Rod Dreher's Blog, page 664
September 29, 2015
Lesbians: ‘Teach Our Kid — Or Else’
I’m on the board of my kids’ Christian school, and we clearly and unequivocally both teach and practice that the school can’t do its work without the full support and cooperation of the parents. One of the great advantages of private education is the partnership between parents and schools, and the notion that we would be forced into partnership with people who fundamentally reject our values is antithetical to any meaningful conception of religious freedom. If this controversy goes to court it will present an interesting lesson for those who believe that Christians can leave the culture wars behind and safely retreat to their own enclaves. The radical left will find you. When the goal is destroying a belief system, there is no safe way to freely exercise your faith.
French, who is a lawyer, acknowledges that this will likely be an open-and-shut case for the school, which will surely prevail. I regret that he took the opportunity to take another groundless shot at the Benedict Option. The Ben Op does not require Christians to run from the public square, or stop trying to defend themselves. What the Benedict Option is for is preparing for what happens when your school wins in court, but faces hateful protests from the community, and your children are stigmatized for attending it.
Traditional Christians need to fight for our liberties as long as we have the chance to do so, but even if we manage to preserve them — a doubtful proposition in the long term, if we can’t get any kind of federal protection for our institutions passed — we have to have enough resilience within ourselves, our families, and our communities to withstand the spite of the world, and the costs that will entail, for the sake of our faith.
I’m less worried about what the government might eventually do to our schools as I am about my children and the members of my faith community turning away from the truth because the cost imposed by the culture is too high. I’m more worried that the government and its courts won’t need to try to penalize and shut down religious schools because so few of them will have refused to capitulate.
The Benedict Option is not an either/or, but a both/and. When you’re out of bullets with which to fight the culture war in the courts and in the court of public opinion, what do you do then? I expect to live to see that day. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not going simply to hope for the best.
French asks a good question:
Here’s a question for the secular left — when religious liberty collides with the desires of LGBT citizens, is there any case where religious freedom should prevail?
Well, according to prominent law professor and gay-rights advocate Chai Feldblum, in that well-known 2006 piece by Maggie Gallagher, no, there isn’t:
To Feldblum the emerging conflicts between free exercise of religion and sexual liberty are real: “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.” Most of the time, the need to protect the dignity of gay people will justify burdening religious belief, she argues. But that does not make it right to pretend these burdens do not exist in the first place, or that the religious people the law is burdening don’t matter.
“You have to stop, think, and justify the burden each time,” says Feldblum. She pauses. “Respect doesn’t mean that the religious person should prevail in the right to discriminate–it just means demonstrating a respectful awareness of the religious position.”
Feldblum believes this sincerely and with passion, and clearly (as she reminds me) against the vast majority of opinion of her own community. And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”
Look, if you’re going to comment on this post, keep in mind that I’m not likely to post any comments saying, “Shame on this Christian bigot school.” Stick to the Ben Op point, or to the legal issues. I don’t care which side you come down on, but I’m not going to host another boring, interminable argument over whether or not the Christians are being horrible, no-good haters. The question is, to what extent are liberals willing to tolerate religious dissenters in our midst. Tolerance only means something when you are in the presence of something you find personally offensive.
Scandal in Moscow
The last thing I read about the controversial Reformed pastor Doug Wilson, he was making a case for why Christian women are prettier than non-believing females. Excerpt from that:
Unbelieving women either compete for the attention of men through outlandish messages that communicate some variation of “easy lay,” or in the grip of resentment they give up the endeavor entirely, which is how we get lumberjack dykes. The former is an avid reader of Cosmopolitan and thinks she knows 15K ways to please a man in bed. The latter is just plain surly about the fact that there even are any men.
So there’s that. It’s apparently a rhetorical tic among the Moscow, Idaho, bunch; longtime readers will recall a younger pastor associated with Wilson’s church claiming that Protestants who convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy are the spiritual equivalent of perverts who masturbate to pornography. He calls himself “one of those grenade launching Protestants.” Um, yeah.
This morning, though, a reader brings to my attention a situation in the Moscow circle that is far worse than any culture-war sniping and snarking.
Earlier this month, a convicted sex offender named Stephen Sitler was prohibited by a judge from having contact with his infant son without a chaperone other than his wife present — this, after he was discovered being sexually stimulated by such contact. Sitler was convicted in 2005 of child molestation; he molested several children in a family
Sitler eventually pled guilty to only one count of lewd conduct with a child under 16. Despite allegations that Sitler had molested other children, none of the other families would cooperate with investigators.
Doug Wilson wrote to the judge asking for leniency, and expressing his hope that Sitler could one day be rehabilitated and become a productive member of society. Sitler was sentenced to life in prison, but released on probabation in 2007 after 20 months behind bars. Six weeks later, he was caught in an act of voyeurism, and confessed to masturbating while peering into a neighbor’s window. In 2010, an elder at Doug Wilson’s church and his family set up a meeting between Katie Travis, a young woman at New St. Andrews college in Moscow, and Sitler; Sitler describes it all on the website announcing his and Katie’s 2011 wedding.
Doug Wilson married them in his church in 2011 — this, knowing that Sitler was a pedophile.
The Sitlers had a baby boy, and as of this month, Steven Sitler is not allowed to be with his son because a court has reason to believe that he is sexually stimulated by the presence of the baby. You can well imagine the ruckus this has caused in and around the Christ Church (Doug Wilson’s church) community. Wilson defends his actions forcefully in this September 5 “open letter” on his blog. Excerpt:
Seventh, in the latest round of accusations, much has been made of the fact that Christ Church approved of Steven’s wedding to Katie through the fact that I officiated at the wedding. First, it should be noted that in our community, weddings are not arranged or determined by the church. Katie and her family had all the facts when she agreed to marry Steven, which was important, but the decision to marry was the couple’s decision, not ours. That said, I officiated at the wedding and was glad to do so. While we do not believe that marriage is an automatic “fix” for the temptations to molest children, we agree with Judge Stegner who approved the wedding and said that ‘an age-appropriate relationship with a member of the opposite sex from Mr. Sitler is one of the best things that can happen to him and to society” (emphasis added). Moreover, if everything is on the table, we do not believe the church has the authority to prohibit or “not allow” a lawful marriage.
Really? The church has no authority to prohibit a lawful marriage? I suppose same-sex couples in Idaho can show up at Christ Church and expect Pastor Wilson to marry them, then. This, and the claim that the church can’t withhold marriage from anybody, as long as both parties know what they’re getting into, is a pretty shameless example of passing the buck for a disaster. Wilson subsequently praised himself for the way he’s conducted himself in this matter, saying that persecution is a sign of his righteousness, and sneering that his wife celebrated the criticism coming their way by buying him a bottle of single-malt Scotch. He also said those complaining about him are “bitter” and are the kind of nasty people who would turn sinners away from church. But that’s misdirection. It doesn’t seem to me that the objection is that Wilson welcomes a child molester into his congregation (as long as he tells the congregation what’s going on), but that he blessed the courtship and marriage of a convicted pedophile to a young woman in his church, knowing that they intended to have children.
