The Tides of the Ocean, the Cycles of Faith

The Tides of the Ocean, the Cycles of Faith | Chilton Williamson, Jr. | CWR



Are we at the end? Has Christianity runs its course? Or is this another beginning for those willing to embrace it?


In
The Unquiet Grave
Cyril Connelly, the 20th
century Anglo-Irish critic, writer, and editor, having acknowledged
the existence of the thousands of people like him (“…Liberals
without a belief in progress, Democrats who despise their fellow-men,
Pagans who still live by Christian morals, Intellectuals who cannot
find the intellect sufficient—unsatisfied Materialists…”),
concludes nonetheless that “there can be no going back to
Christianity, nor can I inhabit an edifice of truth which seems built
upon a base of falsehood.” 

Connelly’s
conclusion is poignant and tragic. How many kings and prophets,
Christ remarks to His disciples, have longed to see and hear the
truth as you have seen and heard it, without ever doing so. And how
many wise men and philosophers of the ancient world struggled
heroically, and with equal poignancy, through no fault of the virtue
and of the intellect that were in them but rather by temporal
accident of birth, to make sense of a world without possessing the
Key which alone could allow them to do so.

One
is struck, reading Clive Fisher’s excellent biography of Connelly,
by the pagan character of English literary society (reflecting
English society as a whole) in the first half of the twentieth
century (Yeats, Orwell, Woolf, Huxley, Greene), relieved by a small
though distinguished minority of literary Christians (Chesterton,
Belloc, Eliot, Waugh). Despite two cataclysmic wars that nearly
destroyed Europe in the short run, and may well have been fatal to
European civilization in the long one—wars that represented, as
Waugh memorably said of the second World War, the modern
scientific-materialist world in arms—for most Western writers and
artists of the period the Faith, core and lodestone of the western
intellect and sensibility for centuries, seemed to have exhausted
itself through its belligerence, its persecutions, cupidity,
reaction, and hypocrisy. To them, Christianity was an integral organ
of the same bourgeois materialist-scientific world whose center,
after two millennia, could no longer hold and was visibly collapsing
all around them.

In
with the Old, out with the New—even if nobody, Cyril Connelly
included, had the vaguest notion of what the New might be.

From
the Christian perspective, the situation has not improved since
Connelly’s time (born in 1903, he died in 1974). Instead it has
deteriorated still further.

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