One of the great things about being marooned in England now while my Schengen visa is sorted out is that I get to spend more time with some great Christian folks I met last week. One of them is Jon Morgan, a graduate student at Queens’ College, within Cambridge University. Jon is an African-American — that is, he and his family emigrated to the US from South Africa when he was a boy. He’s involved with the Trinity Forum here at Cambridge, and came to my talks last week. Last night I saw him again at a Trinity Forum garden party. We got to talking about Orthodox Christianity, and I invited him to come to liturgy with me this morning at St. Clement’s church.

So he did. After services, we went for breakfast, and we talked about the religious situation in the West. Afterward, Jon wanted me to see Queens’, so we walked there. It’s one of the oldest colleges at Cambridge, founded in 1448 by Queen Margaret (of Anjou), wife of Henry VI, founder of King’s. (The Queens’ orthography reflects the “refounding” by Margaret’s successor and rival, Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, who deposed Henry in the War of the Roses.)

Jon said that Queens’ is the best-preserved medieval college. He took me to the study room that was once home to Erasmus, one of the most famous alumni of the college. Here is the view from Erasmus’s room. The quad looks exactly as it would have to Erasmus’s eyes — and yes, the grass really is that green:

Here is Erasmus’s room, from the back quad. That’s it, the little window in the center:

Walking with Jon through Queens’, it was so touching to hear how passionate he is about his college. He has a deep sense of stewardship. I noticed at one point that he would touch wooden beams when he would talk about how these ones are original to the 15th century. “You like to put your hands on history, don’t you?” I said. He smiled, and said yes, he loves this place, feels honored and privileged to be studying here, and feels a deep urge to take care of what he has been given. We sat by the riverside for a bit and talked about how hard it is to get modern people to care about these things.

After we parted, I walked back to the house where I’m staying outside of Cambridge, and I thought about how badly our civilization needs men (and women) like Jon Morgan. He struck me as strong but humble, and with a sense of vision that is uncommon in his generation, and in our society at large. Maybe it’s because he’s a bit older — 33 — and had time to build something in the world (a company, with his brother, that he has sold). Whatever the reasons, he is a kind of knight: a defender driven by honor and loyalty to God, to Whom he is grateful. How wonderful to know that men like that are still in the world.

We are going to need them. Here is a pungent essay by the Dominican monk Father Urban Hannon, on “the politics of hell”. Excerpts:

Let’s start with a little guided meditation. I want you to imagine a society—a society made up of self-absorbed, atomized individuals—a society in which the various members tolerate each other, because they know they need each other, but only so that each of them can achieve his own private ambitions and desires—a society, moreover, that is in open rebellion against its own origins. Sound familiar yet?

Now I want you to imagine that, once upon a time, this society had been noble, and civil, and good—but that its citizens—especially its elite citizens—out of a disordered sense of pride, effected a revolution against that received ancient order.

Imagine, if you will, that this revolution had some ironic consequences, such as that, in the name of liberating themselves from being subject to any official king, these citizens wound up creating for themselves an even more oppressive and authoritarian regime—and that their honorable hierarchy, which in their pettiness they would have liked to dissolve altogether, was merely replaced by a dishonorable hierarchy—that they traded an ordered harmony for hostile power relations, and a common good for private vices.

Now imagine that this populace—who, again, hate their own heritage and devote all their time and energy to contradicting it, loudly—is in fact deeply unsatisfied, frustrated, lonely, sad. And yet imagine that, despite their unhappiness in this society, they also live in constant, ever-growing fear—fear that this society of theirs, and everything it stands for, is on the verge of defeat.

Imagine, finally, that this hysterical anxiety of theirs makes them even more odious and offensive and obnoxious. Probably by now you are not having to imagine, because unfortunately what I have been describing is not imaginary. This is a society—or at least, a “society”—which is very real, which is all around us, and with which we are forced to interact on a daily basis.

I am speaking, of course, of the society of Satan and his demons. This is a talk about the politics of hell.

Got your attention? What follows is a deeply Thomistic account of the nature of demons and how it applies to our politics. Mind you, this appears at The Josias, a website dedicated to advocating Catholic integralism (the joining of Church and State in a mutual harmony dedicated to the Roman Catholic conception of the common good). I do not believe in integralism, not only because I’m not a Catholic, but because I also don’t believe the Church should be joined to the State. Orthodox Christianity has a long tradition, via Byzantium and her successors, of Church-State symphony, but I don’t think it has been good for the Church.

We can discuss and dispute what the best political system is, surely. But it seems impossible to deny Father Hannon’s description of where liberalism has gotten us. The question (to me, anyway), is how we are to be ruled. I don’t believe that integralism is realistic or even just, but I understand why it appeals to people. It is not going to be the only non-liberal option people consider as the decadent order we have now continues to unwind.

On the long walk home, I thought about the things I’ve learned this past week in Cambridge and Oxford. About how both great universities are under the domination of people who despise what the universities have historically stood for. How the ruling class of both schools are coming to hate everything about the civilization of which these ancient universities are a pinnacle. What does it mean, for example, that at Queens’ College last week, they ended the academic term with an obese drag queen galumphing around the quad for the entertainment and edification of the students? And that most of these students are part of a ruling class that celebrates the drag queen but despises the working-class people in their own country?

Same with us Americans, obviously. On the long walk back, I found myself wondering what we have to do. Is liberal democracy, and liberalism, a suicide note? I don’t think it has to be, but without a shared religious framework — which is to say, a shared belief in binding transcendent values — how can it not devolve into the politics of hell?

What should we do to save the inheritance represented by Oxford and Cambridge? What should we be prepared to do? I think of the drag queen in the Queens’ College quad, and say: that’s a metaphor. If democracy means the sovereignty not of godly queens, but of drag queens, then I don’t want it.

But what do I want? Father Urban Hannon knows what he wants. I don’t. Not yet.

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