The state is investigating whether or not the baby boy born to the pedophile and the woman that Wilson married has been molested by his father … and Doug Wilson thinks this is a matter to be laughed at, while raising a glass of Scotch to spite the critics? That is insane.
This is not the first time this has happened in the Wilson circle. Homeschoolers Anonymous has an account of the case of Jamin Wight, a convicted child molester who began a sexual affair with a 13-year-old girl when he was 23. Libby Anne at Patheos has more. At the time of the abuse, the Greenfield family (Natalie Rose Greenfield was the victim; she has come out as Wight’s victim) were members of Wilson’s church, and Wight was a parishioner at affiliated Trinity Reformed, pastored by Peter Leithart. In 2005, after it all came to light, Wilson wrote to Gary Greenfield, the father of the abused girl, saying his irresponsible conduct in the situation (the Greenfields allowed Wight to live in their house, even after he said he was interested in courting their underage daughter) left the Christ Church elders “just as distressed” as they were by Wight’s abuse of the girl. You can read the entire letter here, in the original. Leithart and Wilson appeared in court alongside Wight at his sentencing; the victim of Wight’s crime was unaccompanied by either pastor.
On September 15, Peter Leithart, who was the pastor of Jamin Wright at the time, publicly apologized to the abuse victim and her family for his pastoral failures during that crisis. He said, in part:
It is clear now that I made major errors of judgment. Fundamentally, I misjudged Jamin, badly. I thought he was a godly young man who had fallen into sin. That was wrong. In the course of trying to pastor Jamin through other crises in his life, I came to realize that he is deceptive and highly manipulative, and that I allowed him to manipulate me. A number of the things I said about Jamin to the congregation and court at the time his abuse was uncovered were spun in Jamin’s favor; I am ashamed to realize that I used Jamin’s talking points. Though I never doubted that Jamin was guilty, I trusted his account of the circumstances more readily and longer than I should have, and conversely I disbelieved the victim’s parents (to the best of my recollection, I had no direct contact with the victim, who was a member of Christ Church). I should have seen through Jamin, and didn’t.
As a result, I didn’t appreciate how much damage Jamin did and I was naive about the effect that the abuse had on the victim’s family. I recently asked her and her parents to forgive my pastoral failures, which they have done.
That was the Christian thing to do. But I guess that means no celebratory Scotch for Leithart.
Nine days ago, Natalie Rose Greenfield posted an image of a letter on Christ Church stationery that Doug Wilson wrote to the case officer in 2005, saying that yes, Jamin Wight sinned, but the Greenfields were foolish parents. Natalie Rose Greenfield comments:
I feel the need to rehash this particular line that Doug typed: “I do not believe that this in any way paints Jamin as a sexual predator.” Not a sexual predator? Forgive me if I’m beating a dead horse or being too loud about an uncomfortable topic, but Jamin is most certainly a sexual predator. Let me describe a scene to you, one scene of many, many more just like it. [Emphasis in the original — RD]
All of this gets to me in part because of my well-known history of dealing with the sexual abuse of children and minors within the Roman Catholic Church. Very little makes me angrier than seeing church authorities (and congregations) mistreat victims and then try to blame others for their failures. This one is particularly troubling to me, personally, because despite Doug Wilson’s (and Toby Sumpter’s) reputation for “grenade-throwing,” their Moscow, Idaho, community was on my short list of places I was considering profiling as a Reformed example of the Benedict Option. The way that community handled the sexual abuse of minors within it, and the way Doug Wilson, who knowingly married a young woman to a convicted pedophile, is proudly trashing his critics, and refusing to admit error in any respect, is deeply discouraging, to put it in the mildest possible terms.
I don’t think Ben Op communities are any more susceptible to harboring child molesters than any community, secular or otherwise. We know all too well that communities of all kinds have a tendency to scapegoat those that threaten its beliefs about itself — and sexual predators take advantage of that trust. You find it in Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, Protestant churches, public schools, Scout troops, all over. Still, this Moscow mess is a very good reminder that the problem of authority and accountability is one that has to be forthrightly addressed and attended to by any Benedict Option community, whether its an intentional community, a school, a church, or what have you.
How did anybody in Christ Church think it was a good idea to encourage and enable a young woman in their community to marry a convicted pedophile? I cannot comprehend it. And I cannot comprehend the apparent unwillingness of the congregation to hold themselves and their pastor accountable for this catastrophe that has befallen the Sitler wife and child. Maybe someone from within that community can explain it in the comments section of this blog. From the outside, it does not testify to the integrity and spiritual health of that community. I could be wrong.
Beauty and Reality
Last week at Villanova, I sat in on an aesthetics class taught by James Matthew Wilson. I’ve posted his poetry on this site before (here and here). I found the class thrilling because I have no training in how to think formally about beauty, and these ideas, as elementary as they surely were, struck me as a series of small eureka moments (fitting, as the class is called “Epiphanies of Beauty”).
James sent me home with a photocopy of an essay he published in the Winter 2015 issue of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (that issue is not available online, but you can access the essay on this site). Its title is “John Paul II’s Letter to Artists and the Force of Beauty.” I read it on the plane home, and it sparked all kinds of thoughts. Mostly, though, it helped me to understand why the Divine Comedy, as well as the Chartres cathedral, were for me doorways leading to God. I suppose I ended the essay with more questions than answers, but fruitful questions, for sure. This post is going to reflect the fragmented nature of this amateur’s reading of the paper.
Early in the paper, James calls the imaginative arts “a preamble to metaphysics. We imagine what we cannot yet know by reason or believe by faith, and this act of sympathy and imagination can prepare the soil of our soul for more substantial realities.” More:
If the significance of the artwork is strictly that of the made thing expressive of its maker, it requires few if any a priori beliefs to be in place: only our natural capacity for sympathy and an openness to pretending. And yet, in the case of such novelists, we leave off with a question that the works by their nature cannot answer. We may be moved in sympathy to think of the world through the mind of the Christian character, but the exciting question left suspended is “Are we right to think thus?” or “Is it true?”
