Essays in Idleness

Except for superficial changes, the world remains the same as it was in the works of Sedulius Scottus — grammarian, scriptural commentator, and poet — writing in the IXth century, Anno Domini. He is travelling on the continent, and writing his elegant, though sometimes slapstick, verses, in Latin, from Liège. (We might call him an Irish colonialist, and indeed, we owe our civilization to this Irish colonialism, or the “spiritual imperialism” of the Gaelic sphere. Western Christendom was an Irish invention.)

The familiar, IXth-century Christian world of Sedulius contains Germans, and French, as well as Irish; and there are Slavs, Greeks, and the Holy Land, stretching into Asia, and Scythians and Indians somewhere beyond. Formative Europe is threatened with violence — from Moors and Saracens to the south, and from heathen Northmen on the other side.

Indeed, Islamophobia begins in the largely Christianized and Judaized Arabian peninsula, with the appearance of Islam, in murderous waves of conquest; and we might call the other enemy “Borealophobia,” which began when the Northmen first arrived in places like Dublin. It also took the form of murderous waves, and monks were its first victims.

The Boreal savages have been replaced by Marxists, as numerous and various as the Northmen once were. They have faded into our white-ish societies, because so many of them are palefaced themselves; but they are dedicated to advancing profanity. They have infiltrated our schools, and all other public institutions, and are constantly plotting to “cancel” Christianity, often in association with the barbarians of the “global south.” (And Ireland has been lost, again.)

Verily, Christians have become a shrinking minority throughout what was once Christendom, and serve our “new” masters, their mad philosophies, and their Godless gods. We survive so long as we obey the whims of this political “Left.” But apart from that, life goes on (until it doesn’t).

So, instead of heathen Vikings, we have the heathen Left. This makes the world slightly different from what it was in Sedulius’s time.

Another subtle change is that Christian writers are no longer optimistic — hopeful towards the future, and building and illuminating beautiful things. Their notion that, “With God, all things are possible,” has receded. Today, their outlook is sad and grim, and what we build and illuminate is overwhelmingly “pagan,” and usually very ugly.