One of the best—but, sadly, least known—political scientists of the past century, Don Lutz, recognized exactly how important symbols can be to a free and ordered people. Communities across time share “symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order,” Lutz argued in the preface to a Liberty Fund collection of American colonial documents. In his argumentation, Lutz followed a number of critical thinkers, ranging from Eric Voegelin to Russell Kirk to Robert Nisbet. Unfortunately, a people, a person, a government, a bureaucracy, or a corporation can readily pervert such symbols, stripping them of their original meaning while allowing them to raise the consciousness of a society in ways directly contrary to what the symbols originally meant. Such is the power of symbols.

One of the most fascinating symbols of a republic in the western tradition, from the Romans through the Germanic Barbarians to the American founders to the American founders of the Republican Party, is the mighty oak. As noted in the previous essay on the history on the rise of the modern nation state, all republics must exist—by their very nature—as reflections of nature herself. They are, at essence, organic, necessarily experiencing birth, middle age, and death. How easily one might transfer this to the oak, thinking of its own stages, from acorn to prevailing gian, to corrupted and hollowed-out shell. Once, a thing of nearly infinite possibilities, but, ultimately, food for termites.

Yet, as a symbol, the oak itself has remained alive and well for a free and ordered people not just over generations, but over millennia. How much healthier for us and those of us who crave ordered liberty to see our representation in a majestic thing of nature rather than in a person, too often transformed into a god or demigod in our fallen humanity.

To see the importance of the oak, we must turn back to the Romans at the end of the Republic, nostalgically clinging to and idealizing what was.

When her father unjustly declared neutrality in the matter of the Trojans, Venus intervened on behalf of her son, Aeneas, bestowing upon him divine weaponry.

But the goddess Venus,

lustrous among the cloudbanks, bearing her gifts,

approached and when she spotted her son alone,

off in a glade’s recess by the frigid stream,

she hailed him, suddenly there fore him: “Look,

just forged to perfection by all my husband’s kill:

the gifts I promised!  There’s no need now, my son,

to flinch from fighting swaggering Latin ranks

or challenging savage Turnus to a duel!”

With that, Venus reached to embrace her son

And set the brilliant armor down before him

under a nearby oak.

Aeneas takes delight in the goddess’ gifts and the honor of it all

as he runs his eyes across them piece by piece.

He cannot get enough of them, filled with wonder,

turning them over, now with his hands, now his arms,

the terrible crested helmet plumed and shooting fire,

the sword-blade honed to kill, the breastplate, solid bronze,

blood-red and immense, like a dark blue cloud enflamed

by the sun’s rays and gleaming through the heavens the burnished greaves of electrum, smelted gold,

the spear and the shield, the workmanship of the shield,

no words can tell its power . . .

There is the story of Italy,

Rome in all her triumphs. There the fire-god forged them,

well aware of the seers and schooled in the times to come.

When the greatest of Roman republicans, Marcus Tullius Cicero, offered the world the first treatise on the natural law, On the Laws, began with the image of an oak, deeply rooted not just in the soil, but in the poetic imagination itself. “I recognize that grove and the oak tree of the people of Arpinum: I have read about them often in the Marius. If that oak tree survives, this is surely it; it’s certainly old enough,” Atticus begins. To which Quintus famously answers, “It survives, Atticus, and it will always survive: its roots are in the imagination. No farmer’s cultivation can preserve a tree as long as one sown in a poet’s verse.”  Indeed, Quintus continues, this very oak might have been planted by the one god. Certainly, the name of the oak will remain, tied to the sacred spot, long after nature has ravaged it.

In his History of Early Rome, Livy informs us that a consecrated oak sheltered the praetorium, a seat of waiting and contemplation for foreign guests and ambassadors from the Senate. Likewise, Suetonius reminds us that Mars, especially, favored the oak as a tree symbolizing the divine authority.

The Mediterraneans, though, held no monopoly over a mythic understanding of the oak, as the Germanic tribes far to the north considered the tree the symbol of their god of justice, Thor. When the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians met to decide the fate of inherited and common law–which laws to pass on, which laws to end, and which laws to reform–they met as a Witan or AllThing under the oaks.

Christians, knowing the oak to be so utterly rooted in the pagan tradition, knew not whether to love or to hate the tree. According to St. Bede, when St. Augustine of Canterbury called a conference of church leaders in 603, he did so at an oak, knowing the Anglo-Saxon fondness for the tree. There, at what became known as Augustine’s oak or Augustine’s Ak, the evangelist called for unity in proclaiming the gospel. Two generations earlier, Bede records, St. Columba had done something similar, building a monastery among the Celts known as Dearmach, “Field of Oaks.”  Even at the most famous of medieval monasteries, Lindisfarne, Finan built the church altar there not out of traditional stone, but, rather according to the custom of the peoples in that region, an altar “of hewn oak, thatched with reeds.”

When St. Boniface, a century later, encountered a group of Friesians still worshipping the oak of Thor, he—with nothing short of awesome bravado–attacked the tree with his axe. According to the hagiographic legends surrounding Boniface, the oak exploded into four parts moments before the blade touched its bark. So astounded were the pagans at his daring, that St. Boniface seized the moment to begin proclaiming the gospel. Where the ruined oak stood, according to hagiographic myth, an evergreen grew in its place. As it was getting dark and Boniface continued to preach, his followers placed candles all around and upon the evergreen, thus creating the first Christmas tree.

St. Boniface, it turns out, tried this trick one too many times, the last in 754, when some Thor worshippers decided to stick with Thor, beheading the poor Catholic evangelist.

If Boniface undid the oak as a direct representation of a god, he could not undo its importance to justice, as it remained a symbol of the law and of a free people. When the grand Christian King Alfred the Great met with his men in the late 800s to judge the inheritance of the common laws of the Anglo-Saxon people, they, too, met under an oak. Critically, Alfred and his Witan judged the laws. They did not create them, believing such actions illegal. A ruling body can only judge what it has inherited, not create laws out of nothing. Such a power belongs only to God and through his people only across time.

Perhaps, then, St. Boniface’s actions merely rendered under God what was God’s, and unto the community what was the community’s.

The symbol of the oak remained a powerful one in colonial America, especially as the various communities on the eastern seaboard continued their own observance of the traditional common laws and, especially, in their Declaration of Independence. Though not exclusively oak, oaks made fine Liberty Poles and Liberty Trees in the 1760s through 1780s, and newly-freed American communities regularly planted oaks to celebrate their independence from Britain. Pamphleteers, not surprisingly, used the symbol of the acorn and the oak as representative of America’s independence and hardihood.

When Congress rashly passed the democratic Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854—a law that claimed that the enslavement of an entire people could be decided by mere majority vote—angry republican citizens of Michigan formed a third party, the Republican Party, in Jackson, Michigan, under, not surprisingly, a grove of oaks.

Whatever one in the early twenty-first century might think of Jupiter or Thor, the oak remains a mighty symbol of a free people, a people ready to remember and reclaim what is rightfully theirs by the grace of the Creator and the created order. The oak reminds us of strength in the face of nasty and bitter times, returning us to the nourishment of what makes us strong and free, the duty to govern ourselves in a fashion becoming to God and nature and, equally important, to the dignity of the human person. Unlike oppressive governments who rely on cults of personality, the republic relies on the nature of nature and the nature (good and bad) of the human person.

Origins of the Modern State Part I

Origins of the Modern State Part II

Bradley J. Birzer is the president of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes TAC. He holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College and is the author, most recently, of Russell Kirk: American Conservative.