SPENGLER: The Prince, the President, and the Providence of the Temple.

The European states were not concocted in the laboratory of liberal political theory. Nor did they arise from mere agglomeration of tribes. Tribal society requires no state. Where it persists, for example in Papua New Guinea, nearly a thousand languages each are spoken by an average of a few thousand people. The European states arose out of the ruins of Rome with a sacred purpose, around monarchies founded in emulation of the biblical kings of Israel: the Merovingians under the guidance of St. Gregory of Tours, the Spanish Visigoths with St. Isidor of Seville, and the kingdom of St. Stephen in Hungary. After the fall of Rome, the Church turned the Germanic, Slavic and Magyar invaders into Christian European kingdoms, as the English historian Father Adrian Hastings showed in his 1996 book The Construction of Nationhood.

As an American I believe that republican government as provided by our Constitution is the best form of government–surely the best for us–but I recognize that the sense of the sacred can be embodied in different ways. Conservatives devote a great deal of thought to Constitutional theory, the plumbing of the American republic; we need to give more thought to what drives the steam through the pipes.

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