A talented young poet named Therese Couture explores the lead up to, and lingering in, such questions in a recent poem published in the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things. Describing historic Catholic churches, their architecture and art all in place but largely neglected of the purpose for which they were built, namely, worship, Couture inquires whether they might still signify for a secular viewer what they did for those who once prayed in them. She describes an artist “sketching in a book” the “arches and the stained glass trill/ of light across the trodden, ancient floor.” She speculates that the blessing of this artist may lie “in some firm intuition” that
awakes the urge to reinhabit, make anew
or otherwise inquire into suspicion
of loveliness and that it might be true
Those lines describe exactly the feeling that struck me when I stood in Chartres for the first time, a feeling that I had not been able to fully articulate. I wondered if the imaginative world that created this cathedral as an icon of the divine might be true — that is, was I looking at a work of art that told me something about the nature of God, a God in whom I wasn’t sure I believed. And it also made me desire to live within that world, to be able to call that cathedral my own in some way. To be consumed by it. Nothing like that had ever happened to me.
What would it mean to say that beauty is also true? James Matthew Wilson argues that
we must first understand beauty as having a distinct and primary reality apart from art and the artists, and that we have to understand it as real per se, as a transcendental property of being standing alongside truth and goodness. Unless we first believe in beauty as a reality in the world, we cannot rightly hope for much to come of the beauty that might be found in the fine arts.
That’s a strong claim to modern sensibilities. James gets this, and says that since Kant, many of us, if we think about beauty at all, think of it solely as a matter of taste. In Kant, and after Kant, when we describe an object as “beautiful,” we are really describing the way we feel about the object, not a property that inheres in the object itself. Writes James, “The persuasiveness of Kant’s position therefore makes it less likely for us to feel obliged by a fact of beauty in the way we may suppose ourselves to feel obliged by facts of truth.”
(In this way, it seems to me, Kantian aesthetics prepare the mind for emotivism — the idea that statements about moral truths are only statements about how the individual feels, not what is.)
In contrast to this, there is the “Christian-Platonist” concept of beauty, in which individual things “are beautiful only insofar as they participate in Beauty itself, which subsists independently, over and above them.
The human intellect, with its power of abstraction, may perceive a multitude of individual instances of beauty, ordering them from least to greatest. In the process, it will come to discern that quality they all have in common, the beautiful, and will thus ascend rung by rung up a ladder from physical beauty to moral beauty to intellectual beauty and on to eternal and unqualified beauty. Since ancient times, Christians have specifically identified this assent to beauty as one with the assent to God, declaring Beauty Itself to be one of the divine names.
Beauty, then, is a pathway to God. Read on:
As I have framed it, John Paul’s summons of artists to evangelize culture through the manifestation of art that is beautiful can only be fruitful if we can establish three things. First, that beauty refers to a real property of being rather than a description of a subjective judgment of “taste.” Second, that the encounter with something beautiful is indeed an encounter with a particular participation in Beauty Itself and, therefore, opens up a path for the perceiving intellect to approach God. And, third, that more than simply allowing sympathy or communication between one human mind and another, artworks by their nature do in fact participate in the Beautiful. In brief, it must be the case that beauty is real, is a divine name, and can be manifest in artworks. The first may seem counterintuitive to the modern mind. The second will seem familiar insofar as most persons do believe that encounters with beauty in some way draw us out of ourselves in a vaguely edifying manner; but we are unused to conceiving that as a spiritual journey with a real and definite destination rather than as a momentary elevation. The third will chiefly raise objections among modern artists, who often do not think of their making as a manifestation of the beautiful, but in terms of the expressivity I have already described.
It’s too much for me to summarize JMW’s argument here; read the whole paper. This passage was really helpful to me:
Aquinas appropriately emphasizes that beauty is distinct from goodness precisely because, where goodness leads us to the pleasure of possession, “beautiful things are those which please when seen.” The measurement of arithmetic concludes primarily in a true answer; but it and other measures may also be such that, when we see the way in which they fit together, we are pleased. Beauty’s root in the form is no understatement: we encounter beauty precisely when we see the form of a thing and how it fits within a larger harmony and order comprising other things. Beauty therefore designates an aspect of reality. It is ontological, and no less so because part of its reality may be its relation to the perception of a knowing subject.
A short space later in the Summa, again almost incidentally, Aquinas defines what it is we are pleased with when we encounter a beautiful thing. He writes, “Beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness, or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.” These terms recur in his work, but they never receive further explanation. What I have argued above about proportion in fact explains them: there is the internal proportion of integrity, the more wide-ranging, inter-entitative, set of proportions called harmony or consonance, and there is clarity, the proportion of a thing to the light of the mind that creates it and to the light of the mind that perceives its form. A thing is beautiful insofar as it meets these three conditions.
“Bright color” does not mean “shines like a candy-apple red fire engine.” It refers to the capacity of a thing to reveal it’s “unique what-ness” (JMW). JMW quotes Umberto Eco as defining clarity, in Aquinas, as “the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing of the object.” Eco adds: “The rationality that belongs to every form is the ‘light’ which manifests itself to aesthetic seeing.”
So, if I’m reading this correctly, a beautiful object is one that is internally harmonious in its proportions, is harmonious with the world beyond itself (which implies does what it is supposed to do with respect to its ends), and expresses its own ontological reality with exceptional force. This is why Dante’s Paradiso is a realm of pure light within forms. This is the poet’s way of signaling to us that in Paradise, everything appears to be exactly what it is; nothing is veiled. And more, from JMW’s paper:
A work of art’s integrity is its internal wholeness, and its proportion is its fitting relation to a potentially vast order of things part of and beyond itself. Clarity marks the proportion of a thing to our intellect, as Eco appreciates, but it also draws our intellect into luminous relation with the whole intelligible order of reality that proceeds from Beauty Itself. The work of art, in its beauty, therefore stands between the perceiving and the creative intellects, drawing the former toward the latter. We are oriented by beauty into the whole harmony of the cosmos; the individual artwork draws us toward a vision of the truth, goodness, and order of things. These are obviously bold claims, but they would seem to follow logically from the idea of claritas as a condition of beauty. The medieval thinkers who so frequently spoke of light in regard to beauty, but also in regard to things in general, were searching for a language to capture the way in which everything we encounter strikes us with its intelligibility. As Viladesau argues, “‘light’ or ‘luminocity’ for medieval thought symbolizes the nature of being an ‘intelligible’ and–at its higher levels–self-conscious.” A thing may be mysterious, but it is never wholly alien to our thought: we can understand it to the extent that we may understand it, as it were, and we can also be conscious, we can know the degree of our understanding. When we encounter the proportions of a form, we sense that this intelligibility is no fluke or ubiquitous type of chance, but a revelation of light and order.
I marked the copy of JMW’s paper up on the plane, and my notes for the above paragraph mark the epiphany in which I understood the Commedia as a ladder of ascent to the experience of God. My notes quote the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In the Commedia, the pilgrim Dante cannot ascend to the realms in which he can look directly upon the light of God until he purifies his heart. The more pure his heart becomes, the more light he is able to see. Isn’t this how it is with us? That the impurity of our heart darkens our intellects, and occludes our perception of the Real. The Commedia, then, is a work of unparalleled poetic beauty that teaches the reader that beauty prepares us for truth, and in turn, conforming our souls to that truth, we attain a measure of goodness, which makes it possible for us to see more deeply into beauty, which reveals the nature of things. And so on, over and over, as we ascend to God.
