Introducing A Long Defeat
I’m proud to introduce the newest incarnation of this newsletter.
May I present A Long Defeat.
This will be a newsletter for those who labor to establish order out of the chaos of our modernist life.
The name takes inspiration from a quote from my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien.
“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” 1
That’s a riff on the famous line from the heroine Galadriel in the Fellowship of the Ring, speaking of herself and her husband Celeborn:
“He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.2
This is not a pessimistic view. The secret of the optimism of this view lies in the final line of Tolkein’s letter.
We have seen glimpses of the final victory. The observant among us have seen miralces, small and great, in our own lives. We are inheritors of the triumph of the martyrs.
We understand that Christ rode a donkey into Jerusalem; cheered as king while riding the humblest of creatures. The world expected a materialistic Messiah to become Ceaser, to conquer Rome with the sword. But a week later he was crucified — breaking the gates of Hades and conquering death., while the world was in ignorance of the mightly victory from the greatest event in human history
To the world at the time, He was defeated by the greatest empire on earth. But the world knew Him not.
The great work of the Holy Spirit would begin and subvert the Roman Empire, replacing violent paganism with love through the blood of the martyrs.
What we understand today as “Western values” are the Christian values and morality that a small minority of ancient believers held, under heavy and repeated persecution, until Christianity would conquer the Roman Empire when Constantine the Great cast aside paganism, ended the persecution of Christians and Jews, and became the first Christian Emperor. His successor Theodosius would make Christianity the religion of the empire in 380 AD.
Christendom had come a long way since the early faithful were forced to hide in the catacombs after the Crucifixion for fear of persecution from the pagan leaders of Rome.
So yeah, we’ve seen glimpses of the final victory. It’s just the victory that the materialist world is expecting.
So what is the long defeat all about?
It is an understanding of the world informed by more than the modernist, materialist view prevalent in our society.
It is that hope that sets the Christian gospel apart from earlier pagan historical notions. For the “long defeat” was a common assumption among the ancient peoples. The Greeks and Romans did not consider themselves to have exceeded the heroes who went before. They could model themselves on Achilles or Aeneas, but they did not expect to match their like. The Jews had no hope other than a “restoration of the Kingdom,” which was generally considered apocalyptic in nature. All of classical culture presumed a long decline.3
The publication will be about the journey, about the process that I wrote about recently.
We’ll cover history, family, books, art, food, and faith from the perspective of building a community of fellow pilgrims who share the ethos of the long defeat and the desire to prepare for the ‘final victory.”
Letter 255. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkein.
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 7 - The Mirror of Galadriel
Fr. Stephan Freeman, https://www.glory2godforallthings.com/2014/07/15/tolkiens-long-defeat/