Amnesia and Nostalgia
Discover more from The Common Man
Last month, I decided to change the title of my next book from The Times Are Wretched to After Christendom. And I did this for two reasons. First, The Times Are Wretched is a bad title. It’s long and clumsy and doesn’t make sense without some heavy-duty Googling. That, from marketing purposes, isn’t great.
More importantly, though, the new title is more accurate. The book aims to answer the question, “What are Christians supposed to do now that Christendom is dead?”
And I don’t think there can be any doubt that Christendom is dead.
Then again, some of the very smartest Christians alive would disagree. Among them is the great Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.
There are very few men, alive or dead, whom I admire more than Fr. McTeigue. As general rule, I’d say that if you find yourself arguing with Father, you’ve backed the wrong horse. But last month hepenned an essay for the (excellent) New Oxford Review attacking us post-Christian Christians. And since I’ve already spent the advance, I figured I should try to defend my thesis.
First of all, let me say that I don’t think I’m the exact target of Fr. McTeigue’s essay. He summarizes our position thus: “The age of Christendom is over! It’s time to return to the Church of the Apostles. It’s time to learn to live as a more apostolic Church.” And I think that’s more or less my position. But then he says,
Appeals to “a more apostolic Church” are, at a minimum, code for “Let’s acquire amnesia about the wisdom Catholics have accumulated over the centuries because that wisdom could prevent us from convincing people to like us or at least to leave us alone.” And in the rush to become more “apostolic,” we might be inclined to avoid awkward questions like, “How did our institutions and cultural capital collapse seemingly overnight, with little notice and even less mourning?” So, rather than being a call for Christian individuals and communities to be more resourceful and adaptive, the call for a “more apostolic Church” is an occasion for offering excuses, hiding behind culpable silences, cutting corners, making compromises, and avoiding responsibility.
This is definitely not my position. I am not pro-amnesia. But I am anti-nostalgia. And I can very easily see either malaise—amnesia or nostalgia—crippling the Church.
What’s more likely, I think, is that they’ll work together. As the Pilgrim said, “Satan attacks from two sides: the right and the left.”
Put it this way. Last week I had a long chat with a Byzantine priest. Among other things, we talked about how “conservative” Western churches—both Catholic and Protestant—fall into the habit of defining themselves against modernity. They become defensive, insular, and fearful. Yet I’ve never gotten this impression from Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Why?
I think it’s because Eastern Christians have all had the experience of losing power, suddenly and violently. The Greek Church was nearly destroyed by the Ottomans; the Antiochian Church, by the caliphates; the Russian Church, by the communists. They have all experienced the fall of Christendom. And they survived!
Meanwhile, Western Christendom is still dying its slow, painful death. In fact, the illness has worked so slowly that most Christians didn’t realize it was terminal until about ten or twenty years ago. Many still don’t believe it’s terminal. Our understanding of Christianity is intimately bound up with social, economic, political, and cultural domonance. We have a hard time imagining a Western Church that lacks such power.
And that’s not so suprising, is it? Really, we don’t have the right to abandon Christendom. Once upon a time, every Westerner—from the mightiest king to the lowliest peasant—recognized Christ’s sovereignty over all things, both spiritual and temporal. How can we then hand over the temporality to His enemies?
I have deep sympathy with that argument. Honestly, I do. I would have been a Royalist in 18th-century France, a Sanfedisti in 19th-century Italy, and a Cristero in 20th-century Mexico. But it seems pretty clear to me that Christ Himself is handing over the temporality to His enemies. As St. Augustine said, God “gives happiness in the kingdom of Heaven to the pious alone, but gives kingly power on earth both to the pious and the impious, as it may please Him, whose good pleasure is always just.” After all, “He who gave [the Roman Empire] to the Christian Constantine gave it also to the apostate Julian.”
God is, once again, giving this empire to the apostates. That is His good pleasure.
Now, we can (and should!) exercise political power, so far as we’re able. We can (and should!) pray for a restoration of Christendom. But we can’t allow the struggle for political and cultural dominance to distract us from the ordinary business of Christianity.
That’s what bothered me so much about the Jericho March. That’s what made it more than a grotesque political sideshow. It was the perfect example of what happens when Christians become overwhelmed by nostalgia.
As Christians, our first duty to the public is to help non-Christians into Christ’s Church. Temporal power is, at best, secondary concern; at worst, it’s a burden and a distraction. (St. Augustine says that happiness belongs to those who “prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever.”) The Jericho Marchers made Christianity positively repulsive to non-Christians, in the hopes of maintaining political and cultural dominance. They have their priorities exactly wrong.
Granted, this is a pretty extreme example. I certainly don’t think Fr. McTeigue is a Jerichoist. My point is this: ultimately, God will decide whether Christians or apostates rule the temporality. Because we live in a democracy, we all have a little say in how the country is governed. But most of us don’t have a vocation to politics—at least, not like Constantine the Great or Edmund the Martyr. Restoring Christian dominance in government and culture shouldn’t be our preoccupation as individuals. Such dominance definitely shouldn’t be the “ordinary expression” of Christian witness in the public square.