JMW writes:
In the claritas of a beautiful thing we mark its intelligibility and thus its signifying position between two minds. As John Paul indicates, in a work of art, we often encounter a revelation of the being of the maker along with the revelation of the being of the artwork itself. In natural objects we experience a similar revelation, most often experienced as the illumination of a thing in light of its position within a larger order of beings: not just the waterfall gushing across the rocky slope and framed with a staggered appointment of fir trees but also those things perceived as part of the whole working order of the universe. We do not feel that we need to learn a different mental language other than that with which we read the signification of a desert plain or a fish’s anatomy in order “to read” the waterfall. The clarity of the beautiful reveals this order to us, not in the formulae of truth, or in the moving language of desire that teaches us about goods, but in the mute but intensely signifying manifestation of form.
We do not need to argue in quite the same way as we have for the ontological reality of beauty that the illumination of the order of things, of their formal intelligibility, is a sign of their participation in the God of Being and Beauty. Philosophers since Kant have returned again and again to the question “What are the conditions of possibility for knowledge? What has to be in place, as it were, in a knowing subject for that subject to know in the first place?” Bernard Lonergan provides a provocative argument that is apposite to the account of claritas I have given. We know we know things, but it would seem that we can only know things if they are intelligible, in other words, capable of being known. That knowability is not something that things give to themselves or that we could give to them, since the potency to be known must be prior to our actual knowing. Intelligibility must therefore be given to things with their being. Viladesau summarizes this argument thus: “If the real is completely intelligible, then God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.” Viladesau extends this argument to the reality of beauty: “The condition of possibility for the experience of beauty [which we all can have]–in the sense of the joyous affirmation of the ‘form’ or desirable intelligibility of existence, even in its finite limitation–is the implicit and unavoidable coaffirmation of ultimate Beauty.”
I would elaborate this claim as follows. As soon as we acknowledge the bare presence of proportion in things, and proceed to discern them as beautiful, we will be led by our own intellects, from proportion to proportion, form to form, and on to the source of their intelligible light. This experience of an ascent from the finite to the infinite, from a beautiful thing to Beauty itself, absolutely speaking, merely retraces a path from the appearance of things to the substance, the reality beneath, that makes them possible in the first place. Again, that beautiful things participate in Beauty Itself is not a theory that needs to be separately demonstrated, for it is a reality that we all already experience through the natural proceedings of the sense and intellect from the effects of beauty they already know toward the causes that make them to signify with such irreducible power. While the theory of participation is distinct from the ontological theory of beauty, it follows from it. The experience of beauty taken as real will lead us upward of its own accord from beautiful things to Beauty Itself.
This is the journey Dante the pilgrim — and with him, the reader — makes in the Divine Comedy.
I will quote one more passage from JMW’s paper, because it struck me with great force as being true to my own experience:
But, beauty’s silence is not so gentle; we think it so only when we follow Kant and mistake beauty for a subjective judgment or understand the arts only as a communication of merely the sensibilities of their makers and not the creative intellect of the divine. Rather, beauty’s silence is that of the form of beings in their unmediated, nondiscursive reality. It thus may enter our minds before we have become aware of it, it may dominate us, brooking no resistance. It may even shape our appetite and reason, determining in advance what we can recognize as good or acknowledge as true, as modern doctrines of “sensibility” and Plato’s ancient quibbles about poetry testify. We can, after all, make an error in a math problem, but the judgment of the beautiful and the ugly can be instantaneous and irrevocable–even if it also develops and deepens gradually as the proportions of a thing unfold before our intellects. One can soften truth claims with qualifications and ethical judgments by couching them as kind reminders and positive enticements. But when a work of art is set before us to declare the lordship of God, as do, for instance, the churches of the high Middle Ages, there can be no such hesitation: as soon as we perceive a proportion as beautiful, it takes hold of us as much as we do of it.
Of course, the millions of tourists who visit Notre Dame or Chartres may beg to differ. They would tell us that they come for the beauty of the architecture, not for the Gospel in stone it claims to preach. But I can only reply, “It is the force of that Gospel already working within you. You cannot deny the presence of beauty; you sense its orderliness calling you to an order beyond itself but of which it is a part.” The only moment that allows one to resist that call comes not in denying that beautiful things participate in Beauty, but in the Kantian denial of the reality of beauty as a property of the object itself. The great irony of Kant’s aesthetic theory, and the romantic theory of imagination, is that it was intended to open up a place for spiritual freedom, where the beautiful can appear, but it did so only at the cost of dismissing beauty’s ontological status. This has been the great consolation Kant offers the modern age: he allows us to devalue our experience of the real by treating it as being of as little worth as we consider ourselves to be. “Beauty is just my taste, and what am I?” we ask. The imagination can unveil sublime and stirring plains, in the romantic view, but they are just as quickly swept aside as a higher “kind of dreaming.” My argument has shown that there is indeed a subjective element in the conditions of beauty insofar as proportions are always relational, and one proportion of claritas is to a perceiving subject. But, the other proportion is to that intelligence whose knowledge is constitutive of reality as such.
On walking out of the Chartres cathedral at age 17, I knew that I had seen something beautiful, and that what I had seen was not simply pleasing to my eye, but stood for some Ultimate Mystery that called to me.
In reading the Commedia, the beauty of Dante’s verse revealed to me truths about human nature, and my own particular nature. It also revealed to me what goodness looked like, and how through humility and repentance one makes room for the action of divinity to purify one’s heart, and, in turn, increases one’s capacity to perceive beauty — which leads the rightly-guided soul to deeper and higher levels of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, all of which are properties of God, who is Reality Itself.
I’m going to have to think about this for a while. I have pondered a lot the moral, psychological, and spiritual changes that the Commedia worked in me, but I have not thought nearly enough about the transformative role the encounter with Beauty in the poem. This is because I lack the conceptual vocabulary in which to think systematically about beauty. Read the entire James Matthew Wilson paper; if you know how to think philosophically and aesthetically, it will mean more to you than it does me. I’m grateful for even my cursory grasp of these ideas, and envious, in a good way, of the Villanova undergraduates who are in his Epiphanies of Beauty class this fall.
One final thought: Can an object be said to possess the quality of Beauty if there is no one around to observe it? Yes, if Beauty is an ontological property, that must be true. But Beauty cannot be perceived except by a conscious observer — and even then, the observer may be so blinded that he cannot fully perceive the beauty around him. I think one of the most important points in JMW’s paper is that to believe that Beauty is only in the eye of the beholder — that is, to affirm that beauty is merely a reflection of an individual’s preferences — is to cut oneself off from participation in the reality of God, of the infinite, of the really real. I could be wrong, but intuitively, it seems to me that the concept of Beauty could not exist in a universe without consciousness.
