In The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher, we learn of the very prominent role played by aristocratic families, even royal families, in the conversion of the European barbarians to Christianity. The missionary monks and bishops and priests were often from powerful and wealthy families of Ireland and England and then Francia (modern-day France) and the various kingdoms in other parts of what became Catholic Europe—I don’t know what the story was in Orthodox Europe. The royalty and aristocracy of Western and Northern Europe supported the various saints—often their brothers or cousins. Some of those saints of aristocratic (warlord) blood were among the roughest and most dedicated missionaries in Christian history. It is important to realize those aristocratic evangelists were very well-educated, an aristocracy of the mind as well as of the blood. Commoners would not have often had access to education at the level of those of the nobility, but it’s important to remember that the likes of Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, made the most of their opportunities; there aren’t so many modern Christians, from any backgrounds, who make a serious effort to acquire the best learning of our age.
In at least their public behavior, the peoples of Europe followed their kings and counts and dukes, and their monastic and priestly relatives, into the Christian Church, though often continuing many of their old ways of belief and behavior. While there was a lot of brutal politics and ambition involved in the decision of, say, Saxon warlords to adopt the religious faith of the powerful and wealthy Franks (such as Charlemagne), much of what happened involved deep and strong conversions on the part of sons of kings and earls whose sons and nephews were often very well-educated and became monks or priests or very devout rulers and who had a great influence on the men of the surrounding barbarian tribes. The common peoples, simple farmers and wealthy merchants alike, followed their Romanized or barbarian rulers into Christianity, but even in areas were most accepted baptism with indifference or out of purely materialistic desires, those conversions would often result in strong faith in a generation or two.
I hope I haven’t distorted a very complex history too much by the above brief telling, but I’m going to use it as background to speak of the situation of Christianity in the modern world, a world where the wealthy and powerful and famous can have great influence over the minds and hearts and hands of the other people and peoples in their communities, a world where that elite is decidedly non-Christian if not actively anti-Christian.
The situation is now very complex. We now have a variety of writers and commentators and athletes and politicians as well as different sorts of teachers who can help shape the beliefs and feelings and behaviors of those they touch in any way. Our modern elites, in the sense of those having some sort of serious influence over others in their communities, include even popular musicians, though it would seem that religious leaders have little such influence and this may be true also of the local sorts of leaders labeled as “town-fathers” (or their maternal counterparts). We look to `stars’ who shine worldwide or at least nationwide.
Not many among these elites of political leaders or entertainers or the few among religious leaders act or speak to endorse Christian ideas, other than the occasional—and usually despicable and sometimes blasphemous—attempt to claim God has endorsed American hegemony and exceptionalism. This is particularly strange when American hegemony and exceptionalism are pursued despite all damage to other countries and peoples, even the peoples of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. Rather than the devout, semi-barbarian Charlemagne or even saintly kings such as Alfred of Wessex or Louis IX of France, we have the Bushes and Clintons and Obama; even Cheney and Baker and Albright and Kerry. We also have the pop-music queens and kings; the wig-stands of the so-called news-programs; the stars of movies about comic-book characters I left behind at the age of 12. We have Stephen King with his retro-paganistic and demonic view of evil in an age when mainstream Christian thinkers have not made peace with Darwin and Einstein; authors of thriller novels in which brave young men and women take wild risks with the lives and property of many to save the world from some implausible danger—and earn fame and promotions in the process. We have teachers and school administrators who disdain memorization so as to leave plenty of mental space to be filled with pop-music lyrics and sports statistics. These are the elite who have shaped and misshaped and refused to shape the minds and moral characters of a once Christian people of the West; the members of this elite are also the main representatives of that West to the other regions of the world.
Western Civilization and Western Christianity are tied together, bound as perhaps body and soul but more plausibly the greater body and its central organ. When the Western elite went rotten, Christianity was in trouble—at best it became soft and submissive to the corrupt elite as they sought wealth and power and often seemed to be deliberately working to cut all ties to Jesus Christ and the churches which carry forth his teachings, but Christianity hardly needed enemies when it had leaders and other adherents who seemed to have trouble separating God’s commandments from the push for great expansion of Western political and economic power over all peoples in the world. In other words, the religious leaders—Popes and priests and ministers and lay authors—were part of that elite of Western Civilization which did so much damage to the Christian peoples they were claiming to serve. My particular mission has been largely directed to one of the great failures of the leaders of Western Civilization and its primary organ, the Church: the failure to update Christian thought, indeed all Western thought, to properly reflect both inherited truths and and new, fact-based understandings of this world.