So, what should be the ordinary expression of Christian witness in the public square? Why, I’m glad you asked, dear reader. Because to answer that question, we need to think back to a time before Christianity dominated the Western world. And in order to access that wisdom, we have to look back to the Age of the Apostles.
That’s why some of us call this a New Apostolic Age. It’s not our vision for the future. It’s just the facts as we see them.
This, at least, has been the experience of our brothers in the Christian East, particularly the Middle-East. I think it’s also a big part of why they're able to go about the ordinary business of Christianity—prayer, fasting, works of mercy, etc.—with such ease and cheer. They’re survivors. Yes, they remember dominance. Large looms the memory of Byzantium and her daughters. But the memory of catastrophe is far more vivid. And so they’re not afflicted by nostalgia. Whatever their faults, the Eastern Christians have more historical perspective than we do.
So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the best guides to (re-)evangelism comes from an Orthodox Christian: the theologian, philosopher, and contrarian David Bentley Hart.
The greatest argument for Christianity is (of course) Jesus Christ. And why? Because Christ is beautful. As Professor Hart writes in The Beauty of the Infinite, “Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire.” Our Lord “embodies a real and imitable practice, a style of being that conforms to the beauty of divine love, but that is also a way of worldly godliness.”
To be clear, Professor Hart isn’t (necessarily) talking about the beauty of St. Peter’s Basilica or Mont Saint-Michel. He’s talking about the beauty of Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi. Neither was considered physically attractive, and yet everyone who encountered them found their joyfulness and prayerfulness, their simplicity and love, to be irresistable.
In that sense, everything we do as Christians must also be beautiful. Some things, like worship, should be pleasing to the senses. But everything—everything—must possess the “beauty of holiness.” As Professor Hart puts it,
What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of “rational” arguments that (suppressing certain of their premises) force assent from others by leaving them, like the interlocutors of Socrates, at a loss for words; rather, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells concerning God and creation, the form of Christ, the loveliness of the practice of Christian charity. . . . Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may “command” assent, the church cannot separate truth from rhetoric or from beauty.
What Professor Hart calls “practical charity” will be critical for us. It gives credibility to our faith.
This comes back to what I call the Soup Kitchen Fallacy. Every now and then you’ll hear some well-meaning priest say, “Charity doesn’t just mean volunteering at soup kitchens,” as though the Church was paralyzed by the number of people trying to volunteer at soup kitchens. No: charity doesn’t just mean volunteering in soup kitchens. But if you’re a Christian, you believe that love of neighbor is part of the Great Commandment; and if your neighbor is hungry, giving him food is the ordinary expression of charity.
Hart repeatedly warns against “spiritualizing” the concept of charity, and he’s absolutely right to do so. As he points out in his book Atheist Delusions, practical charity was vital to the success of the Early Church:
Thus, in the late second century, Tertullian could justly boast that whereas the money donated to the temples of the old gods was squandered on feasts and drink, with their momentary pleasures, the money given to churches was used to care for the impoverished and the abandoned, to grant even the poorest decent burials, and to provide for the needs for the elderly.
This is what Dostoyevsky said when he meant that beauty will save the world. And, as a matter of fact, He already has.
I would be remiss not to point out at least some of the many strong points in Fr. McTeigue’s essay. For instance, he writes:
The historical Apostolic Church (in contrast to the “apostolic Church” of current whimsy) had the good sense to go to the catacombs in response to the lethal toxicity of the ambient culture. In the catacombs, the Apostolic Church looked to the past, specifically, to what Christ said, did, commanded, and forbade. The Church in the catacombs demanded rigid adherence to doctrinal and moral norms, and she prepared people to suffer martyrdom rather than make compromises with a world at war with Creator, Christ, and Church. The Apostolic Church also took sin and penance very seriously. Is that what the present would-be pallbearers of Christendom mean when they speak of a more “apostolic Church”? I’ve seen nothing to support such an assertion.
He’s absolutely right. Beauty is holy; holiness is also beautiful. Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar and noted art curator, understood this all too well:
The more creatures approach and participate in the beauty of God, the more are they themselves beautiful, just as the beauty of the body is in proportion to the beauty of the soul. For, if you were to take two women of this audience, equally beautiful in body, it would be the holier one that would excite the most admiration amongst the beholders, and the palm would assuredly be given to her even by worldly men.
Virtue (or morality, or whatever you want to call it) is also a “persuasion.” It evokes desire. It’s a powerful—a necessary—tool for evangelization.
And this is only one of the many gems to be found in Fr. McTeigue’s essay, which alone is worth the price of a subscription to the New Oxford Review. All the other great content is, as the Americans say, pure gravy.
Really, I’m not even sure we’re at odds here. Father may agree with me about the dangers of nostalgia, as I agree with him about the dangers of amnesia. All I know is that fear of change can be just as paralyzing as fear of stagnation. Both manifest as a desire for control and stem from a lack of trust in God.
“The Lord would rather wash the feet of His weary brothers,” said George MacDonald, “than be the one only perfect monarch who ever ruled the world.” That’s a good place to start in our imitation of Christ.