This stuff really makes me stretch, and use muscles I’ve never exercised.
September 28, 2015
Roscoe
This is our little dog Roscoe. Seven or eight years ago, he wandered up to our kids on a Dallas playground. He was an older puppy, and had been abused. Julie and the kids brought him home for the weekend, just long enough to stay until we could take him to the pound. He is the best dog in the world. That is all.
‘One More Thing, And I’m Gone’
I often hear from people who are deeply dissatisfied with their church — either their particular congregation, or the broader communion. They’ll say something like, “One more thing, and I’m outta here.” I know this one person who has been saying, “one more thing” for years … but that “one more thing” never comes.
Let me survey you readers who are dissatisfied with your current church: what is the “one more thing” for you? That is, what is the bright red line that, if crossed, will make you leave for another parish, another communion, or even another religion (or leave religion altogether)?
I’m not eager to stir up arguments among the readership. I’m simply curious as to where people draw those lines, and why. If you answer, feel free to keep yourself anonymous. Please let us know if you’re talking about leaving your current congregation, or something broader. I’m not going to post comments criticizing in any but the gentlest way (if that) others’ posts. I want people to be as honest as they want to be without having to worry about being jumped on by defenders of the faith.
Or defenders of the faithless, because I’m interested also in hearing from atheists or agnostics who have felt the pull of religious belief, but who are waiting for “one more thing” to cross the line.
Open thread. Go.
‘To Hell With Congressmen’
Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com
Here’s a very enjoyable interview in the Jesuit magazine America with R.R. Reno, editor of First Things. Below, my favorite parts.On Pope Francis skipping a Congressional lunch:
As for passing on lunch with the congressmen and going to the homeless shelter, all I can say is good for him. You know, I don’t know if you can print it, but to hell with congressmen. I think one of his most powerful witnesses is his refusal to let the hierarchies of the world determine his ministry and the spiritual attention he gives to others. I think that’s a very powerful witness and one that I’m very grateful for.
On Francis as a symbol of Catholic postconciliar fragmentation:
He’s really the first pope who came of age in the era of and immediately after the Second Vatican Council. The church since the Council has had a fragmented, disordered language and mind. He is not a synthetic, systematic thinker. Instead, he’s a poet of the faith, I would say, rather than a philosopher of the faith. So he often manifests this kind of fragmentation and lack of coherence in the life of the church. In that sense, the weakness is that he’s a mirror of the church in its own fragmented mind in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
More:
As editor of an ecumenical journal founded by the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, a leading theological spokesman for the Religious Right, where do you find yourself most in harmony with Pope Francis?
Clearly, the primacy of our life in Christ over all things resonates. Secondly, I share with Pope Francis a dissatisfaction with the power elite of the contemporary West, which I think is ideologically oriented toward perpetuating its own power even though it calls itself progressive. Most American liberals think the pope is criticizing conservatism, but they are—along with their European counterparts—in fact the dominant outlook in the rich world. So when the pope is criticizing the global system, he’s criticizing the system they run. It’s not a system being run by evangelical pastors in Texas. It’s a system being run by Ivy League graduates in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington—and they are not readers of “First Things.”
As a political conservative, where do you find yourself most in tension with Francis?
I think Francis accepts uncritically the social justice movement in the Catholic Church, which, although often well-intentioned, adopts the intellectual and moral framework of secular progressivism—which is, I think, anti-metaphysical and easily manipulated by the powerful to serve their own ends. Multiculturalism is a technology for managing and manipulating people. I find the same outlook has a therapeutic view of the human condition. So I’m frustrated by Pope Francis’ use of that social justice vocabulary, which I think is easily co-opted by the rich secular world.
Let me put it this way: To make a claim about Natural Law is the most heretical thing you can do at a contemporary secular university, in the technocracy of today. I wish this papacy was more aware of the true nature of what we’re up against in the 21st century. As a conservative, I’m not opposed to the pope’s criticisms of global capitalism. It strikes me that global capitalism doesn’t need to be defended because it’s the only system we have. So criticizing it and trying to humanize it should be the goal of any morally serious person today, whether they’re conservative or liberal. We just disagree in debate about how best to humanize it.
Good interview. Read the whole thing.
I find that Reno’s “to hell with Congressmen” resonates with me, not because I dislike Congressmen (I do not), but because so much of what is wrong with American Christianity is our infatuation with power in this world. To the extent that Pope Francis shows us the power of antipolitical politics, he is an icon for all of us Christians.
Is the Pope a Kim Davis Backer?
Pope Francis always makes news in his press conferences. Reuters:
On the flight back to Rome, he was asked if he supported individuals, including government officials, who refuse to abide by some laws, such as issuing marriage licenses to gays.
“Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right,” Francis said.
Earlier this month a county official in the state of Kentucky, Kim Davis, went to jail because she refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following a Supreme Court decision to make homosexual marriage legal.
Davis’s case has taken on national significance in the 2016 presidential campaign, with one Republican contender, Mike Huckabee, holding rallies in favor of Davis, a Apostolic Christian, who has since joined the Republican party.
“I can’t have in mind all cases that can exist about conscientious objection but, yes, I can say that conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right,” he said, speaking in Italian.
“And if someone does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right,” he added.
Francis said conscientious objection had to be respected in legal structures. “Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying: ‘This right has merit, this one does not.'”
I hope to read a full transcript of his remarks here. He defends conscientious objection in principle, but concedes that he “can’t have in mind all cases that exist about conscientious objection.” As you know, I am very much not a supporter of Kim Davis’s, but I can agree with the Pope here, given how general his statement is. I am sure it’s going to be pulled out of context to claim Francis for the Kim Davis side. And if he had the particulars of this case explained to him, he might well back Davis.
My point simply is that it’s a real stretch to say “Pope Francis backs Kim Davis” based on his general comments in the press conference, as reported by Reuters, especially given his caveat about particulars. It is quite possible — I would say desirable — to provide for conscientious objection for many American dissenters, while still believing that government employees and elected officials have a many fewer grounds for standing on conscientious objector status, and still being allowed to keep their jobs. This would satisfy Francis’s belief that conscientious objection should be respected in legal structures, but would nuance it to fit the quotidian practicalities of governing a pluralistic country.
Once we have a transcript of Francis’s remarks, I’ll update this post if facts warrant.
UPDATE: Via Denny Burk, here are the full remarks of Pope Francis on the issue:
Terry Moran, ABC News:
Holy Father, thank you, thank you very much and thank you to the Vatican staff as well. Holy Father, you visited the Little Sisters of the Poor and we were told that you wanted to show your support for them and their case in the courts. And, Holy Father, do you also support those individuals, including government officials, who say they cannot in good conscience, their own personal conscience, abide by some laws or discharge their duties as government officials, for example in issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples. Do you support those kinds of claims of religious liberty?
