The gown I wore at Cambridge — a thick black robe with gathered, drapey sleeves — now hangs useless at the back of my closet. Sometimes I can feel it when I sift through my coats. What is it doing there, why hang onto it? Sometimes I imagine I’ll wear it again for some ceremonial occasion. I can’t throw it out, though, because once I felt naked without it.

These memories now seem absurd to me. At the time they did not seem absurd. Then, in that place, at that moment, the experience of being without my robe was morbidly serious. I can still put the robe on, but I can’t feel the gravity of it anymore. I can remember that feeling, but it has no meaning for me now. I can explain it to you, but it can’t move you like it did me, then.

It’s an object of the past. And it presents the same problem all of the objects of the past do, even those once imbued with a great deal of meaning: you can’t just slip them on again, at a much later time and place, expecting them to perform the same function they once did. Thus The Name of the Rose finds its narrator Adso returning to the monastery burnt at the conclusion of the greatest episode of his youth, searching for meaning:

“The two outer towers, over the cliff, appeared almost untouched, but all the windows were empty sockets whose slimy tears were rotting vines. Inside, the work of art, destroyed, became confused with the work of nature, and across vast stretches of the kitchen the eye ran to the open heavens through the breach of the upper floors and the roof, fallen like fallen angels…

Along one wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how; it was rotted by water and consumed by termites. In it there were still a few pages. Other remnants I found by rummaging the ruins below. Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disiecta membra of the library a message might reach me…

I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains…At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.”

How do we know the work of nature, the sequence of events as enacted without much purpose or necessity, from the work of human intent? Time blends the two seamlessly. One book survives, another doesn’t. Our vision of the past is made up of the kind of fragments Adso obtains, and others; but they’re all fragments. And they come to us through chance, and they were not created with the intention of speaking to our present day: their auteurs had no idea what our present day would be like, or what it would need to be told, or how it would be able to listen. When you speak to posterity, you whisper in the dark.

Nonetheless there is a tremendous impulse in the face of modern innovations to try to reclaim the objects of the past and use them the way they were then, to affect that time and way of being. As Freddie deBoer writes,

“There’s an even deeper problem, though, for men who explicitly embrace traditional masculinity: there’s nothing traditional about knowing you’re embracing tradition. Whatever their virtues or vices, the manly men from long ago that these bros imagine they are emulating didn’t spend all their time thinking about what it meant to be manly men. Indeed: it’s precisely the unthinking acceptance of the gender hierarchy that gave these men the “confidence” (read: entitlement) that neo-masculinists want to emulate. But you can’t think your way to an unthinking prejudice. [...] They are told that they only have value if the embody an ideal they cannot think their way into.”

You obtain all the trappings of the past — wear the clothing of the past, use the words they used in the past, smoke the cigars your grandad did and do your hair like Fred Astaire — but the objects of the past no longer produce the meanings of the past. They don’t mean to us what they meant to them; we know this in part because they were using the objects, not intentionally using them to perform something. True to form, the response to Freddie’s piece came from dudes who do try to live like that, ones who write with intentionally archaic diction, like so:

“The act of being a man is realized when all such things are put under the rule of his will and are broken with a rod of iron; when he is no longer driven by his lusts as the Greeks would term it, or the flesh as it would be known among Christians, but rather commands them. Such is the dominance which is to be acquired by the power of his will and reason, and the acquisition of such dominance is called among us “virtue,” which is merely Latin for “manliness.””

What Greeks? Which Christians? Who uses these terms in this way, unless they’re trying to speak in the way they imagine the person they want to be would’ve spoken? But the orator would’ve known precisely what Greeks, and which Christians. By now those imagined referents no longer really exist; they’re just symbols. Writing like John Locke isn’t going to put your girlfriend in petticoats, nor revoke her right to vote. The trappings of the past can’t take you there; the moment is gone, and all we have are fragments.

But more than any other hero in all of literature, my heart aches for Adso, because he’s faced with the task of trying to make meaning out of things which no longer contain it. The remainders become almost totemic for him:

“The more I reread this list the more I am convinced it is the result of chance and contains no message. But these incomplete pages have accompanied me through all the life that has been left me to live since then; I have often consulted them like an oracle, and I have almost had the impression that what I have written on these pages, which you will now read, unknown reader, is only a cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic that says and repeats nothing but what those fragments have suggested to me, nor do I know whether thus far I have been speaking of them or if they have spoken through my mouth.”

This is the problem with the reactionary type of conservatism that supposes what we need is a healthy dose of back-then, that we can pick up the things they put down and use them again like they did. This was the caution I intended to convey when I wrote at the top of the medieval pieces that there’s a serious risk of idealizing the medieval era. There is: one of the central dangers is presuming that, by referencing the medieval period, we mean to resume whatever habits its Christians had carried on and presume doing so will revive in us whatever Christian sentiment has been lost to time. I do not believe this. My intention with this medieval stuff is not to suggest we try to reach back through time and adopt their practices, though this is a surprisingly easy theological habit to slip into.

My goal is only to destabilize the myth, usually propagated by reactionary conservatives, that Christianity inherently holds a particular liberal view of property and welfare, and to suggest otherwise is to misrepresent Christian doctrine. To this I pose the medieval Christians as evidence that their story isn’t as common-sensical as they suggest; that’s a historically dependent version of Christianity that could really only arise from a political circumstance that requires that kind of Christian statement. Christian doctrine, in other words, doesn’t demand libertarian property ethics; libertarian property ethics occasion a vein of Christian thought that comports nicely with it.

Which still leaves a lot of work to be done. What the medievals thought of property and Christian doctrine matters to us; it has to. We can look back to it for guidance and inspiration, but it’s too clumsy to try to import it directly and graft it where it no longer makes sense. This is like putting on a fedora and supposing now you’re traditionally masculine; doesn’t work, looks silly. The problem isn’t that conservatives do it, but that it doesn’t work. All this is to say: my medieval interest isn’t a form of reactionary conservatism, it’s an attempt, as Sean McElwee positions it, to shake open an old myth about what sort of practice Christianity simply must produce, by the lights of some contemporary conservatives.

And perhaps you already sensed this. But it is an oddly widespread problem, the tendency to forget that between the time that a certain way of doing things was lost and the time it took you to realize that was a mistake everything changed to such a degree that it isn’t possible to revert back to the way of doing things you now realize was a better one. Rather, an altogether new thing has to be made, which might be inspired by that former thing, but can only have its ghost, and will suffer for trying to find in it a mirror.