BOOK RECEIVED:
“Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World” by Anthony Esolen
October 26, 2018
This book has been terrific. The publisher, Regnery (really good) sent it and, at the last moment before I headed out the door to begin this trip, I slide it into the outside pocket of my suitcase. It isn’t released yet (30 October). Over the last few days, I have been reading and savoring subsections of chapters. This is one of those books that you have to read a bit at a time. Then you put the book down, think about it, and walk away for a while.
I am probably so struck at the moment because, as I write, I’m in the heart of Rome in an area where I lived for many years. It occurred to me that I spent more years here, than I did in my native place before I moved away. In a sense, I am there, to where I tend. I am alive here in a way that I am not when I go back to my present locale. Perhaps I hang my hat there, but its real hook is here. That’s what Esolen is on to.
Do not hesitate. Just order it. It is available for PRE-ORDER at a 24% discount at the time of this writing. There is a KINDLE version, too.
This isn’t an overtly Catholic book, but it is deeply Catholic in its worldview.
While Esolen uses little in the way of overtly churchy material, he – consciously or unconsciously – provides an argument for what I’ve been talking about for many years now:
the revitalization of our Catholic identity, especially through a restoration of our sacred liturgical worship.
How often is the charge of “nostalgia” flung as a cliché into the teeth of those who desire, with their legitimate aspirations, the liturgical forms of their forebears?
Nostalgia, however, is, as the Greek indicates, a pain (
algia) we feel for our “return home” (
nostron): “pain for the return, ache for the homecoming.” It is an essential longing. False nostalgia might be thought of as a desire for some “golden age” that is no more, and probably never was. A desire for something better.
Augustine, drawing on the science of the day, describes the heart as restless because, according to ancient thought, gravity was a tendency within the thing itself which compelled it to go where it belonged.
The object tries to get where it is supposed to be. Thus it is with the heart and God. Augustine says, “amor meus, pondus meum… my love is my weight”.
This is at the heart of what Esolen explores in
Nostalgia. He opens the book with Odessyus, sitting by the sea on Calypso’s island. He pines for Ithaca, for home, not because it is better than this enthralling captivity, but because, simply put, Ithaca is his home and this dreamy place isn’t. Everything with Calypso might be “better”, but it isn’t where he is supposed to be.
The small and even poor house in a humble neighborhood might not compare to the far more splendid starter-castle which through sweat and ingenuity you’ve worked up to, but it won’t be the same thing as what that old home was. And Esolen is not saying that nostalgia is nailed to a place and time. After all, God told Abraham to leave the place of his fathers and go to a new land, which would become the new place for new fathers. Of course, God can do that sort of thing, and even change your name, and make it right.
With every page, I cannot help but find a parallel with the devastation to our Catholic identity caused over the last decades, especially through devastation of our sacred liturgical worship. We are our rites. Change and tinker and make “progress with our rites” and you alter our identity as Catholics. The damage has been nearly catastrophic.
Esolen ranges all over, from the Odyssey to Shakespeare to Thomas Wolfe to Hilaire Beloc. Thank you, Professor, also for providing an INDEX! He draws on a short story by Flannery O’Connor about a “progressive” who, hating his own family, sells off parcels of their property for the sake of “progress”, like building a gas station that would blot their view of the woods. “Progress here,” writes Esolen, “is not the destruction of beauty. There is no great beauty. It is the destruction of a place”.
How’s that “springtime” of the Church thing going?
How the tinkerers and snipper pasters of the Novus Ordo got it wrong.
I have in mind Fr. Jackson’s fine read,
Nothing Superfluous. Those technocrats, for the sake of progress, damaged not something that was technically perfect, every bit accounted for somehow, and having a utilitarian purpose to justify its continuance in our rites. They damaged our place, our home, our
patria, where we start from and toward which we tend.
No wonder we are so damn screwed up as a Church.
Today I have read about such a (seemingly) important moment as a Synod of Bishops being run by – and I note the full irony in what I am about to write – not our Anthony Blanches
[Blanche is a flamboyantly gay character and 'aesthete par excellence' in Evelyn Waugh's BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, of whom, however, Waugh writes, "His vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock" but by our Hoopers. By Hoopers with Anthony’s affliction
[homosexuality] but with none of his substance.
[Hooper, another Brideshead character, was the lead character's platoon commander, about whom Waugh says "The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change". One of those Philistines for whom "annoyance and sentimentality are the only passions left to the Hoopers of the world. Greatness is quite literally unimaginable to them, whether that greatness be heavenly or hellish; Paradise is bland and the Inferno desolate. Heroism and hedonism alike hold no appeal for Hooper", as a Catholic blogger wrote.]
Many of you have been misunderstood and mistreated for your desire to go home, to be a Roman in the Roman thing, your rite, your
patria (fatherland) which you ache for because it is yours. I sure have my stripes to show it.
Time after time I have spoken with people, especially with priests, who at some point woke up from Calypso’s arms, who opened their eyes in the sty far from home, and realized that they had both squandered the patrimony they had or had been cheated out of the patrimony they didn’t know that they ought to have been given.