Pope Francis:
I can’t have in mind all cases that can exist about conscience objection. But, yes, I can say the conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right.Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying ‘this right that has merit, this one does not.’ It (conscientious objection) is a human right. It always moved me when I read, and I read it many times, when I read the “Chanson de Roland” when the people were all in line and before them was the baptismal font and they had to choose between the baptismal font or the sword. They had to choose. They weren’t permitted conscientious objection. It is a right and if we want to make peace we have to respect all rights.
Terry Moran, ABC News:
Would that include government officials as well?
Pope Francis:
It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right. It is a human right.
Burk adds, with appropriate caution:
Pope Francis is the progressive’s dream Pope. But the Pope’s liberal admirers are not going to like this. My hunch is that Pope Francis did not know the particular background to the reporter’s question. I wonder if he would have answered in the same way if he had known? As it is, however, the Pope has landed on the side of Kim Davis. And that’s really something.
It is. Burk is right not to claim that Francis would have supported Davis fully, but it is hard to deny that the pope would have supported some compromise that would have allowed Davis to keep her job while still making it possible for gay couples to exercise their right to obtain a marriage license. Not, of course, that Francis would support gay marriage, but notice that Francis said, “if we want to make peace we have to respect all rights.” Do we want to keep the peace in this time of cultural transition? Francis does. We could all learn from him. Kim Davis and her supporters could — but so too could Davis’s progressive opponents.
Christian Conservatives’ Phantom Army
Did you see the Values Voter Summit straw poll results from the weekend? From The Hill:
Sen. Ted Cruz won the Values Voter Summit straw poll for the third year in a row on Saturday, a strong showing of support from evangelical voters for his 2016 presidential bid.
The firebrand Texas senator won a whopping 35 percent in the poll of summit-goers, ahead of runner-up Ben Carson’s 18 percent. That margin is significantly wider than last year, where he edged out Carson by just 5 percentage points.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Ark.) took third with 14 percent, followed by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) with 13 percent. Real estate magnate Donald Trump finished a distant fifth with 5 percent.
Bernie Sanders received more votes than either Chris Christie or Lindsey Graham. Heh.
Here’s the thing that my fellow conservative Christians need to understand: we are a lot weaker within the GOP than many of us think. The Indiana RFRA battle earlier this year was a watershed. It marked the first time the business community stood up and took sides on a contentious culture war issue — and the corporate lobby came down resolutely on the side of gay rights. You will remember too that as soon as Wal-mart cleared its pro-LGBT throat, the Republican governor of Arkansas backed away from that state’s RFRA. The fact is, the business lobby is powerful within Republican politics, because it is the source of so much money. If it comes down to standing with conservative Evangelicals or business leaders, the GOP knows on which side its bottom-line bread is buttered.
There will be no possible legislative protections for religious liberty going forward if the business community opposes them. You can go gaga for Ted Cruz, but even a President Cruz wouldn’t be able to deliver squat without business’s support. The LGBT lobby owns the Democratic Party, and now, because it has won over the business lobby, it holds the high ground in the Republican Party. I hate it, but them’s the facts. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
TNR’s Suzy Khimm was at the Values Voter Summit. From her report:
Despite the shouts of hallelujah, what this year’s summit ended up highlighting was not the resurgent power of Christian conservatives in the Republican Party, but how much their influence on the policy debate has diminished. As usual, most of the major GOP presidential contenders—even the unlikely figure of Donald Trump—came courting the crowd of 2,700 who’d registered for the event. But they offered little besides effusive praise for Kim Davis and utterly vague—if not utterly unrealistic—promises to champion religious liberties in the White House. When the summit-goers left Washington to scatter back to their hometowns across America, they left with no clear idea of what to fight for next—or how.
More:
The drift in the social-conservative agenda has been a gift to conservative Republicans: They’re increasingly free to court the religious right with little more than toothless appeals to tribalism. This year, they had little to do but practice affinity politics, competing to see who could come off as the most ardent supporter of Davis and “religious liberties” rhetorically. And if there’s one thing that Republican candidates have learned, particularly in the Obama era, it’s how to tap into their base’s fear and anger without offering anything concrete.
Read the whole thing (the Benedict Option gets a mention, btw). I think the Religious Right ought to do what Ross Douthat suggests, and find some realistic way to get policy changed by partnering with a Republican presidential candidate who won’t make promises he can’t possibly fulfill, and work on the Benedict Option, because the political and legal landscape is not going to get better for religious conservatives in the foreseeable future.
The Untidiness of Freedom
Another triumph for US policy in the Mideast:
Syrian rebels trained by the United States gave some of their equipment to the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday, the latest blow to a troubled U.S. effort to train local partners to fight Islamic State militants.
The rebels surrendered six pick-up trucks and some ammunition, or about one-quarter of their issued equipment, to a suspected Nusra intermediary on Sept. 21-22 in exchange for safe passage, said Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, in a statement.
“If accurate, the report of NSF members providing equipment to al Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train and equip program guidelines,” Ryder said, using an acronym for the rebels, called the New Syrian Forces.
It’s almost like we don’t know who is trustworthy and/or capable in that region. Imagine that.
In more Mission Accomplished news:
Even as the U.S. military denies reports that American troops were told to ignore Afghan child abusers, an 11-year Green Beret who was ordered discharged after he confronted an alleged rapist was informed Tuesday that the Army has denied his appeal.
Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland earlier this year was ordered discharged by Nov. 1. He has been fighting to stay in, but in an initial decision, the U.S. Army Human Resources Command told Martland that his appeal “does not meet the criteria” for an appeal.
“Consequently, your request for an appeal and continued service is disapproved,” the office wrote in a memo to Martland.
The memo was shared with FoxNews.com by the office of Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who has advocated for Martland’s case. According to Hunter’s office, Martland learned of the decision Tuesday.
Sgt. Martland is a mensch.
Why, it was only yesterday that the then-Commander in Chief was promising a geopolitical utopia:
A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America’s interests in security, and America’s belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq.
September 27, 2015
Benedict Option as a Way of Life
Molly Worthen writes about “the rise of the moral minority,” her term for conservative Christians who rebel against the culture-wars-as-usual strategy. Excerpts:
Yet some evangelical elites … have not shifted leftward, but they disown both the legacy of the Moral Majority and the populist demagogy of Mr. Trump in favor of a softer, more sophisticated approach to activism. They note the shrinking ranks of American Christianity but say that evangelicals shouldn’t kick and scream. They should embrace their new role as a moral minority instead.
“We don’t see ourselves as a cultural majority,” Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me. “Change doesn’t come from a position of power, but a position of witness.” Dr. Moore assured me that when he brings this message to churches around the country, “most are responding well because they see what’s happening in the culture.” But he is disappointed that so many evangelicals favor Mr. Trump.
