Ok, so the title of this post is over-wrought, and not even really what I mean to say. But it was all I could think of, and it struck me funny.

Recently, Hilary sent me an article in which she highlighted a section relevant to our discussion of those who, out of a rejection of the modern culture, adopt (seemingly arbitrarily) a way of doing things that is from the past. The section in question is about Renaissance artistry:

This liberal approach to the arts, in this case literary, meant taking risks. It was therefore hopeful, not only for the improvement of the arts, but also for the betterment of the human condition. Perhaps because of being critical of the then current (late medieval) culture for its presumed decline from ancient glory, these authors longing was for a past so distant that it could not really be returned to; therefore, there really was nothing to conserve,  and so they felt emboldened to try their hands at new epics and rhetoric. On the contrary, our contemporary classical conservatives mostly long for a not so distant past–maybe only several decades gone–and therefore feel compelled to conserve  it, or reconstitute it whole. This is not the dream of a renaissance, but a revival. A renaissance is a rebirth, characterized by the past being made new again…”

This was floating about in my head as I continued to evaluate what is going on when Catholics “opt-out” of modern life. When styles, customs, modes of dress and the like from another time are “revived” (as the article cited above would say) rather than an attempt made to create a true renaissance in Catholic culture in the sense of being emboldened to try our hands at creating something new in the spirit of the old.

I associate, whether it’s accurate or not, some of the sensibilities of these Catholics who wish to bring back the formalities and fashions of what they consider a more reasonable time with a sort of neo-Victorianism. (I am willing to be disabused of this notion if I am incorrect.) But it was with this very neo-Victorianism in mind that I stumbled on Chesterton’s essay, The True Victorian Hypocricy. It occurred to me upon reading it what a bad idea it would be to try to choose this particular period of time to revive:

Half the trouble has arisen from two falsehoods; both of them current, not so much among those who are young enough to be troublesome, as among those who are old enough to know better. But in both generations there is a fixed idea; first, that what is called the Victorian Age was a golden age of domestic respectability and unity; and second, that there was something specially British about this solid and conventional family life. The very name of Queen Victoria is supposed in some way to stamp a sacred domesticity upon the period and the place, and to suggest that the idea of the family was at its highest or strongest in that age and in that country.

Both these ideas are quite false. The Victorian age was not one in which domesticity was at its highest. On the contrary, it was one at which domesticity was at its lowest. Half the present evil arises from the fact that the Victorians never did understand the virtues that they were vaguely supposed to defend. It was as if we were to say that the Catholic religion and the French monarchy were at their healthiest and most hopeful moment in the time of Voltaire. In the eighteenth century there were still bishops for Voltaire to make fun of, as in the ninteenth century there were still British matrons for Bernard Shaw to make fun of. But the matron no more embodied all that was meant by the Mother or the Madonna than an Abbe who was a sycophant was like an Abbot who was a saint…

…Now the Victorians were people who had lost the sense of the sacredness of the home. They still believed in the respectability of the home; but that is only another way of saying that they wanted to be respected by other people for reverencing what they did not really reverence. If we compare Victorian customs with the customs of the mass of mankind, the first thing that will strike us is that the purely domestic customs have been cut down to next to nothing; that they are duller and not brighter, colder and not more convivial. It is as if we were to say that because a Victorian banker generally disapproved of walking about naked, therefore his age was the golden age of glorious and flamboyant costume. The truth is that he had cut down costume to something meaner and more prosaic and less significant than costume had ever been before. He wore chimney-pot hats and mutton chop whiskers because he thought less and not more about the possibilities of dress than did a gallant of Giorgione or a cavalier of Van Dyck. He preferred the chimney-pot hats as he preferred the chimney-pots to the Tower of Giotto. He tolerated the mutton-chop whiskers as he tolerated the mutton-chops; because he despised French cookery along with French culture. It is quite possible for a sympathetic imagination to see something manly and bracing about such a Philistine. But nobody, however sympathetic, would say that he understood the real meaning and possibilities of dress. Nor did he understand the meaning and possibilities of domesticity.

Each age, I suppose had its glories; each also had its ignominies. Ours is no different, even if one could reasonably argue that we have more of the latter than the former.

So, if we need to effect a renaissance rather than a revival, how would it best be accomplished?

Filed under: Catholicism, Chesterton, Culture Wars