In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century.Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World.America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents.Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired-as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity-to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Life lived in reference to tradition.is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies-the ideal of ‘who we are’. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. Tradition.is preeminently contemporary.It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization. Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself-the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (45), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind. Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now-however slowly-beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time. “The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –NietzscheĬonservative thinking.is essentially historical thinking-in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. He draws interesting distinctions between America and Europe, and I largely agree with his observation that the U.S., in its own way, occupied western Europe every bit as much as the Soviets did in the East. Venner's thoughts on tradition are ones that can be appreciated by the Orthodox reader. He finds that amidst the current crisis-financial, demographic, cultural, existential-Europe is awakening from a long sleep, a dormition, if you will. I enjoyed the recent article by Michael O'Meara, entitled The Shock of History, being a review of a book by the same name- Le Choc de l'Histoire by French historian Dominique Venner.
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