How do you convince evangelicals to temper their political ambitions? You teach them to rethink their own identity. “Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future,” Dr. Moore writes in “Onward,” his manifesto for the moral minority. “Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ.”
Worthen highlights the work of my friends Gabe Lyons and Eric Metaxas, and the way their circles favor the word “winsome” to describe the kind of temperament they think Christians should bring to cultural engagement. I love Gabe and Eric, and I much prefer their way of being Christian — they love Jesus, but they’re not pissed off about it — than that of the more aggressive culture warriors on our side. But something rubs me the wrong way about the word “winsome” in this context. It’s not that winsomeness is a bad thing, but I fear that too many Christians think that being nice is going to make the other side like them. As I told the Q Ideas gathering this spring, in a speech that many of them did not like, you can be as winsome as you like as a conservative Christian who holds to traditional Christian teaching on sexuality, and they’re still going to hate you, because they think you are the moral equivalent of a racist. We should be firm but kind in our dealings with the world, not because it will improve our standing, but because it is the right thing to do.
On this same general topic, Laura Turner writes in The Atlantic about the Moral Minority — and considers the Benedict Option. Excerpts:
This call for societal withdrawal marks a new turn for American evangelical Christianity, which for several decades had been mostly aligned with the political right. Increasing support for gay marriage, the declining rates of marriage, and the rise of the “nones,” all seem to indicate waning evangelical influence on American culture. In the fight-or-flight response to feeling threatened, more and more Christians are taking (or at least talking about) the road out of Rome [Note: She’s not talking about Catholicism, but about Benedict of Nursia’s leaving post-imperial Rome to head to the forest to pray — RD]. They want to regroup, immerse themselves in communities that share their values, develop more robust theology, and emerge, in a sense, stronger than before.
In this way, the Benedict Option could be just the thing evangelicals need. With their public influence waning, withdrawing from the political conversation, at least in part, and adopting a strategy of re-entrenchment could help both fortify Christianity and engage the public. Certainly, things are starting to look bleak for evangelicals who remain in the public square. Recent efforts to defund Planned Parenthood via a Senate vote failed, and some evangelical leaders are disavowing the culture wars altogether.
On the other hand, it is difficult to influence society from a position of defeat. Those who follow the Benedict Option and create sealed-off Christian communities will find themselves frustrated in their attempts to influence not only politics but also art, literature, media, science—any areas shaped by meaningful public conversation. There may be room for lament, like there was around Obergefell, but the ability for the larger church to offer its prophetic voice to the culture would be damaged.
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify, once again, that I’m not in favor of creating “sealed-off Christian communities.” I don’t think that’s either possible or desirable. Rather, when I think of the Benedict Option, I think of creating stronger, thicker communities within which traditional Christian life can thrive. That will require some separation from the wider world, and the creation of de facto barriers. A Catholic school, for example, that wanted to form Catholic children according to orthodox Catholic teaching may want to exclude non-Catholic students, and to expect parents to participate more directly in their children’s education than is usual with parochial schools. But the way I see it, if we Christians are to be salt and light to the world, we have to first learn to be real Christians, not Moralistic Therapeutic Deists with a Christian-ish gloss.
That will require rebuilding a thick Christian culture in which we and future generations can be formed. To the extent that secular modernity dissolves and assimilates Christian belief and practice, we must stand against it, creating the institutions within which we can build resilience, and developing the personal and communal habits that build resilience. Ken Myers sends me these excerpts from sociologist of religion Steve Bruce’s 2002 book God Is Dead: Secularization in the West; they illuminate the kind of mindset we have to fight:
In brief, I see secularization as a social condition manifest in (a) the declining importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and institutions such as those of the state and the economy; (b) a decline in the social standing of religious roles and institutions; and (c) a decline in the extent to which people engage in religious practices, display beliefs of a religious kind, and conduct other aspects of their lives in a manner informed by such beliefs.
More Bruce:
Following Durkheim, [sociologist Bryan] Wilson argues that religion has its source in, and draws its strength from, the community. As the society rather than the community has increasingly become the locus of the individual’s life, so religion has been shorn of its functions. The church of the Middle Ages baptized, christened and confirmed children, married young adults, and buried the dead. Its calendar of services mapped onto the temporal order of the seasons. It celebrated and legitimated local life. In turn, it drew considerable plausibility from being frequently reaffirmed through the participation of the local community in its activities. In 1898 almost the entire population of my local village celebrated the successful end of the harvest by bringing tokens of their produce into the church. In 1998 a very small number of people in my village (only one of them a farmer) celebrated the Harvest festival by bringing to the church vegetables and tinned goods (many of foreign provenance) bought in the local branches of an international supermarket chain. In the first case the church provided a religious interpretation of an event of vital significance to the entire community. In the second, a small self-selecting group of Christians engaged in an act of dubious symbolic value. Instead of celebrating the harvest, the service thanked God for all his creation. In listing things for which we should be grateful, one hymn mentioned ‘jet planes refuelling in the sky’! By broadening the symbolism, the service solved the problem of relevance but at the cost of losing direct connection with the lives of those involved. When the total, all-embracing community of like-situated people working and playing together gives way to the dormitory town or suburb, there is little held in common left to celebrate.
The consequence of differentiation and societalization is that the plausibility of any single overarching moral and religious system declined, to be displaced by competing conceptions that, while they may have had much to say to privatized, individual experience, could have little connection to the performance of social roles or the operation of social systems. Religion retained subjective plausibility for some people, but lost its objective taken-for-grantedness. It was no longer a matter of necessity; it was a preference.
In sixteenth-century England, every significant event in the life cycle of the individual and the community was celebrated in church and given a religious gloss. Birth, marriage and death, and the passage of the agricultural seasons, because they were managed by the church, all reaffirmed the essentially Christian worldview of the people. The church’s techniques were used to bless the sick, sweeten the soil and increase animal productivity. Every significant act of testimony, every contract and every promise was reinforced by oaths sworn on the Bible and before God. But beyond the special events that saw the majority of the people in the parish troop into the church, a huge amount of credibility was given to the religious worldview simply through everyday social interaction. People commented on the weather by saying God be praised and on parting wished each other ‘God speed’ or ‘Goodbye’ (which we often forget is an abbreviation for ‘God be with you’).
The consequences of increasing diversity for the place of religion in the life of the state or even the local community are fairly obvious. Equally important but less often considered is the social-psychological consequence of increasing diversity: it calls into question the certainty that believers can accord their religion.
One more Bruce quote:
The clash of ideas between science and religion is less significant than the more subtle impact of naturalistic ways of thinking about the world. Science and technology have not made us atheists. Rather, the fundamental assumptions that underlie them, which we can summarily describe as ‘rationality’ — the material world as an amoral series of invariant relationships of cause and effect, the componentiality of objects, the reproducibility of actions, the expectation of constant change in our exploitation of the material world, the insistence on innovation — make us less likely than our forebears to entertain the notion of the divine.
