The Wild Tears Fall: December 2010

Friday, December 31, 2010

A Celebration? But it Is Only Primidi, 10 Nivôse CCXIX!

1:35 AM |

Tonight marks the beginning of the year of Our Lord, 2011. Or to some it may only be the eleventh day of Nivôse, and if you do not celebrate the solemnity of the Virgin Mary, you might still celebrate clay, as tomorrow is its festive day in the calendar of the French Republic.

However wrong the thinkers of the 'Enlightenment' may have been, their clarity of their words, the stunning quality of their rhetoric, and the rational consistency of their principles are a thing to be admired. While in today's world we are dominated by dullards void of even catchy phrases who adhere to the unimpressive creed of the PC Church, the people of that powdered, stockinged era at least heard men debate with confident appeals to reason, men who dared to pursue truth, and when they thought they had their quarry, would proclaim the news with virile certainty.

Even though they were murderers, usurpers, irreverent, and hypocritical, I must applaud the French Revolutionaries for having the intellectual honesty to create a new calendar when they ousted God from their nation's government. The godless of today however merely wish to change the initials AD without doing the work of writing their own calendar. One need merely visit this page or this page or even this page to see that there is no separate calendar for CE proponents apart of AD proponents. My pronouncements are of course no great import either to those who revere authority, as I have none, nor to those who don't, but I call this sort of appropriatation laziness.

The argument that our world is global, ergo one should not offend non-Christians by referring to the years as either His or before His time on Earth is disingenuous. I do not worship the god Thor, but the name Thursday does not offend me, anymore than the other days of the week do. I do not believe in a two-faced god called Janus, but I shall not sulk tomorrow when the first page of my calendar confronts me with the name 'January.' The existence of previous forms of belief do not threaten me as a Catholic; why do secularists find them so threatening? Alas, pursuing that line of thought would veer into the mucky domain of the ad hominem, so let us maintain our course.

Perhaps there is something in the argument that a more universal system of dating is needed, a geopolitical one. Fair enough. But the BCE/CE system is not such a new system. It is still based on the Gregorian calendar! While some may deny that this is an attempt to deliberately distance the remnants of Christendom from Christ, the underhandedness of textbook authors proves otherwise.

Experts admit that Era Vulgaris and Anno Domini amount to the same dating system, CE's proponents in education often assert that the BCE/CE system is different from the BC/AD system. I remember cracking open a high school history book to be informed that Christ was born in either 5 BCE or 6 BCE without so much as a footnote explaining that the same discrepancy exists within BC/AD.

With no logic to support such 'scholarly' pettishness, one can only conclude that it is indeed deliberate propaganda. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that one should not attempt to inculcate children against the beliefs of their parents, even if the parents are not Catholic. The atheists and agnostics today (at least the political ones in publishing) seem not to be as liberal-minded as the Angelic Doctor, seeing that they often flout not only parental convictions, but even the conventions of anthropology. See Carol Delaney's (an anthropologist) pronouncement below:

But our calendar, itself, relates to a specific history. The Western calendar, which for all intents and purposes has become the world calendar...dates from the year of Christ's birth. It is--insert current year--AD (Anno Domini, in the year of Our Lord). Some people have begun to use CE (common era) instead of AD as a more "politically correct" form...I find CE a euphemism because the common era still begins with Christ's birth and, thus, conceals the political implications.

(Carol Lowery Delaney, Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology)

Enough wishful thinking, please. These are the facts: the Gregorian calendar was instituted by a man named Gregory, who believed as the head of a Church of millions that a new era began when the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. If one wants a calendar for Era Vulgaris, one will have to make such a calendar and define what he means by 'Vulgaris.' Intellectual honesty entails either swallowing 2011 AD or perhaps cheerily wishing someone the beginning of a pleasant décade 11 tomorrow, though for some reason, I just don't see too many being eager to celebrate the latter occasion.

Happy New Year's Day!
Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku!