HERE'S A MOVIE FOR MEL GIBSON AND JOHN RHYS-DAVIES:

A poem for the West (Robert Bové, April 12, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

Kudos to editor Dale Ahlquist and the American Chesterton Society for lovingly producing a new edition of Lepanto, G. K. Chesterton's martial masterpiece of a poem about that seventh day of October 1571, when Don Juan of Austria and his ships destroyed a superior fleet sent by Turkish Sultan Selim II to the Gulf of Lepanto (now Naupaktos), an armada equipped and manned to conquer Venice and Rome. It was the greatest naval engagement of its time, one still studied at Annapolis, as are the gargantuan WW II naval battles at Midway and Okinawa. 1571 is one of those dates, like 1492, that the Muslim world remembers and the West tries to bury in the cloying syrup of tolerationism that has gripped even Spanish voters who should know better, March 11, 2004 being the alarm they are struggling to suppress.

Lepanto contains not only the poem, first published in 1911, but two essays by Chesterton, copious notes demonstrating the remarkable literary and historical grasp the author had, and new essays commenting on the text and contexts including a particularly illuminating piece by historian William Cinfici. Putting the poem and the times it illustrates squarely in our era, Cinfici says:

"Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims have focused upon trying to eliminate the state of Israel and upon fighting around the periphery of the Islamic world, as is currently the case from Chechnya to Kashmir, from Ivory Coast to Indonesia. However, the question is whether we have reached the point that Hilaire Belloc predicted would come when Muslims rise again to challenge the West."

Only a somnambulist would doubt that Belloc, at least on the matter of a resurgent Islam, knew whereof he prophesied. Again, from Cinfici:

"It is noteworthy that the despots who have emerged in recent years, from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, do appeal to a significant portion of the Arab and Islamic world, despite their brutality even to fellow Muslims, because of their casting of the conflict as one between Islam and West. Although overpowering Western forces led by the United States snuffed out Saddam's regime, the irony remains that the Islamic world still has a better chance of re-uniting under one leader than does the Christian West. That is because there is no Christian West."

Mr. Ahlquist also hosts a very fine program about Chesterton, Apostle of Common Sense on EWTN, Saturdays at 5pm.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 9:01 AM