King Solomon

FROM AN excellent essay by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira at Tradition in Action:

There are men who correspond to grace and fulfill their vocations dragging whole historical eras with them or there are others whose sins have analogous consequences. They unleash dynamisms, they bring together charges of energy that were dispersed, make them surge forward.

[…]

We can also see this dynamism in the roles God assigns to peoples in History. It is very beautiful to see when a dynamism enters a people and illuminates it from within; henceforth everything that people does takes on a special brilliance. This can be a natural, supernatural or preternatural phenomenon. As a consequence of that dynamism, a people become splendorous.

In the Old Testament, this happened with the Chosen People in the golden phase of its history, that is, during the kingships of David and Solomon. The episode of the Queen of Sheba traveling from afar to see King Solomon was a repercussion of the brilliance of the vocation God had given to the whole people that shone especially in him.

In the history of the New Testament, the French people received a similar grace of predilection at the baptism of Clovis, when France became the first-born daughter of the Church.

The history of a people is in many ways the history of this splendor that dwells in it. At a certain point, however, that splendor begins to diminish, as it did in France after the French Revolution. Either someone reignites that splendor or the dynamism fades and nothing goes forward anymore. These are some samples of the mysterious crescendos and decrescendos of History.

This is a general view of what I consider the deepest layer of reality with an indication of the roles played by the natural, supernatural and preternatural in it.

Liber Custumarum, 1321-25

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