American Christianity, in particular, is a simple version of the faith; even sacramental Christianity (Catholic and Orthodox and perhaps a few small communities from ancient churches in the Middle East) in the United States is presented to its members and to the general public as generic Christianity (whatever that might be) with priests in fancy dress and some strange rituals which seem to involve magic. As Rabbi Neusner, a reliable and friendly outside observer of American Christianity, has noted: Protestantism involves an extreme individualism incompatible with Biblical teachings about salvation as a member of the People of Israel (for the Jews) or a member of the Church (for the Christians) and American Catholics are essentially Protestants. The universe has never been re-understood as the Darwinistic and Einsteinian stuff of a sacramental world; human being has never been re-understood as an individual nature and a communal nature which have evolved and developed in this physical world. This is a task which would require the efforts of a true elite, scientists and philosophers and poets and novelists and film-makers and musicians. And, to use the last as an example, we don’t need elevator music but rather music grand enough to lift the soul, lift us not from a fallen state but rather from a state of tree-climbing or crouched knuckle-dragging.
I most certainly am not denying the validity of the sacraments in American Sacramental churches, Catholic or Orthodox or otherwise, but I am denying there be any richness of belief in the Real Presence on the altar or in the hymns which leave the mind and heart uninspired. When I write of “richness of belief,” I’m not denying that many believe: I’m a Special (Lay) Eucharistic Minister and I can testify to the belief showing in the facial expressions and bodily postures of at least a substantial minority of those who receive communion in my parish, an ordinary parish with a typical American population (carpenters and machinists and small businessmen, teachers and engineers and doctors). I’m not denying that there are some hymns being sung which truly praise God as He should be praised. I am denying that there is that richness which comes from a basic substance of thought and art and music which speaks truly of God and His Creation, as does the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers used by the Medieval evangelists of Europe—though it be likely it was the evangelists who understood (and misunderstood) those sacred writings and their audiences took on faith the testimony of those impressive men. Similar comments can be made about most fields of human endeavor: architecture and sculpture and even home decorations.
Some Christians can develop a deep and rich understanding of Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which is based upon not only the Bible and traditional teachings of Christian churches but also upon a plausible understanding of God’s Creation: time and space and matter, including matter come to life, understood in terms of rich Christian thought and art. Others, probably the vast majority, need to trust in various elites who have such a facility or least a convincing facility with statements of such an understanding.
We have no such understanding and no such elites to develop and advocate and teach newer and richer understandings of Christian teachings. In particular, we obviously have no elites who can plausibly set the Eucharist in the context of the reality we know and which is well-described by the descendants of Einstein and Darwin, a reality which is seen as part of a greater reality, our world as part of Creation. If we have no way of thinking or speaking of those asteroids and planets being visited by space probes as part of the Creator’s story which is this universe as a morally ordered narrative; if we have no way of thinking or speaking of viruses and rattlesnakes as well as pretty little girls and energetic little boys as being creatures of that Creator and characters in His story; if we have no way of speaking or writing of God’s relationship to bread and wine and the changed relationship which occurs when a validly ordained priest consecrates them as the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ; then we can do little better than wave our hands spastically as we claim, without any rational justification, there’s no conflict between `science’ and `religion’. We have no worthwhile Christian literature or art to set against the non-Christian or anti-Christian works of recent centuries in the West. (Would such works have been produced if the Christian leaders and intellectuals and artists had been doing their job as was true of the generations of Christians from the Apostolic Age to the Medieval period when German and British-Celtic and Slavic barbarians were evangelized by those fluent in a rich and substantial Christian thought and language?)
We have, in fact, split what is studied by `science’ and even is created by architects and painters from the beliefs and acts of Christianity, which is to say we’ve split what is united in a sacramental universe. Sacraments, with a capital `S’, aren’t acts of magic which unite metaphysically distinct stuff and spirit. Such Sacraments enrich and deepen relationships already existing, the relationships between Creator and what He has created. In traditional terms: Grace doesn’t destroy or replace nature, grace completes and perfects nature. Sacraments with a capital `S’ complete and perfect a sacramental nature which is the proper study of evolutionary biologists and the proper matter of chemical engineers and road-builders.
The problem lies with the need for intellectual sophistication, a sophistication dependent upon both knowledge and a well-disciplined mind—not necessarily a creative or brilliant mind. Creativity is needed as well, but not in the large—a few creative thinkers can guide all of Christianity in integrating reality (such as Darwinian ideas of the origin of human beings and Einsteinian ideas on spacetime and quantum ideas on the nature of matter) into a Christian worldview.
Christianity may well have started out partly by way of appeals to the simple of mind and simple of heart and poor of hands—`simple’ doesn’t mean `stupid’ though it might mean ignorant in the sense of uneducated. This simplicity was more a reflection of the communities of the time and place of Christ’s Incarnation. As the world of men became richer and more complex and the natural world was investigated and found to be also richer and more complex that was thought, as human communities came to include ever more thinkers with well-developed minds, as those communities and thinkers built upon past achievements, Christians needed to adjust according—after all, we claim this complex and rich world to be the work of the God of Jesus Christ. Why shouldn’t we try to understand it and communicate it in words and pictures? Why shouldn’t we feel a need to properly evangelize the citizens of such a complex and rich world.
[Those who have followed my blog or have downloaded and read any of my books will know that I have been working to produce a Christian re-understanding at a fundamental level of human being and of all of created being. See Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston for a list of those books as well as links for freely downloading most of them.]