impavidum ferient ruinae

It is the early 1960s and Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo is despondent. Is the world “rushing towards self-destruction?” he wonders, taking his trouble to the crucified Christ. And Christ poses a counter question: “Do you mean that my mission among mankind has failed because men's malice is stronger than the goodness of God?”

Don Camillo then elaborates, expressing Guareschi’s own feelings at that time. (If he had been living now he would have said the same thing.) People, says the country priest, have chosen what they account as desirable because it is tangible, over the intangibles that are their spiritual heritage: “love, goodness, piety, honesty, purity, and hope. Most of all, faith. Things which one can't live without.” And this is what he means by self-destruction. “One day not very long from now,” says Don Camillo, “men will find themselves back in the brutalism of the caveman - the caves will be sky-scrapers filled with the latest equipment and miraculous machines, but men's souls will be primitive and brutish.”

Christ consoles him with a parable of the river flooding fields. Farmers save the seed. After the waters recede and the land – more fertile from its soaking – dries, they plant the saved seed and watch it grow. The seed is faith, says the Crucified One, and Don Camillo must do all he can to keep it intact in those who have it. For the spiritual desert grows and “Every day men of many words and no faith are destroying the spiritual heritage and faith of other people. Men of every culture and religion.”

It is a passage that has not lost its relevance. In the world at present, it does sometimes seem that the malice of men has proved stronger than the goodness of God. So it must have seemed to communities suffering under tyrannies down the ages, and in every region. Yet something of worth was always salvaged. It is a hope to cling to now. Or lacking faith, at least to hold on with pagan Horace “and stand secure amidst a falling world”
si fractus illabatur orbis
impavidum ferient ruinae

That Horace should survive the Roman Empire, western and eastern, over twenty centuries after his death, and be valued in regions not known to Romans of his day, must that not feed hope in the eventual triumph of good?

Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?

Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis? aut cur dexteris
aptantur enses conditi?
parumne campus atque Neptuno super
fusum est Latini sanguinis?
non ut superbas invidae Carthaginis
Romanus arces ureret,
intactus aut Britannus ut descenderet
Sacra catenatus Via,
sed ut secundum vota Parthorum sua
urbs haec periret dextera.
neque hic lupis mos nec fuit leonibus,
numquam nisi in dispar feris.
furorne caecus an rapit vis acrior
an culpa? responsum date!

tacent, et ora pallor albus inficit,
mentesque perculsae stupent.
sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt
scelusque fraternae necis,
ut immerentis fluxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor.

~ HORACE

What purpose does the story of humankind serve if not to offer the painful experiences of the past as a guide to present choice? Yet did humankind take history’s lessons to heart – and mind – George Santayana would have had no occasion to make his famous statement:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Sixteen hundred and ten years ago, at the very end of December, the Rhine froze in a bitter winter. On the night of 30/31, a massed horde of barbarian tribes crossed over to Mogontiacum (Mainz)  and cruelly sacked it, pouring into Gaul, laying waste as they went, and setting off a chain of revolts in Britannia and elsewhere.

Four years later, Rome itself fell to the Visigoths.

In a way that Horace (65 B.C. – 8 B.C.) did not have in mind, himself having known only the civil war that followed upon Julius Caesar’s assassination, the state of Rome – then the western Roman empire – died by its own hand (urbs haec periret dextera). The latter was a prolonged self-murder and different from the wars that destroyed the Republic. Yet madmen rushing on their doom there have always been. Not lions, or wolves, says Horace, are so mad as to tear their own kind apart (neque hic lupis mos nec fuit leonibus,/ numquam nisi in dispar feris); “has rage blinded you?” (furorne caecus) he asks, and getting no answer to his question supposes that his countrymen’s minds have been stunned by constant battering (mentesque perculsae stupent).

Sometimes Nature provides an opportunity to the enemy at the gates. Sometimes it wants only a person to leave open the Kerkoporta, and Byzantium falls. Sometimes a people fail to heed the lessons of history. Always, history’s wheel turns again in the same place. It has worn a deep rut. Can it ever be raised out of it, to move forward?