Transition and Tradition

Belief in the objective existence of the world outside ourselves, the world to which we submit our thought, is our deepest inheritance.

Last Thursday, Bishop Steven Biegler of the Diocese of Cheyenne came to Wyoming Catholic College to bless our new Immaculate Conception Oratory—“new,” at least, in our use of it. As I have mentioned before, the old church building has been used for many different things since the parish moved in 1965, most recently as a private home. Since the summer, the renovation supervised by Jon Tonkowich and executed by Eli Rowney and his team of work-study students has been startling, not least because of the discovery (and refinishing) of a fine hardwood floor under the linoleum tile. Several weeks ago, the conversion took another huge step toward completion thanks to the contribution of pews, an altar, a crucifix, Stations of the Cross, and a sanctuary lamp from the church recently closed in Basin, Wyoming.

What could be better? These things will not be gathering dust in a warehouse but seeing daily use by devout young Catholics who deeply honor the Church and its traditions. We will be inviting the former parishioners in Basin to a special Mass in their honor so that they can see for themselves the good use of their gifts.

On the face of it, this kind of transition seems small and local, but the history of Western civilization has in many ways been marked, on the most august scale, by finding new purposes for old things. Many years ago, when I first went to Rome with Thomas More College, I was struck by the mismatched columns of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere near the convent where we stayed. These had been taken from the nearby Baths of Caracalla when the church was built in the fourth century, and as one commentator puts it, “their transformation from classical structure to ecclesiastical ornamentation lends fascinating insight into the process by which the classical world became the Christian world.”

Even before Christianity, the Romans themselves provided a great pattern of transformation. “To be Roman,” writes the political philosopher Remi Brague in his book Eccentric Culture, “is to experience the ancient as new.” Our freshmen memorize John Keats’s great sonnet about this experience, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in which the poet compares his first real encounter with the greatness of Homer—one of the oldest poets in the tradition—to an astronomer’s discovery of a new planet or the first European glimpse of the Pacific Ocean from a mountain peak in Panama. For the Roman, the ancient is “renewed by its transplantation in new soil, a transplantation that makes the old a principle of new developments.” Homer, transplanted into Italy, becomes the “principle” of Virgil’s Aeneid. The American founders were Roman in this sense when they conceived of the United States Senate as a transplantation of the noble Roman institution into the circumstances of the New World.

Brague describes the splendid poetic, architectural, and philosophic accomplishments of Greek culture as “uphill” from the practical Romans, like the mountain waters that feed an aqueduct. Imagining the great past as uphill is almost counter-cultural in our day, when inherited institutions are increasingly discarded because they do not suit “the relativizing of all meaning and truth to personal taste,” as Carl Trueman puts it. In other words, they require serious study or moral reform or obedience. All through the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College, students experience the “uphill classical” in the same way that they experience the Wind River Mountains and the Tetons—as an aspiration, a challenge, a discipline of the real.

A discipline of the real: what exactly does that mean? It forms the basis of our self-understanding at Wyoming Catholic. Belief in the objective existence of the world outside ourselves, the world to which we submit our thought, is our deepest inheritance. In the 1950s, when my late teacher at the University of Dallas, Louise Cowan, was thinking about the contribution of the Southern poets and critics she loved, she wrote in The Fugitive Group that their attempt to develop a poetic craft “had led them ever farther into an exploration of their heritage.” Trying to be better poets, in other words, they encountered the “uphill classical” in the mastery of the ancients.

This encounter had consequences for everything that those men and women went on to achieve in transforming American literary thought in the mid-20th century:

They had found that their true task was not the creation of an ideal world but the discovery of a real one, independent of their own thinking; they had learned that a genuine culture, whatever its moral flaws, is an analogue of something nobler toward which the human spirit aspires but which it can grasp only through submission to the actual. Hence, their poetry made available to themselves and to the writers following them a body of techniques, a language, and a core of belief drawn from a traditional society which, at its very moment of change, could by these means be transmuted into permanence.

In the case of Wyoming Catholic College, submission to the actual means a great many things, not least our grateful acceptance of the gifts of those who support this noble enterprise. We hope to turn them to the highest use.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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