battle, armed with the moral imagination. In the Twentieth Century, the darkest and bloodiest in the history of mankind, the invigorating influence of the moral imagination was considerably undercut by the intoxicating dream of ideology. For this sole reason, all the courageous men of letters who strove untiringly to overthrow the universal Empire of Ideology were seldom rewarded with victory. Had they not seen, contrary to all their positive expectations, the triumph of Ideology in the senseless horrors of World War Two or in the callous wasting of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by atomic bomb; and had they not witnessed, in spite of all their best efforts, the victory of Ideology in the adventuristic insanity of the Gulf War or in the unnatural savagery of bellum civile in the Balkan Peninsular and post-colonial Africa? Nevertheless, Russell Kirk customarily solaced himself with that cheerful and familiar line from Arthur Hugh Clough: "Say not the struggle naught availeth." It would take something far more daunting and dreadful than the vicissitudes of fortune to extinguish his hope.

Upon him especially, born, as it were, at the midnight hour of Judeo-Christian civilization, was laid the monumental burden of restoring and safeguarding a precious patrimony of order and justice and freedom. Ever mindful of the speedy approach of that Night wherein no man shall work, Russell Kirk diligently set about reminding his generation, by way of his imaginative literature and orderly life, that Order, in the person and commonwealth, was the first need of all. A symbiotic relationship, he posited, subsists between personal and social order. A collapse of order in the soul will lead with fateful necessity to a disintegration of order in the commonwealth - sooner or later. If personal morality decays, constitutions are ropes of sand - he warned in an insightful volume titled Elliot And His Age. In South Africa, if the worrying data from our criminology authorities are anything to go by, it would appear that we have set at nought the spiritual claims of our souls - and the dismal tenor of our national life begins to reflect that awful reality. Will we take the warning from this American sage before we run out of time? I can only hope. Now, personal order is only feasible if a man recognizes and conducts himself in accordance with some kind of transcendent moral order - rooted either in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law. Whereas civil social order can only be possible within a constitutional framework that is founded upon custom, convention, and prescription.

The wisdom of his political philosophy has the absolute assent of my reason, but only the profundity of his moral perceptions resonates with the deepest sympathies of my heart. I always learn a whole lot more about the human condition and the vanity of this life from his magisterial Gothic stories than I do from these homilies of straw that have become characteristic of the milk and water Christianities of our faithless Age. On reading Old House Of Fear and Lord Of The Hollow Dark I felt that I was set upon a healthier normative footing than when I had read those many books which pass for bestsellers in Christian literature nowadays. The path that leads away from the world of sensuality is attended by more tumbles than triumphs, especially for those of us who naturally struggle to restrain the thousand-headed hydra of the libido sentiendi. If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? With a consummate moral guide like Russell Kirk and by a will under the unfailingly benign discipline of the grace of Christ, I should like to believe that even sinners, of whom I am chief, may still gain the threshold of Paradise.

In the pages of Russell Kirk's books there happened a wondrous miracle: a conscience spoke to a conscience. It is my wish that one day you too will allow him to speak with yours - the old pilgrim now only a flame-tongued ghost at the back of beyond. Of the many books by him I have read, I highly recommend his magnum opus The Conservative Mind: From Burke To Elliot, his exquisitely written Roots Of American Order, and Redeeming The Time (edited by Jeffrey O. Nelson, his son-in-law), and his collection of Ghost Tales. His works out of vogue at the moment, a day may yet come when Russell Amos Kirk, the last Medieval man ever to walk the earth, will boast to those whose standing celebrity is founded upon ideological sophistry: "Time is yours, eternity is mine!" A full account of his fascinating life is readily accessible to anyone who possesses a smartphone - that most handy viatica whereon we worship strange gods.

It is always an exceeding delight to meditate on the lives and example of great men of antiquity - much more so for someone the natural inclination of whose spirit is one of reverence for former ages. I cannot hope to induce everybody to feel this way, much less to prevail even upon the few to acknowledge the infinite superiority of Augustine over Rousseau, yet I am come to testify to the uncommon truth that not everything that belongs to bygone ages is worthless dross fit for the 'dustbin of history'. And by the grace of divine revelation, or by the unfailing light of reason, every worthy Scholar will always ratify the unanimous judgment of Prophet and Philosopher, that two things invest our fallen human nature with genuine dignity: the Imago Dei we all bear and the exercise of virtue. Only to the long and painful labours of our human ancestors belongs the merit of the discovery of these two transcendent truths; and as the progression of history has clearly demonstrated ab ovo, neither shall anything be added nor subtracted from them without serious injury to mankind.

In these preceding and other comments, those of you who possess vulpine nostrils will catch from afar an unmistakable whiff of Christian prejudice. I gladly own that I am a Christian, or so I believe that I am - and I similarly confess that my religious belief is the veritable nucleus of my Weltanschauung. However, this was no proselytizing tract on behalf of Christianity - even though nothing would make me more grateful than to hear that a man was won to the love of Christ by reading this valedictory article. Moreover, it was my intention to make the lives and example of these admirable figures appeal to as many people as could receive them positively - without regard to political or religious affiliation. And insofar as virtue was the chief end of their lives, though some of them pursued it within the Judeo-Christian framework and others sought it within the contours of natural morality, I feel that I can leave to my readers and acquaintances, as much to them as to myself, no better counsel than this: what renders life truly worth living is making virtue the supreme end of all your endeavours. For when the Last Trump sounds, neither will our Beauty, nor our Money, nor our Power, nor our Race, nor our Reason - those dashing and shifting Baalim of our time - count for anything: only our Deeds will be weighed in the balance. Farewell!