We approach, with fear and trembling, the 2025 New Polity Conference. It takes, as its topic, “the people.” The event—God willing and the creek don’t rise—will occasion an explosion of thought concerning ethnos, the nations, and all the distinctions and agonies that “belonging to a people” seems to produce. I found a passage in an old notebook that seemed worth sharing along these lines:
Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, “maintains it is useful for states that brave men believe, though falsely, that they are descended from the gods; for thus the human spirit, cherishing the belief of its divine descent, will both more boldly venture into great enterprises...” (III.4)
Augustine would have the Romans remember the founder of their city Romulus, his murder of his brother Remus, and his rape of the Sabine women. His fellow Romans would like to forget:
Of Romulus, a flattering legend tells us that he was assumed into heaven. But certain Roman historians relate that he was torn in pieces by the senate for his ferocity and that a man, Julius Proculus, was ordered to say that Romulus had appeared to him, and through him commanded the Roman people to worship him as a god; and that in this way the people, who were beginning to resent the action of the senate, were quieted and pacified. (III.15)
It is natural to want to be descended from something good. Powerful too, if you and your friends can look upon each other as Brothers of a Good Beginning—not like those others. But because man comes from man, one can always push a relatively good beginning back one more generation and find—a Bad Beginning. Sure, your grand-father was a hero—but your great-grandfather was a rapist. Sure, you are a hospitable, noble people—but when you arrived here you slaughtered the natives.
Polytheism is convenient in this regard. It allows us to insert divinity—that unequivocally Good Thing—anywhere into the historical account of our own origins, providing us with an uncaused cause and a forefather beyond critique.
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. Ernest Renan, in his little essay, “What is a Nation?” argued:
Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. For historical inquiry throws light on the violent deeds that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most salutary in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.
Like a modern-day Varro, he all but advocates for forgetting: “the essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”
The Scriptures are historical in Renan’s sense: they “pose a threat to nationality.” For if the creation of a nation depends on forgetting, the Scriptures insist on remembering, on continuously accusing our “founding father,” Adam.
The thing the Romans are told to forget about Romulus is that he was only a man. The first thing we remember about Adam is that he was only a man—“from dust.” The Romans undergo a process by which the violence and tyranny of Romulus are generationally forgotten. The Jews undergo a process by which their father’s sin and failing is ritually remembered—and they pass it to the Church. Romans must forget that Romulus was just like them. The New Testament insists that we are just like Adam, that we are “in” Adam; that we inherit his glory and his shame and must be saved from his sin.
The Scriptures, then, are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. They were properly understood by the Nazi ideology as an obstacle to the creation of their own new nation—they are vaguely understood by liberals in the same way. And yet the Scriptures are not exactly “anti-national” so much as they are anti-mythic; not “opposed” to particular, differentiated groupings of people so much as they are opposed to all forgetting.
The Scriptures introduce a division and a choice: one is either of a people who forget or a people who remember; a people whose division into a nation is all glory and a people whose division into a nation is a glory and a shame; a people who obscure the truth and so live in “peace” or a people who reveal the truth, do penance for their sins and the sins of their fathers—and so live in peace.