Grim's Hall

Paganism in Schools:

Have you seen this statue of Athena in a public park in Nashville, TN? The author of the piece pointing out demands that it be torn down and removed, since the Ten Commandments monument was torn down and removed from public property. No favoritism for Pagans, he says!

Well, fine. But where can I find a statue of Woden, on public or private property? This gets back to Jefferson's point, which was that the real roots of our culture are in the pre-Roman North of Europe, not in the Greco-Roman tradition. Jefferson was certainly an admirer of Rome--you can see it in the dome he constructed for his house--but he was also a realist about history. One reason that the tradition exemplified by Leo Strauss has had such difficulty making "ancient liberalism" and modern liberalism come to terms is that there is little common ground between them. Greek ideas about democracy did not survive the Roman empire, whose own ideas about the Republic gave way to imperialism.

The Greco-Roman tradition, if anything, worked against egalitarianism and the old views of virtue. The surviving Roman tradition is what turned elective kingship into Charlemagne, and what turned the early, charismatic Christian church into a hierarchy that hunted heretics and squashed dissent. Whatever good may be said about Catholicism--I believe that there is very much good to say about it--it is undeniably true that the Imperial hierarchy it adopted thanks to the interest of Constantine the Great was a force against free-thinking, eh, "heresy." It was that Imperial Church that survived the Empire, and while it may be said that it held Europe together, it must be noted that it did so by imposing a rigid authority.

Those places in Medieval Europe where we see a vision of freedom like to our own are those that had not yet been involved in the Empire, or which had been swept from its grasp entirely: England, Scotland, Ireland, and among the Vikings, who held as we do that all free men are equal.

I haven't spoken to the Viking notions in a while yet, so I'll post just a couple of links for those of you among my readers less familiar with Viking ethics. Just as the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, the Viking tradition upheld that a king ruled by right of consent of the goverened, and that he could be removed--even slain--and replaced if he violated the will of the folk. King Olav of Sweden discovered this when he tried to bully the assembly, called the Thing, at Uppsala:

Now it is our will, we bondes [free land-owning farmers], that thou King Olaf [of Sweden] make peace with the Norway king, Olaf the Thick [ON: Digre], and marry thy daughter Ingegerd to him. Wilt thou, however, reconquer the kingdoms in the east countries which thy
relations and forefathers had there, we will all for that purpose follow thee to the war. But if thou wilt not do as we desire, we will now attack thee, and put thee to death; for we will no longer suffer law and peace to be disturbed. So our forefathers went to work when they drowned five kings in a morass at the Mula-thing, and they were filled with the same insupportable pride thou hast shown towards us. Now tell us, in all haste, what resolution thou wilt take.

So it was that the French, who were mired in notions of superiority and inferiority among men even in the Viking Age, got a lesson that must have been stirring and chilling at once. When French knights approached a Viking encampment to demand to know who had come unwanted into their kingdom, they got this answer:

"We are Danes", they replied, "we are from Denmark and we are here to conquer France". "But who is your master?" the knight shouted back, but just to receive the famous answer: "Nobody, we have no master, we are all equal".

It was the coming of the Greco-Roman-Catholic tradition that ended elective kingship and egalitarianism in Europe. Men were supposedly born better or worse than each other, and meant to accept their place, an attitude that has its roots in Rome's patricians and plebians, and slaves who were scorned for rising above their station.

Fortunately these ways survived in the fringes of Europe, such as Scotland, and among those classes, like English yeomanry, who were most devoted to them. Thankfully, they blossomed at the moment that a new continent was available wherein they could take root, and the "Scottish Enlightenment" combined with an Anglo-Saxon ideal of "yeomen farmers," pace Jefferson again. We have our vision of freedom as a consequence. It would be wise to remember the truth about its roots.