Resurfacing from a Summer slump

We apologize for the dearth of activity over the past month. Competing summertime duties for us have limited our ability to contribute to this website. Nevertheless, rest assured that we continue to press ahead with our work. While Gil Bailie remains at the writing desk researching his next manuscript project, he has recently provided a couple of tidbits for our consideration that we would like to share.

The first references a bit of historical trivia concerning the name of our organization. Originally when first constituted in 1994 The Cornerstone Forum was known as The Florilegia Institute. (For a more detailed telling of this story see HERE). In those early days when speaking of the Florilegia Institute Gil would on occasion be met with quizzical looks from those unfamiliar with the word. In the quote from Fr. Nichols Gil found a most beautiful expression of what he aspired to in his apostolate.

FLORILEGIA COMES ROUND AGAIN.

Of Saint John Damascene, Aidan Nichols, O.P. writes:

The high profile of poetry in the Greek life is important because John would be remembered in the Byzantine tradition primarily as a liturgical poet and only secondly as a theologian. For the most part indeed, he was not an original theological mind. Much of his material incorporates either verbatim or by paraphrase earlier patristic sources, thus constituting, to some extent at least, a kind of elaborate anthology or “florilegium” – literally, a bunch of flowers. Lionel Wickham, one of the last of the great line of scholarly Church of England parsons working on the Fathers, was moved to comment that “patristic theology may be said to aspire to the condition of the florilegium and in its last representative John of Damascus whose de Fide Orthodoxa (On the Orthodox Faith) is a mosaic of quotations, attains its goal.” …

Gil’s next piece considers the meaning of some of the rhetoric spilling over from the current news cycle. Nota Bene: in our current highly polarized political environment we understand this is taking a bit of a risk. However, this is offered only for our and your edification.

“UNBURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN”

The current Democratic party candidate for president and sitting vice-president, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly asked her audiences to imagine “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” This little piece of campaign rhetoric turns the very principle of cultural transmission on its head. Cultures remain healthy by drawing on the wisdom and accomplishments of past generations and learning from their failures. The conscious act of forgetting both the accomplishments and the failures is fatal to cultural transmission. The glaring examples of where this erasure of cultural memory has been tried – the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese cultural revolution – constitute a sobering lesson which no sane person wants to have to learn again the hard way.

When aspirations are “unburdened” by “what has been” delusions abound. Perhaps no one has exposed the underlying premise of this slogan to more ridicule than did the distinguished French political philosopher, Pierre Manent. In a 2022 book, he expressed appreciation for the central point of Charles Péguy’s historical vision:

All the great oppositions which give history its momentum, the opposition between paganism and Christianity, between republicanism and monarchy, pale before the fundamental opposition between the modern world and all the others: “the modern world is not only opposed to the Ancien Régime in France, it is opposed, it runs counter to, all the ancient cultures, to all the anciens régimes, to all the ancient cities, to everything which is culture, to all that is a city.”

The longstanding Augustinian adage, enthusiastically adopted by the Cornerstone Forum, remains essential: Christian civilization remains healthy only by being both “Ever-Ancient” and “Ever-New.”