In his introduction, Esolen ends one section with the reaction of the progressive to those who feel deeply their sense of belonging, their desire to be placed and rooted.
“People who object to nostalgia are afraid that their achievements, such as they are, will not stand scrutiny. “No, you don’t want to go home!” they cry. They must cry, they must make the noise they can, because if they cease for a moment, we hear the calls of sanity and sweetness again, and we may just shake our heads as if awaking from bad and feverish dream. Coming to ourselves, we may resolve, like the prodigal, to “arise and go to my father’s house.”
I’ll probably write more on Esolen’s book along the way.
Aldo Maria Valli, taking the cue from Fr Z, does a very good brief reflection about the nostalgia of born and bred Catholics like him.
In praise of nostalgia
Translated from
October 26, 2018
I will say right away that I have not yet read the book, only the preliminary review by Fr. Zuhlsdorf on his blog. But nonetheless, the title suffices for now.
Nostalgia – going home in a homeless world. Is this not really the deep need that so many of us feel within the Catholic Church? To go back home, to a home that is once again welcoming, one that you recognize to be truly your own, not a church in which if you but dared to say 'something seems wrong', you are immediately made to feel not at home but a stranger in your own land.
I repeat, I have not read the book, and I am limiting myself here to taking off from its title which struck me. Fr. Zuhlsdorf says the work is not ‘openly Catholic’ but the world view it expresses is profoundly Catholic. I think that the word ‘nostalgia’ in itself merits reflection.
“You are a nostalgic”, is one of the numerous ‘accusations’ levelled against me every time I write of
“the Church as it was” where I felt at home.
- A Church in which I could trust in my parish priest and my bishop, and had no fear that one day or other, someone would invent some non-Catholic novelty for the Church, or start speaking like a United Nations representative, or like a union leader or environmentalist.
- A Church in which ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusivity’ was never spoken of per se but which was
always truly welcoming and inclusive in fact, because it was clear in her propositions and therefore honest.
- A Church that did nothing to seem ‘friendly and sympathetic’ but was
a true mother who confronted her children with their responsibilities.
-
A Church that spoke of sin and not of some vague human ‘frailty’.
- A Church that spoke of divine justice and not of generic mercy.
- A Church that urged fear of God and was not all joy and smiles, smiles, song and dance, but instead transmitted true joy by teaching adherence to divine law.
Nostalgia, yes. So much nostalgia. Which I keep feeling more and more. And I have no problem calling myself a nostalgic, even if I know very well that in Italy, the word has a marked political connotation that is negative and therefore makes it even less ‘practicable’.
In the etymology of the word, there is a reference to
algos, pain, while
nostos means going back home (to one’s country or home). Nostalgia is therefore that piercing pain that grips you when yu are far from home and feel the need to go back.
It is a nostalgia for what which you know well, of things and persons among which and whom you have lived your life. It is a nostalgia for a world which you trusted and of which you felt part.
But in ‘the Church’ today? Whom and how much can we trust? And do we really feel at home in it?
I can already hear the subsequent accusations: That as a nostalgic, I am also a traditionalist, in the sense of being attached to a wrong idea of tradition that is firm and solid, and therefore immobile and dead.
Well, I will respond that as a Catholic, I am not and cannot be a historicist. Because
I do not yield to the temptation that is so widespread today, even in the Church, by those who claim that in order to actualize one’s experience of faith, one must consider history, i.e., change, thereby rejecting the existence of absolute and definitive truth.
Of course, divine revelation occured in history, but history, i.e., the world, is not the only horizon. The Catholic has another horizon which is higher – a supernatural horizon.
Therefore I am also nostalgic for a Church that taught the supernatural and was not ashamed to do so.
- A church that spoke of the Four Last Things (death, judgment, hell and heaven) and did not occupy herself with politically correct language.
- A Church that thundered against sin calling it by its name, and reminding the faithful that sin can be mortal, which means that unless one repents and does penance for such sin, condemns the soul to eternal damnation.
Yes, so much nostalgia.
- For honest liturgy, that is refined – not vulgar, not ‘strange’, not ‘animated’, not abused.
- For tabernacles that are visible, recognizable, not hidden nor camouflaged.
- For priests who dress like priests, and nuns who dress like nuns.
- For laymen who do not do Mass readings wearing shorts and tank tops.
- For liturgical rites that have ‘substance’ because they have precise theological meanings.
- For good Catholic education.
- For that
gravitas – the sense of dignity and seriousness in liturgy - that was the patrimony of clerics but also of the laity, before everything went ‘mad’ after Vatican-II.
Of course, nostalgia can be a false one or a distorted one, for an illusionary golden age that never was in reality, and which now our minds may be creating to console ourselves. But I do not want to fall into this trap.
What I am nostalgic for is not a mythical golden age. I am nostalgic for what was home. A home I knew very well but which has almost disappeared.
Fr. Zuhlsdorf says that in the book, Professor Esolen evokes Ulysses and the goddes-temptress Calypso who sought to seduce him, but he was able to resist because he thought of home, of Ithaca.
Today, do we Catholics ever think of our Ithaca?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/10/2018 04:18]