Column: Illuminations
Our Dear Land
by Anthony Esolen
Americans have heard lately, mainly from American politicians, that it is not possible to love America unless you love its government, which means, practically speaking, its governors, the politicians themselves. L'etat, c'est moi, said the bloated old French dynast. He was in this regard gentler on his subjects than our governors are. There was only one Louis XIV that they all had to love, and his method of loving his subjects was the old and necessarily limited one of inviting a few of the prettier females to a closer acquaintance with their sovereign. Most Frenchmen lived safely beneath the enmity of their one king. If only Americans could live safely beneath the loving-kindness of their many thousands.
But what a sad thing it is, to have no country to love, but only The Congressional Record, or the by-laws of the senate of Arkansas! I'm flat-footed enough to believe that when you love your country, you love that place under your shoes. You love the red clay hills of north Georgia, or the shiny black coal that splinters under the grass in Pennsylvania. You love the snow-laden gales blowing across Lake Michigan (yes, you do). You love that there are such things as scrapple, Yankee Clippers, banjos, baseball fields, marching bands, and diners serving blueberry pancakes as big as hubcaps but heavier. You love the place, and all its peculiar ways, just as you love your cousins and your classmates, even when you fight with them, and sometimes especially when you fight.
In his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton catches that love of country in a most memorable passage. Noting that the Italian towns in the thirteenth century seemed to be at war with one another all the time, he says that at least they fought for the places they loved. His comparison with towns and wars in our own age is not flattering:
While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till there is a city wall around Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
The Soldier's Love for Home
Now, you might think that in an old hymnal for our Army and Navy, such love of the homestead and the hills and the brook nearby would seem unfit for men going forth to fight for our land so vast. Place would seem to be out of place. But the old hymnodists understood piety better than we do.
Here's a small gem in the 1942 hymnal for our servicemen, My Own Dear Land. It is sung to the London-derry Air, but that's not to fear; the melody works very well with it:
My own dear land, where'er my footsteps wander,
Ever to thee my heart still turns again;
To thee my love grows ever fonder, fonder,
Till in its might it is akin to pain.
Ever to thee, I'm bound by love and duty;
No dearer land to me in all the earth;
By all sweet ties of home and love and beauty,
To thee I cleave, dear land that gave me birth.
That fourth line lifts the stanza out of the realm of easy sentiment. It can only have been written by someone who could understand Odysseus's pain for the return: nostalgia. It is akin to pain because it is almost too great for a lone man to bear. If an uprooted tree could feel in all of its tender filaments an acute longing for the place of its birth, with clots of the soil clinging still to the roots, then it would know something of the faraway soldier's love for home.
Friendship in Piety
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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