It’s not that people cease to believe in God under secular modernity, Bruce maintains. Rather, religion ceases to be prominent in informing the social consciousness and cultural milieu of a people. It becomes a privatized thing, with diminishing force in shaping the lives of individuals and of the collective. Can anybody seriously claim that we aren’t there now?
I don’t believe the Benedict Option requires us to withdraw entirely from the public square (though I believe we will be steadily pushed out). But I do believe it requires us to abandon thinking that the point of being Christian is to “influence society” for the good. Consider again this passage from Worthen’s column:
“Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future,” Dr. Moore writes in “Onward,” his manifesto for the moral minority. “Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ.”
Yes, this a thousand times. As an Orthodox priest and reader of this blog reminded me the other day, St. Benedict did not leave Rome for the forest with the goal of saving what was left of Roman civilization. He left because he needed to be in a place of quiet where he could hear the voice of God, and pray, and worship as he was called to do. All that followed — the founding of the Benedictine order, the writing of the Rule, and in the subsequent centuries, the spread of monasticism and the evangelization of western Europe — came because that one monk, Benedict of Nursia, put the kingdom of God first. Remember what Alasdair MacIntyre said:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
It’s like this: I would like my children and my children’s children to grow up in a free, prosperous, democratic country. But it matters infinitely more to me that they hold on to the Christian faith. Better that they live in an unfree, poor, undemocratic country, but one in which their faith is strong, than a rich one that has forgotten God. The Benedict Option is not ultimately about saving civilization. It is about saving our faith, and cultivating it so that it can live robustly in future generations, despite what I am firmly convinced will be the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
For us traditionally-inclined Christians, it is time for a Great Relearning of what we have forgotten in modernity. And for that, we are going to have to revisit the Fathers of the Church, and learn from the experience of how the early church formed disciples within a hostile culture. Here’s a 1998 interview with church historian Robert Louis Wilken, in which he talks about this very thing. Excerpts:
What are some of the lessons we can learn from the early church about evangelizing our culture today? For example, should we do apologetics today as the early church did?
A lot of early apologetics was not defense but simple explanation. In his First Apology, Justin Martyr gave an account of Christian worship. He also talked about baptism. He didn’t try only to establish a link to the larger culture or prove Christianity true. He also tried to tell people what Christians actually did in worship and what they believed.
Today I believe the most significant apologetic task is simply to tell people what we believe and do. We need to familiarize people with the stories in the Bible and to talk about the things that make Christianity distinctive. Many people are simply unaware of the basics of Christianity. They’re rejecting something they don’t know that much about.
But apologetics then and now has a limited role. We must speak what is true, but finally the appeal must be made to the heart, not the mind. We’re really leading people to change their love. To love something different. Love is what draws and holds people.
What about the tightly knit early Christian community—what can we learn from that?
I think that should be a main strategy of Christians today—build strong communities. The early church didn’t try to transform its culture by getting into arguments about whether the government should do this or that. As a small minority, it knew it would lose that battle; there were too many other forces at work. Instead it focused on building its own sense of community, and it let these communities be the leaven that would gradually transform culture.
How did the early church build their community?
It built a way of life. The church was not something that spoke to its culture; it was itself a culture and created a new Christian culture. There were appointed times when the community came together. There was a distinctive calendar, and each year the community rehearsed key Christian beliefs at certain times. There was church-wide charity to the surrounding community. There was clarity, and church discipline, regarding moral issues. All these things made up a wholesome community.
Did the church strive to be “user-friendly”?
Not at all—in fact, just the opposite.
One thing that made early Christian community especially strong was its stress on ritual. That there was something unique about Christian liturgy, especially the Eucharist. It was different from anything pagans had experienced.
The worship was architecturally different. The altar at a Greek temple was in front of the temple and represented that worship was a public event open to all. In Christian churches, the altar was inside. Worship was something the church gave one the right to enter into.
Furthermore, in Christian worship there was no bloody sacrifice. Prayers and hymns were taken out of the Bible, a book foreign to pagans. And then there was a sermon, an unusual feature in itself, with historically grounded talk of a dying and rising God.
Pagans entered a wholly different world than they were used to. Furthermore, it was difficult to join the early church, besides the social and cultural hurdles: the process for becoming a member took two years.
Do you think we ought to adopt this strategy today?
Yes. I think seeker-sensitive churches use a completely wrong strategy. A person who comes into a Christian church for the first time should feel out of place. He should feel this community engages in practices so important they take time to learn. The best thing we can do for “seekers” is to create an environment where newcomers feel they are missing something vital, that one has to be inculcated into this, and that it’s a discipline.
Few people grasp that today. But the early church grasped it very well.
Read the whole thing. For Christians who create within their own tradition — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox — a Benedict Option, it will be above all a way of life that is about initiation into the kingdom of God, and a life of constant discipleship and formation in love, mercy, repentance, and traditional Christian living. If this means fewer of us get to participate in public life in late imperial America, well, so it does. That is not the most important thing.
After I explained to him what the Benedict Option was, Father Cassian Folsom, the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, told me that he thinks in the years to come, Christians who don’t take some form of the Benedict Option aren’t going to make it through the long darkness now upon the West. He’s right. It is a time for choosing, a time for preparation, and a time for un-learning and re-learning. After all, the real battle is not political, but spiritual.
I’ll end with these photos of the kind of Christians I hope we in the spiritually dessicated West can be. Here is a photo of my friend Father Silouan Thompson, a missionary Russian Orthodox priest in the Philippines. He is chrismating a new Filipino Christian, who was just baptized in the ocean:
Fr. Silouan writes on Facebook:
By our count 187 people were baptized in the ocean this morning [Saturday Sept 26] at Kiamba, Sarangani province. Fr Stanislav Rasputin and I baptized despite unusually boisterous waves. At times it felt like playing with a kennel full of 200-pound mastiffs: You get knocked down repeatedly :). One particularly strong wave took Fr Stanislav’s epitrahil (stole) right off his neck and washed it out to sea; we think it’s halfway to Malaysia by now.
Kiamba is in an area where the Moro Nationalist Liberation Front (Islamic secessionist group) is quite active, and a number of foreigners have been abducted this week by various groups of evildoers; so we were grateful for the escort the Philippine National Police provided for our sacrament and our procession from the church to the beach and back (even if their machine guns were a little strange to American eyes.)
One hundred and eighty-seven Filipinos received baptism in a single day — and they risked their lives at the hands of Islamic terrorists to do so! The Holy Spirit goes where He is wanted.
Rod Dreher's Blog
- Rod Dreher's profile
- 508 followers
