Lamentation for France

I am not going to post any images from the horror that was shown in Paris last night. I am sure many of you saw the depravity, the degeneracy, and the mockery of the Christian faith which is always at the heart of ‘wokeness’.

Consider instead, for now, a contrasting image from the Sochi, Russia opening ceremony ten years ago:

The debacle is useful insofar as it reveals to a wider audience exactly ‘what time it is’. It is the twilight of the West. The arc of the new religion in the West reaches its apex. Things fall apart in its shadow.

Paris, of course, has played host to great terror before. The Revolution, celebrated with a headless queen and a bloodied castle last night, destroyed churches and killed priests and nuns en masse. That same spirit just celebrated a ‘black mass’ in full view of the world: obese and painted drag queens re-enacting the Last Supper.

This spirit has simply reached a fuller decay, a full ugliness: a spiritual terror: a frontal assault on sex, grace, manners, and beauty… Revolutions are revolting.

Recall that Paris has always had another side. For centuries France was the jewel of Christendom, paragon of taste and aesthetics, the land of of Montaigne the great essayist, the home of King St Louis, Joan of Arc, St Genevieve, of Notre Dame (mysteriously burnt down), of Chartres and Mont St Michel:

Recall also the famous words of the first great French bishop and doctor, the Greek-born St Irenaeus: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

Last night, the human being was depicted as dying, the divine spark hidden, distorted under a shroud of decay.

One could even go so far as to say that this happening in Paris is no accident. Without a living France, can there be a living West? France is a battleground.

This morning I remembered the words of Jeremiah’s great Lamentation of the Old Testament, for a fallen Jerusalem:

How deserted lies the city,
    once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
    who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
    has now become a slave.

Bitterly she weeps at night,
    tears are on her cheeks.
Among all her lovers
    there is no one to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her;
    they have become her enemies…

All her gateways are desolate,
    her priests groan,
her young women grieve,
    and she is in bitter anguish.

All the splendor has departed
    from Daughter Zion…

Her filthiness clung to her skirts;
    she did not consider her future.
Her fall was astounding;
    there was none to comfort her.
“Look, Lord, on my affliction,
    for the enemy has triumphed.”

The enemy laid hands
    on all her treasures;
she saw pagan nations
    enter her sanctuary—
those you had forbidden
    to enter your assembly.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
    Look around and see.
Is any suffering like my suffering
    that was inflicted on me,
that the Lord brought on me
    in the day of his fierce anger?

There is some grim irony that the director of the ceremony was Jewish. One is not meant to notice such a thing, but the online ‘right’ would be quick to point it out if it had been a Muslim.

Let me make two caveats to this lamentation.

First, do not assume the entire French nation, or Europe itself, has completely fallen. There is a regime in place, a mutli-national beast of many heads. The bizarre Macron represents something anti-French, as he famously said for himself, “French culture does not exist.” It does, though, and it can rise again.

Second, do not impute a grandeur to this evil. These people are dangerous, yes, but they are also pathetic. They are to be mocked, as the prophets of old mocked such people.

These are the late throes of a dying thing.

In the end, we win.