Patria

At Mass yesterday Monsignor made the observation (based on his welcome upon his first visit to Italy) that home is not so much where one is born and raised as where one feels most at home; the paradigmatic case of this truth, he added, is that earth is less our home than the heaven that we have never seen.

Thomas Aquinas, of course, calls heaven “patria,” the homeland or, more literally, the fatherland.  For the Jews there was the promised land of Israel, for the Romans the patria—that is, Rome and its Empire.  Christianity, adopting the eschatological significance of Jerusalem and the Roman term patria considered its true home to be heaven.

But the pull of earth is strong, and the desire for patria remains even amongst those who have left Christianity behind.  Thus, of course, the Nazi conception of Vaterland took on a salvific edge that the Romans, to whom the Nazis preferred to liken themselves, surely never included in their thoughts.  Thus the mild error of many nations, of crediting their earthly polities with more longevity and significance than belongs to any institution of human nature, was taken to a deadly extreme.

There is, of course, an equal and opposite error (as Aristotle and C.S. Lewis would surely remind us), perhaps more common in the West today, of insisting that there be no human patria.  Mostly people label this as a liberal or progressive or leftist or globalist error, even as people consider too excessive devotion to the human patria to be a vice of the right.  What people tend to forget is that—as the former U.S.S.R. showed—the “liberal” error can be just as deadly.

I suspect it is not a coincidence that Stalinists and Nazis produced more horrific versions of their respective errors than, say, the Whigs and the Tories, or than anything we have see yet in America today.  The Whigs and the Tories were still Christian, by culture at least, and the idea of the heavenly patria hovered in the air they breathed like a friendly miasma, an inoculation of sorts against too great an excitement at secular political solutions.  America today, in contrast, is post-Christian, and while the heavenly patria is a legend for most and a fact for only a few, it is not a real rival to secular ideals; American secularists on either side of the aisle have no great religious concept of patria on which to model their acceptance or rejection of nationhood.  It was only the age that actively rejected Christianity that saw both the exaltation and the negation of political patria take on a demonic shade.  Whether the rejection and the demonization (demonification?) were effect and cause, and which was which, or whether both were caused by some third thing, I cannot guess; but surely the coincidence was no accident.

In any case, history would seem to suggest that the rejection of Christianity, far from being a purely liberalizing phenomenon, comes with its own problems.  And anyone concerned over the return of an unhealthy nationalism would be wise to make Christianity their friend rather than their enemy; for in a right understanding, nothing could be more salutary in adjusting notions of the human patria than a firm belief in and a rightly ordered love of the patria that is the Christian heaven.