The Terrible Beauty of Transcendence: A Reflection on Easter 1916

Abstract

The Terrible Beauty of Transcendence: A Reflection on Easter 19161 David Walsh The challenge of understanding the 1916 Easter Rising emerges from our own existence in a post-nationalist era. We subscribe to a multicultural version of society in which the state maintains the neutral role of securing the liberty of all who come under its authority. The age of nationalist passions has receded, even if there are still notable flare-ups. We have difficulty understanding the motivations of those who marched out on that Easter Monday morning to launch their assault on the temporarily unguarded bastions of empire. The theatrical and doomed character of the affair, lasting all of six days, only underlines its incomprehensibility. Despite the obligatory commemorations, we are almost as far from understanding it as the denizens of Dublin who awoke to discover that rebels had seized the most prominent buildings of their city. The bemused onlookers hardly considered they were in need of liberation, when they already enjoyed one of the freest regimes in the world. With personal liberties secured and political representation in parliament, there was little to demand politically, even if living conditions could always be improved. The gulf between the liberal and nationalist outlooks could scarcely be greater, and it must be conceded that we too find ourselves unprepared to bridge it. Perhaps the best homage we can render to the men and women of that astonishing outburst is to contemplate the chasm they opened in Irish – and, by extension, modern – political thinking. Our excursion will not follow the familiar narrative of the Rising but will instead undertake the more philosophic search for its meaning. Categories of historiography must be enlarged if we are to reach what eluded both participants and successors in their self-understanding of events. A first step is the admission of the incompatibility of the dominant modes of discourse. The ethos of national self-determination is perennially in tension with the elevation of individual liberty. The second stage is to apply this realisation to the concrete historical circumstances of Irish and British political life. It is only in this way that the anomalies come clearly into view, rather than Studies • volume 106 • number 422 159 The Terrible Beauty of Transcendence: A Reflection on Easter 1916 slide unremarked away. Once we have conceded the deeper tensions it will be possible, third, to suggest a way in which the character of the 1916 Rising provides a way of resolving them. A fourth and final section will then consider the Catholic inspiration as both a means of moderating revolutionary demands and promoting the path of constitutional liberty. The contradiction inherent in the nation state contains the possibility of its self-overcoming. Conflict between liberal and national The first thing that strikes us about the impassioned band of rebels in 1916 is their extensive rejection of the liberal outlook that defined late Edwardian society. These were men and women for whom the private liberty of being left alone was not enough. They sought a greater public purpose and they found it in the cause of national independence. Political liberty had definitively trumped individual liberty in their estimation. Turning their backs on the pursuit of material gain that the modern progressive economy had ushered in, they sought to return to a more primordial community of those who were united by the deeper bonds of language, culture and tradition. The soil and not the market was to be their lodestar. In this way they would find the enlargement of the heart that the cramped horizon of self-satisfaction could never provide. Rejecting the promise of security and comfort, they had turned to the irrevocability of self-sacrifice. From the distance of our own cocoon of comfort this may seem almost mad, but it is not so remote that we cannot sense the nobility that drew them. Action on the public stage supersedes the narrower fulfilments of private life. It is a theme with which we are familiar in contrasting the ancient and modern forms of liberty, the one public and the other private, without fully admitting their irreconcilability. For now, all that needs to be conceded is that in a regime of private liberty...