Non nobis, Domine.
Non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
Brother.
I write to you as you perhaps also sit in the sickly glow of a screen, scanning and scrolling for fulfillment. Who shall give it?
"You who renounce your own wills … (The Rule of the Templars)”
Our generation has begun again to strive upward, to break free of mere “Liberty”, a word Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre described as almost “sacrosanct” to the Revolution.
We strive and strive, unknowing, longing - striving in a world that does not understand the spirit of the Crusades enough to hate it. Indeed - I say again - there is no one who hates the Crusades, because there is no one who understands them: the Crusades which were exemplary of Freedom (the renunciation of the self).
Men always seek a challenge, but what is the challenge, and is the road honorable? Is the pursuit mere Liberty (the lack of obstacles to the fulfillment of one’s desires, whatever they may be) or is the pursuit Freedom, which is the acknowledgement of the Divine Order and submission of one’s will thereto.
''Probate spiritus si ex Deo sunt. That is to say: ‘Test the soul to see if it comes from God’ (The Rule …)”
We live in an epoch of unprecedented uncertainty and confusion resulting from the rejection of the Divine Order by our forefathers’ forefathers. Slow degradation and degeneration of humanity through the ages has widened the rift between the male psyche (and its desire for great feats) and its most beautiful expressions throughout the history of the Glories of Christendom.
Consider the Poor Knights of the Temple.
”For if any brother does not take the vow of chastity he cannot come to eternal rest nor see God … (The Rule …)”
Celibate warrior-monks who forsook worldly pleasures, who only ate meat “three times a week” (The Rule …), and who kept the hours in prayer, the Knights Templar are emblematic of a masculinity that existed on another plane, one to which most of us can only aspire to reach, and few will attain.
Abandoning all finery, they consented to a communal life of fasting and sacrifice, up to and including the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in the defense of fellow Christians, the Church, and pilgrims:
It is the truth that you especially are charged with the duty of giving your souls for your brothers, as did Jesus Christ, and of defending the land from the unbelieving pagans who are the enemies of the son of the Virgin Mary. (The Rule, par. 56)
We often think of these men as being constantly and forever at war - men of violence and wrath, and yet often their days were spent in silence and in recollection:
When the brothers come out of compline they have no permission to speak openly except in an emergency. But let each go to his bed quietly and in silence, and if he needs to speak to his squire, he should say what he has to say softly and quietly. (The Rule …)
Silence and prayer, fasting, abstinence, celibacy, the contemplation of one’s death: such was the life of a Poor Knight of the Temple. And why? Non nobis, Domine. Non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. Not unto us, O Lord. Not unto us, but unto your name give the glory.
They understood the source from which all existence comes, and they wished to live or die by the Truth: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Free?
Yes, brother.
Free.
Freedom? The ability to do one’s duty to God, to one’s family, to the Church, to one’s neighbors. In the time of the Crusades - despite the propaganda of the Revolution (i.e. the Revolution against God and therefore against man) preaching otherwise - duty required the willingness to suffer and to die in the defense of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful.
We no longer live under the auspices of the Glories of Christendom. We do not build Mont Saint-Michel, nor Notre Dame de Paris.
The Age of Faith stands as a great and unassailable watchtower - representing the heights to which man can climb when he worships God in all justice - and looking down upon the wasteland of the pride of the Modern Age and its legacies of unprecedented genocides, misanthropic architecture, iconoclasm, and rebellion against the very laws of nature themselves.
The consequences of the ever-shifting seas of liberalism (which is simply another name for subjectivism, rationalism, and relativism - and liberalism is the ideology of both Left and Right!) have finally come hope to roost. There is nothing we hold sacred. Innocence itself will not be spared by the demons of the Revolution as they screech in the streets “We are coming for your children!”
It is fashionable to consider - instead of our own age of infanticide and biological warfare - the Crusades to be a series of genocides and the soldiers who fought in them - many of whom were men of real, heroic virtue - savages duped and cajoled by men of power into a war of empire.
My, how we have been duped and duped again - duped in preparation for more duping yet to come, dunces of the New World Order.
But perhaps our false ideas of “Progress” and the exceptionalism of the Post-Post-Modern Age are finally failing to convince. The propaganda, too often repeated by untrustworthy voices, no longer persuades because it failed to deliver its bill of goods that was only ever - and always will be - a catalogue of lies and deceit.
Brother.
Voices from another age call to you.
I call to you, and I ask of you: will you renounce the old man, “who is corrupted according to the desire of error”, and become the new (Ephesians 4:22)?
Your neighbors - they too are corrupted. To love them, often you must simply oppose them. They may will not to see the light. They may will to live in darkness, in “the desire of error”, the desire of Liberty and the hatred of Freedom. Too love them, again, you must oppose them and bear their hatred, betrayal, and rejection.
The immolation of self in our age begets the suffering of living, perhaps, at times, as a ghost: devoid of friendships, a good job, decent family relations, because it is what living in the Truth demands. It is what the spirit of Chivalry and the spirit of the Crusades demands - and in acquiescing to the demands of the Divine Law and through the mortification of the Flesh and its desires, we will find our crowns.
Wherever you are, brother, you are not alone.
The Sacred Heart, wounded with love for you and for all mankind, sets with its steady, orderly beats the rhythm of your life and stays near to you so long as you stay near to Him - for God never drifts away from us, but we from Him.
God is only far when we distance ourselves from Him and His gifts of grace, which come first and foremost through the Sacraments instituted by the Church he founded, the Church that fostered the Age of Faith, that fed the Templars their spiritual meat.
Will we accept what is offered?
Strength, discipline, austerity, obedience - the pillars of a hope that cannot be shaken by any cinder-block edifice of man.
The children of this world live in darkness, “But the men signed of the cross of Christ / Go gaily in the dark” (The Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton).
The powers of this world mock, condemn, and persecute the Church of Christ, “But the men that drink the blood of God / Go singing to their shame” (The Ballad …).
Vive Le Christ-Roi.
Avec amour,
Ross