The Last Crusade 01 (Guest): The Voice in the Black Room
One who had volunteered to be a knight in the Last Crusade sends the following meditation on the battle before us. As an homage to one of my books, he places words in the dialog of Gilberec Moth, who is the fictional Last Crusader that inspired the reality which either you and I, dear reader, will bring forth, (or, if we fail, heaven haply will select another to save the people, but it will not go well with us).
Naturally, I have no objection to his borrowing from me, as I have borrowed wholesale from G.K. Chesterton, who introduced the name and purpose of the Last Crusade in a book called THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY.
I thought the following list of particulars to be an apt introduction to a planned series of columns outlining the need, the philosophy, the vision, and tactics of the Last Crusade.
The voice in the black room now took on a more serious tone.
“From 500 AD to 1500 AD under precisely the type of government at which the moderns sneer, the West abolished slavery, invented science, erected the Common Law – which is the single greatest juridical accomplishment of Man – created perspective in drawing, the Gothic arch and flying buttress in architecture, the horse collar and stirrup, the romance story in art, individualism in psychology, the Magna Charter, the dinner fork, the Julian calendar, the monastic order, parliamentary government, separation of secular and spiritual government, the University system, the code of chivalry, the notion of limited warfare, Christmas carols, the windmill, modern astronomy, the clock, eyeglasses, the bound book, the Copernican model, and the idea that marriages had to be voluntary for both partners. This was while civilization was in ruins and under remorseless attack by more powerful forces from north, south, and east.
“And they did this while preserving pagan culture, arts and letters, unlike their neighbors to the south, the Mohammedan, who destroyed what they could lay their hands on of the previous cultures they conquered.
“And they did all this without letting the rich and the moneylender run roughshod over the rest of society. The socialist impulse was channeled into constructive use: anyone who wanted to live without property could join a monastery. Any Puritan who wanted to live without luxuries could be a hermit. Anyone eager for productive work could join a guild or move to a chartered city. There were taxes aplenty, but no tax on income.
“One might be tempted to think the guild system and the ownership by many small yeoman-farmers of many small shops and farms imposed undue restrictions on the free market. However, we who toil under the minute regulation of every aspect and element of life, we whose toilet water tanks are regulated, cannot in good conscience mock the sumptuary laws and guild restrictions of the medieval. The feudal lord was due a tithe, ten percent, of the produce of the land. When was the last year anyone’s income tax was that low?
“They were freer than we are. And their gold was gold indeed.
“They had more holidays than we have now. People used to sing in public, together. And churchbells pleasing to the ear from high spires pleasing to the eye sent sonorous echoes across the landscape to mark the hours.
“You were taught man has progressed beyond such. It is not true.
“Starting with Henry VIII, nations began to claim the power to redesign and redefine the contents of the Bible, the nature of the Eucharist, the authority of priests, as well as the doctrines and disciplines of the Church. Separation of the spiritual power from the temporal was lost, and sacred and mundane became intermingled to their mutual detriment.
“It was the shipwreck of the world’s most glorious civilization, and a continual loss of personal liberty until, far overdue, some medieval notions of the proper rights and duties of man resurfaced in new guises during ironically-named Enlightenment, the Age of Reason which ushered in the Guillotine and the Gulag.
“Once the idea of civil power ruling over sacred things became commonplace, Cromwell became possible, perhaps inevitable: what all such Puritanical movements involved is trying to be holier than Christ, and to force common people to adopt one or more disciplines of the Church: Some forswear alcohol, some forswear all worldly pleasures, some forswear all worldly distinctions of rank, some forswear private ownership of property.
“Some take a vow of silence and forswear freedom in speech; some take a vow of obedience so that a master of the order can order every detail of your no-longer-private life. Political Correctness and the totalitarian adoration of a Glorious Leader are based on a religious impulse which the Church could tame to good uses.
“And all heretics, starting with Mohammed, abolish the boundary between priests and layman, and make every man a priest, and therefore no man.
“The terror of the Puritans of Cromwell, the Terror of the French Revolution, and the appalling mass murders of the Bolsheviks: each one in its own way was attempt to impose the Jesuit life – a life a Jesuit imposed on no one but himself – onto the general society in no way suited for such special spiritual discipline.
“This confusion of the spiritual and temporal power is the source not of one, but of all the political controversies of the Twentieth Century, and the Twenty-First. That confusion was introduced by the end of the Middle Ages, and introduced a civil war into Christendom which eventually led to its self-destruction at the apex of Europe’s greatest splendor, at World War One.
“Europe died then, and its dispirited but hollowed-eyed corpse has continued from that day to this merely by inertia, waiting for some Christ-hating power, either communism in the East or Islam in the South, to roll over the lifeless corpse of Europa, and put a stake through her heart.
“If Europe rediscovers Christ, she may be born again from the dead. That is what Christ does for those who have faith in His name.
“But if not, the greatest civilization, the one most properly suited for the human spirit, which this sad globe has ever known will not only perish, but her memory blackened and slandered beyond all recollection.
“What the West has lost to this slow robbery, and what she stands to lose, is beyond reckoning.
“It is a crime so monstrous that its sheer magnitude makes it invisible.”
The voice paused, and the scope and cruelty of what had been done to man’s world began to sink in to Gil’s imagination.
The man said, “Whose business is it to execute justice for this crime?”
Gil answered firmly, “Mine.”
The man in the dark said nothing, but Gil could almost feel a look of warm satisfaction, an avuncular pride, issuing from the blackness.
“Is that the right answer?” asked Gil.
“If you say so. I mean that literally. Only one who truly wills this fight to be his can make it his. You are hired.”
“Wait. What? You are not thinking I volunteered for something, are you?”
The man laughed. “If you do not volunteer now, you soon will. It is in your nature.”
“I don’t have any training. Real training, I mean. And no experience. And to be a Crusader, I would need to have title, a horse, and a sword, and be in Order of Malta or Knights of Columbus. Right? What about boot camp? The academy?”
“Nothing is required for this line of work but willingness.”
Gil was startled. “I have never heard of a job where you do not need any training or experience!”
“I think you have.”
“What line of work has no requirements but willingness?”
“Martyrdom.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
