Europe teaches me how to hold fast to things that are eternal, to grasp loosely things that are temporal, and the wisdom to know the difference

From Disneyland to Dante

by ROD DREHER

Go to Europe in search of truth, not illusions of tradition.


Thoughtful U.S. travelers approach Europe with a sense of pietas. Europe is no Disneyland but the home of our fathers.

That’s the attitude I take, anyway, and never did I feel more pious, in the classical sense, than on this recent trip to Florence. Within the previous year, discovering theDivine Comedy of Dante Alighieri had changed my life—saved it, I would say, because it drew me out of a dark spiritual wood.

I wanted to go to Italy to see the city that nurtured the poet who had been the spiritual father of my new life, the same city that threw him out in disgrace and in so doing seeded the creation of an immortal work of literature. For me, the trip to Florence was very much a pilgrimage, as much a spiritual journey as an intellectual and cultural one.

But then, they all are. For well over half my life, I have been going to Europe at every opportunity, drawn mostly by its art, its architecture, and its culture. (And, well, its food.) It was in Europe—inside the Chartres cathedral, to be precise—that I rediscovered the Christian faith that I, as a know-it-all teenager, had rashly discarded as an ideology of either bourgeois dullards or televangelistic vulgarians. It was in Europe that I had fallen under the spell of art, of beauty, of ritual, of continuity, and had sensed the depth not only of the Western experience but of the human experience—a depth that is all but inaccessible to Americans at home, not because of any moral fault but because of our brief history, throwaway culture, and restless, forward-looking character.

And it was in Europe—or rather, because of Europe—that I would become a conservative, or at least become the sort of conservative that I am: a traditionalist focused on religion, family, and culture. Russell Kirk, riffing on a felicitous utterance of Edmund Burke’s, articulated the heart of the conservatism that appealed to me: “I mean by the phrase ‘the unbought grace of life’ those intricate and subtle and delicate elements in the culture of the mind and in the constitution of society which are produced by a continuing tradition of prescriptive establishments, reflective leisure, and political order.”

That is true, but what is more true, at least for someone of my unacademic cast of mind, is what the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik describes as the secret of Paris’s allure for Americans: “the idea of happiness it presents is always mingled, I do not always know how, with a feeling of seriousness.” This feeling, this sense of “pleasure allied to education,” allows those of us from the New World to lose ourselves in “absorption without obvious accomplishment, a lovely and un-American emotion.”

So it is in Paris, and so it is in Europe, where the past is never really past. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in the early 14th century and peopled it with eminent Florentines. Today, you can walk the same streets that the poet and some of the most vivid characters of the poem walked and see startling evidence of their presence.

...............

Read more: www.theamericanconservative.com