Meditations on a European Vacation

For seventeen days from late June to this past weekend, most of my family and I took a high-speed tour through Western Europe.  Though the experience was both exhilarating and exhausting, it gave me some needed time to re-charge my batteries with my family, as well as to reflect on a lot of thoughts that I have tried to express in my posts over the last few years.

My wife, who in a prior life was a licensed international customs broker and logistics expert, scheduled an ambitious trip around the wedding of our first foreign exchange student, which was celebrated in the Black Forest region of Germany.  Although it was sometimes nerve-wracking, my wife pulled-off an amazing feat, and we were able to see so much of the European art and architectural history that we had studied all our lives.  She and my father-in-law took literally hundreds of pictures, many of which I will try to share with you as they are uploaded by my wife to Facebook over the next few weeks.

The trip actually started for my youngest daughter and my father-in-law on June 20th, when they flew to Leeds, England.  From there they spent 9 days traveling throughout England, seeing Stonehenge, several castles and estates, and a couple of cathedrals; as well as London and my daughter’s favorite part of the trip—the studio where the “Harry Potter” films were made.  They then joined my wife and me in Paris.  From Paris, we traveled to the village of Eguisheim and the city of Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France; to Basel, Switzerland; to the Black Forest region of Germany; over the Swiss Alps to Milan; and then on to Florence, Pompeii, and Rome—from where I flew back through Amsterdam to Houston this past weekend.  The rest of my family then went on to see the French Mediterranean region, and will return to Houston later this week.

Over the course of this trip, we saw some of the great cathedrals and basilicas in Paris, Strasbourg, Milan, Florence—and of course the Sistine Chapel and great Basilica in the Vatican; we saw Versailles, the Eifel Tower, and the Black Forest Castle of Prussian Kings and German Kaisers; we saw so much great art in the Musee d’Orsay and the Louvre in France (including being in caught in the crush of tour groups from China, who seemed to be everywhere, surrounding the “Mona Lisa” and the “Venus de Milo”), in the Kunstmuseum Basel, in Florence (including Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the Convent of San Marco and Michelangelo’s sculptures of the “Four Prisoners” and “David”), and in the Vatican Museum; we saw the great fountains and Spanish Steps of Rome; and we saw the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Rome—including the Coliseum.

Through it all I enjoyed not only seeing these sites for the first time, but also seeing them through my daughter’s eyes—just as I had enjoyed seeing Washington, New York and London through the eyes of my older daughters when they were young.  This is not to say that some of the trip wasn’t a little hair-raising (even for me) at times:  when you drive through these countries using a GPS it is amazing how many roundabouts and unmarked farm-roads there are; and the initial scenic thrill of driving over the Alps, through every Swiss hamlet and every two-lane hairpin turn, with a manual transmission begins to wear-off quickly.  I don’t know if it was the altitude or not, but I finally threatened to sing “Climb Every Mountain” in a continuous loop in my worst impersonation of the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music, if my father-in-law didn’t reset the GPS to get us back down to the highway to finish our trip through the Alps to Milan.  Needless to say, we soon came down the slopes to get back on the main tollway to Milan.

The site-seeing part of my trip ended under an arch in the Coliseum with my daughter, where we sat on shaded old marble columns turned on their side.  From there we looked out over the ruins and talked about the things we had seen and our impressions—it was interesting to hear her perspective.  For me, I had a swirl of emotions and impressions, not all of which I could articulate at that time to her.  So, after a few days to reflect on what I had just experienced, I want to share some of my thoughts with you.

This experience reinforced for me my belief that we all are characters in a story that started probably at least a hundred generations before our birth, and that will continue (God willing) for hundreds of generations after our death.  Our story has been the tale of our struggle to accept both the gift of liberty, and the challenge to balance that gift with the admonition to love our neighbors.  The struggle of our tale involved a journey through which we learned the principles of our civilization through divine guidance and the trial and error of human experience, and from the imperfect attempt to live by those principles; and that journey has served as the context through which we have lived our lives and developed our society.  Ultimately, our story has been but one book in the library of mankind, and that, as C.S. Lewis showed in his Appendix to The Abolition of Man, the book of each civilization largely has contained the story of the same struggle, just separated by geography and time.

As our story of Western Civilization unfolded, it was often told through symbols—especially before Guttenberg invented the printing press. If pictures paint a thousand words, symbols convey concepts and emotions that fill libraries.  Crests, Coats of Arms, and Flags were some of these symbols, but the greatest symbol of our story has been a simple one made of two pieces of wood—the Cross.  The Cross is so simple in form–two lines overlapping each other–that it can be formed on paper by children, in the wilderness with two sticks of wood, and in the sand with a finger.  Since the Carpenter dragged it to his execution, the Cross has been the most enduring symbol of the Christian faith that crystallized the meaning of the struggle at the heart of our story, as well as the journey through which we found our principles.  In that role, the Cross—though it has been demeaned, misused, and perverted throughout the centuries—has stood as the transcendent and fundamental symbol of not just of a great religion, but of the story of Western Civilization in which we still are characters.

For me, the sight of the Cross—in a church, in a cemetery, in my daughters’ drawings—always reminds me that I can, and should be, better than I am; for I have been given the gifts of life and liberty for certain purposes, and that one of those purposes is to help make this world better, in any small way that I can, while I am here.  This reminder, however one may articulate it, has been a central inspiration to the great progress in the human condition on Earth since Charlemagne knelt in the snow before the Pope.  It is the symbol of faith behind which many people crossed the Atlantic to start a new life in a wilderness (and for the thousands who still cross oceans, rivers, and deserts to get here); it is the symbol of human progress from which our ancestors found the courage to create, to fight for, and to die for a government conceived in liberty; it is the symbol of a caring love that rallied individuals to form and nourish neighborhoods across this continent; and it is the symbol of a responsibility to preserve, and to bequeath to our posterity, the blessings that we have been given.  Through it all (even through its misuses), the Cross has remained a fundamentally positive symbol of human progress and promise (for our country and our civilization), and it is this idea that poured through me as I saw the great art and architecture of Western Europe, so much of which was created in reverential response to the meaning of the Cross.

Sometimes it is the small things that you see that burn images in your memory.  As I walked through the Kunstmuseum Basel, I saw in one of the rooms a preliminary oil painting that Rubens had made as a study for a later work.  It is entitled “The Holy Trinity,” and its figures form a figurative cross.  It burned an image that I will never forget.

Although I like the art of the Symbolists and Surrealists of the late 19th and 20th Centuries, their art is an example of the decay of the traditions of Western Civilization that the historian, Jacques Barzun, described in his epic account of modern Western history since the Renaissance, entitled From Dawn to Decadence.  When I compared the work of Rubens to the works of Dali, Picasso, and other modern artists in nearby rooms, I began to sense how such art, though immensely creative, reflects a loss of direction and purpose within our society as we struggle with the decay of our traditions.  It is hard to see from our vantage point whether we are transitioning to a new and greater chapter in our story, or toward the dead-end and ruins that befell the Romans and other societies in earlier chapters.

All of these thoughts return me to my view of our duty as conservatives in this society.  Conservatives’ first obligation to any society is to preserve the heritage they have been given by prior generations, and to pass that heritage on to future generations.  The heritage we have been given is a challenge—the challenge to reconcile the gift of liberty with the admonition to love our neighbor.  The responsibility conservatives now face is to help our society avoid the fate and ruins of Rome, and to guide the transition to our children’s future in a way that preserves our story, the great challenge we inherited, and the enduring meaning of the Cross.