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Entry: A Meditation for Guy Fawkes Day Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_meditation_for_guy_fawkes_day#8465 Post contents: Dear John Ball: There was no important Christian group in 1550 which proposed religious toleration, especially in England. When blessed Mary took the throne, it was in a country divided between an overwhelming Catholic majority and a powerful Protestant minority which had just finished denuding the churches, closing the monasteries which had fed and educated the poor, burning alive Carthusian contemplatives for remaining true to the faith of their ancestors, stealing the cash which had been left by generations of pious Englishmen to endow monasteries and pray for their dead, and in general enacting an authoritarian revolution along the lines of what the French accomplished in 1790-94. She attempted to enact reaction, using the same means which had been employed by the Protestants--the persecution of dissenters. It is positively dishonest to suggest that the Protestants were champions of "ancient English liberties." Indeed, no one in England (or, alas, anywhere in Europe at that time) believed in liberty of conscience. The question was simply, in ugly Leninist terms, "Who whom?" Who would persecute and subjugate whom? As it happened, she did not bear a male child, and so the bastard Elizabeth took the throne (by falsely swearing to uphold the Catholic faith), and proceeded to make the celebration of Holy Mass punishable by death. She tortured to death hundreds of Catholic clergy with no political connections, and enacted through a very efficient secret police a religious revolution akin to Lenin's in Russia. Through a campaign of propaganda, she helped create an English nationalism (that should set off your Lukacs meter) which entailed in its very essence the rejection of universal papal authority in favor of royal supremacy. At the same time, the Reformation throughout Europe reduced the Church to either the victim or the ally of the State. A Church which had once served as an alternative locus of power to the State now depended on the State for her very existence--since any king whom she displease could turn Protestant at will. So the Church's age-old role (since Theodosius) as moral censor of the State was almost abolished, even in Catholic countries. Is it really honest, even sane, to condemn the Spanish monarchy for engaging in the same sorts of persecutions which Calvin was conducting in Geneva, and Elizabeth in England? The liberties which we treasure from the Anglo-Saxon heritage arose by Providential accident--since it suited the political aspirations of non-conformist and Puritan Christians of the rising mercantile classes (see "The Cousins' Wars" by Kevin Phillips) in their struggle against an Anglican monarchy. On most of the Continent, the old Common Law traditions did not succeed in counter-acting the ambitions of centralizing monarchies--except in the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and to some degree in Italy. As a result, the Anglosphere, Protestant though it was, became the transmission belt for medieval, Catholic ideas of decentralism and subsidiarity--which were themselves the heritage of Germanic, feudal Europe. And Whig history distorted all this to suit English nationalism, as neocon nationalism today distorts American history to suit its ends. It's our job as thinkers to step back from such false versions of triumphalism, and look critically at our own national (as well as religious) heritage. And yes, given that his co-religionists were being tortured to death for saying Mass by a monarch who proclaimed (against St. Robert Bellarmine) the Divine Right of Kings, I DO regard Guy Fawkes as a freedom-fighter, like Claus von Stauffenberg--and I intend some year to build a little House of Parliament on his day and blow it to smithereens. Sent at: 2008 07 06