How Chaucer Saved Me From Modernism

And Tolkien and Kenneth Clark Too...Plus Growing Up On a Farm

“It happened in that season that one day in Southwark, at The Tabard, as I lay ready to go on pilgrimage and start for Canterbury, most devout at heart, at night there came into that hostelry some nine and twenty in a company of sundry folk happening then to fall in fellowship, and they were pilgrims all that towards Canterbury meant to ride” (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Coghill Modern English translation).

Thank you, Chaucer. And thank you Professor Howard Miller. For as far as ever I strayed from the company of pilgrims some unseen easy yoke, crafted in the workshops of Middle Earth and Middle Ages and embellished on the road to a saint’s shrine, helped rightly order my path away from modernism’s wide way astray.

I was born in 1961. My lifetime saw the advent of the Beatles, sex drugs and rock and roll, the leftward drift of the news media, the onset of cable t.v., the attempted destruction of traditional Catholicism, and that doesn’t even bring us to the late twentieth century. How did I stumble through that chaos and end up a traditional Catholic somehow free (I think and hope) of the clutches of modernism? It was not because I had a strong religious upbringing. I was part of an intact family with married parents and extended family in the vicinity, though no strong practice of religion. But there is likely some connection to growing up on a small dairy farm. The combination of hard work, a regular schedule, and seasonal variation helped form me for the liturgical life. Sadly, outside the confines of the Catholic Land Movement and small-scale homestead farming, the farm life I knew is gone. Today’s farms are just too big, more like factories than a small universe of and for a family. Large agriculture obliterates connection to individual animals and places. Today’s large farm takes no time off. Cows are being milked around the clock in automated fashion by workers who think in terms of shifts, not seeing a job through. barns are akin to virtual platforms, in that they serve a purpose of accommodating action at the expense of anything humane. There are no cozy corners for barn cats in the post-modern barn.

The Navy helped me to understand structures of authority. (I was often on the wrong side of authority’s exercise.) During my stint sailing the seas and before then I’d been an avid reader, promiscuous even, and I gorged on Conan, John Carter of Mars, the denizens of Oz, and histories of WWII. But the one set of books that burrowed the deepest into my mind, heart and soul were those of J.R.R. Tolkien. His tales of the great and small, good evil and undecided, human and non, never let go of me.

I realized that hold on my imagination when, in college (a smaller state school) I took a Medieval lit class and recognized in those stories: “This is where Tolkien got his stuff!” (Of course there is more to it than that but that is the general idea.) Beowulf. The Dream of the Rood. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Canterbury Tales. How blessed I was to sit in classes on Medieval English, History, and Art History. To study William Morris and Gerard Manley Hopkins. And to have a whole course centered on Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation videos. I wrote a paper on Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” and co-authored a paper with a professor on St. Augustine as a father. It’s not as if the corrupt world stopped intruding and corroding with its tentacles of materialism, hedonism, and perversion. However, civilizing and Christianizing anchors were acting on my wayward soul.

In subsequent years I floundered around on the fringes of the academic world and failed to become a rock star or literary icon. But our jealous and loving God would not abandon me. A seismic conversion led me first to Protestantism, then Eastern Orthodoxy, and finally and blessedly to Catholicism and Tradition. I am more an over-educated peasant than a man of culture, but somehow the idea of Christian culture stayed with me over the years. While still Protestant and the “District Youth President” in my denomination’s regional organization, I made a presentation on using classical music, art and literature as a way to build up the faith of the young people. The faces in that room mostly showed puzzlement, and now I understand why—my answer did not fit their programs and scriptural predispositions. That presentation was more for me than for them.

So thank you Professor Tolkien—Middle Earth formed me in ways I could not comprehend. I was interested in the battles but he was teaching me about the eternal truths of the Catholic Faith. Thank you Geoffrey Chaucer, for revealing to me the variety of human experience even on ostensibly holy and pious pilgrimage. Thank you Kenneth Clark, for showing me highlights of the artistic heritage of Christendom. Although I’ve been infected by the anti-culture’s diseases, tradition (often hidden) has proven to be an antidote. And thank God for that.

You can Buy Greg a Coffee at this link.

I have two self-published books available on Amazon; both are in verse: Against the Alchemists, which is a loosely-linked catechism in verse; and, A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s Sacred Signs, a sort of commentary on Guardini’s wonderful little book on many aspects of the liturgy and worship.

Blessed Feast of the Transfiguration to all! May Christ light your way.