In effect, every city or region has what could be called a collective personality or a “common soul”
The reflections above consider the aristocracy from the point of view of the pole of perfection toward which it should tend. But the aristocracy can be considered further as expressing the collective perfection of a city or region.
In effect, every city or region has what could be called a collective personality or a “common soul” that, in a certain sense, is worth more than the sum of its individual personalities. This “common soul” is a synthesis of the perfections toward which its individuals, families, and classes tend. It is the collective product of their march toward perfection.
General Robert E. Lee, General-in-Chief of the Confederate Army
The aristocrat best expresses this “common soul.” By elevating himself to a standard above the community, he becomes its embodiment. For this reason, he has the mission of representing its particular spirit. The superior task of the aristocrat is to conserve that spirit, elevate it, and make it progress. Thus his vocation is turned toward the common good.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII: A Theme Illuminating American Social History (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), American Appendix, p. 195.
Nobility.org Editorial comment: —
While American families move more than most Western peoples, many are still blessed with stability in one locale over many generations.
With this stability comes a bonding with the local people and the land they live on that so to speak “brands” people. They are no longer isolated individuals, not even isolated families, but Cajuns, Bostonians, Charlestonians, Philadelphians, Texans, and so forth.
Like a distilled, but slowly aging Scotch, this regional human type with its characteristics, aspirations, ideals, and particular perfections is gradually formed and passed on from one generation to another, especially among the local aristocracy.
There is love of God in this collective, multi-generational effort to develop a regional human type, for it is specific aspects of God’s Perfection that are being reflected, cultivated, and glorified.
