In a short essay recently published under the byline of the staff of The American Conservative, Higher Culture, Better Politics, an argument is made which is in the right direction but steps into the water as the boat is pulling away from the dock:
When a movement neglects culture and philosophy, one can be sure it’s dying. High ideas, art, and literature seem remote from the concerns of political professionals and grassroots activists. But the movements that succeed—or that acquire power, at any rate—tend to be steeped in theory.
Back in May of 2012, I published an essay, What Can We Say About the Body of Christ?, where I wrote:
I’ve spoken in the past of Western Civilization as being a home which the Christian Church (in the West) built for Herself. This is a metaphor used by Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope Benedict XVI). Cardinal Ratzinger went on to note that Christians of the West hadn’t properly maintained their home. Western Civilization isn’t in trouble because of invasions by pagans or Satanic agents but rather because Western Christians were morally irresponsible in their duties towards their own civilization. Pagans and others didn’t invade the West. They wandered into vacated public spaces.
I went on to argue that the Christian Church Herself is an organ in the Body of Christ and not the entirety of that Body; She is the central organ—moral and spiritual and liturgical guide from which the entire Body grew. The entire Body has the fullness of human life in it and, as such, looks more like a civilization and looks more attractive in that it promises a full human life in the world of the resurrected and not a sentence of eternity in a church choir. In fact, there is very little evidence in the Gospels that Jesus of Nazareth would have been interested in choir life everlasting as singer or conductor.
Western civilization is in a state of decay because of the moral irresponsibility of Christians over the previous two centuries or more. In my opinion, this moral irresponsibility developed into a schism between our worship of the God of Jesus Christ and our concerns, practical and theoretical, with the world created by that God, a world which is the physical universe of the scientists seen in its completeness as a morally purposeful story being told by God. As implied above, this schism shows up in the restriction of the Body of Christ to the Church and an attitude which ranges from condescension toward Creation to condemnation of Creation as if it were truly the kingdom of demonic forces. Christian teachings broadly understood to include the political teachings in Western (Christian) civilization are out of synch internally and more out of synch with the teachings of our current deformed and decaying civilization.
In an essay I published in November of 2010, The Promise and Comedy of Modernity, I stated the basic problem in this way:
[T]he modern phase of the Christian comedy has become a farce, played out by those who strive to remain Christians by remaining true to traditional human encapsulations of “the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy” as Pope Benedict termed these forms of human knowledge of God’s Creation. These Christians live behind ghetto walls refusing to look at the huge amount of material our age has added to that “book of nature” and to our understanding of at least the history of “the book of sacred Scripture” and the history of the “book of liturgy.”
Somewhere in his many writings, Etienne Gilson said that, around 1800, Catholic intellectuals failed to deal properly with the questions raised by modernity and led the Church into an intellectual ghetto from which She has not emerged. They sinned greatly in doing so—their responsibility was to educate their students to surpass the weaknesses of their teachers, but men will often fall into self-righteous defense of the ideas to which their minds were shaped and will fail to respond properly to a Creation which is not only dynamic but also constantly revealing itself in depth and breadth to a properly curious mankind.
On the 7th of June, 2008, Pope Benedict spoke to a gathering of scholars, Pope Benedict said, “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.” I wrote not only a variety of essays published on my blog, Acts of Being, but also an entire book in response to this quote. The book is freely available for download: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
Before I wrote about human being, I had done a lot of work on the basic nature of being, of spacetime and matter and the nature and facts of human history, of creative fictions and other narratives, which provided the foundation of my work to date on human being. I have done some reading of popular science works which appear on bestseller lists and some of those are written by serious thinkers speaking intelligently about the empirical knowledge of modern science and about what it might mean to human beings. I have also read less accessible, quite serious works by Darwin and Einstein and their successors as well as works by intelligent commentators on modern scientific work. I’ve read John Henry Newman’s comment in which he accepted the truth of Darwin’s work and very wrongly denied its importance. I’ve read commentaries on science by the good historical and literary thinkers, Butterfield and Barzun and others. So far as non-scientists go, I was most impressed by a comment Flannery O’Connor made in one of her letters as published in the Library of America’s collection of her writings (page 953):
To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of those laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.
Miss O’Connor was mostly certainly not among the morally irresponsible majority of modern Christians. She was trying to re-understand Creation in terms of what men currently know and not by just putting a new coat of paint on a ramshackle structure. Unfortunately, she somewhat missed the target as I noted in Flannery O’Connor Was a Pretty Good Thomistic Philosopher, but she came closer to the bulls-eye than any modern Christian thinker I’m aware of.
Good works of creative fiction, history, philosophy, literary analysis, Biblical studies, the Bible itself, have also played a role in my efforts to revive my mind. Such works as well as observations of living human beings and a lot of contemplation also play an important role. (I like to do my deepest, and often back-of-the-mind, thinking as I walk or run the sidewalks of my hometown to which I returned some 20 years ago.)
This is the point of this essay: political philosophy is a room in an upper floor of the structure of a complete Christian understanding of Creation, or any other reasonably complete understanding of this world and more. To speak of better political philosophy in an age of man when our ancestors discovered centuries ago that the Christian story no longer makes sense is to speak gibberish, it is to recommend remodeling a room on an upper floor of a decaying structure which could collapse at any time. In fact, to speak of culture as if there is much worth engaging with in the new productions is to speak gibberish. To speak of culture as if it is inherited antiques is to simply misunderstand matters.
I addressed this problem in my previous essay, Modern Ideologies as Misunderstandings of Human Communities though limiting my comments to human being and the general lack of understanding, even among Christians who supposedly believe in the Body of Christ, that human communal being is real being. If it isn’t real being, our hopes in salvation are in vain as both Christians and Jews were warned by Jacob Neusner—see Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality? for my discussion of Neusner’s views as well as some relevant ideas of Hans Reichenbach and E O Wilson.
At the end of my previous posting— Modern Ideologies as Misunderstandings of Human Communities, I refer to some of my earliest blog writings where I discuss the debate between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality. Einstein is generally seen as the defender of common-sense. I discuss, very briefly, why this isn’t so and why it is that Bohr’s radical view of the nature of reality is similar to the understanding of the school of St John the Evangelist who taught that relationships (starting with love) are primary over substantial being and, in fact, bring substantial being into existence and continue to shape it.
My writings, all part of my general efforts to update the Christian understanding of Creation, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston. These writings include six novels.