As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted years ago, western Christians built Western Civilization as a home for the churches united to Rome. St. Augustine and St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great laid the foundations and many others built upon those foundations. For centuries, Western Civilization was a home for the Catholic Church and then for Protestants and others as well. Etienne Gilson, the Thomistic scholar, and Ratzinger have both noted that it was Christians who failed to maintain the Church’s home. Gilson gave a specific reason for this failure: Catholic intellectuals had no good answers to the modern questions raised during the Enlightenment and the bad answers given by others led to the slaughters of the French Revolution and gave men of little imagination and rigid faith an excuse to retreat into an intellectual ghetto. Christian intellectuals have generally remained in self-confinement since then.
It was new discoveries in God’s Creation and the consequent changes in human societies which had created new opportunities and raised new problems, violent men and scoundrels did no more than take advantage of the confusion caused by the failure of Western leaders and intellectuals to respond properly. If Western men were being tested by God, they seem to have flunked the tests pretty consistently, except perhaps for the scientists. Or, did we men of the West really do so badly? In a series of upcoming articles, I’ll try to raise a new perspective that might be more optimistic about the general development of human civilization and the necessarily parallel development of the human mind.
In any case, it would seem we need to build anew and to aim at constructing something like Western Civilization. There are many treasures in the rubble and many more feeding bookworms and silverfish in those libraries which haven’t yet replaced Austen by King or even eliminated most books in favor of video recordings of some sort. And then there are the old folk-songs and ditties of which I learned only a smattering in my childhood in the 1960s. I doubt if many born in the past three decades know so much as a song from their Scottish or Polish or French-Canadian ancestors. Even popular American folk-music, such as that of Stephan Foster or that performed by Burl Ives or Pete Seeger in the 1950s onward, isn’t heard often nowadays.
I don’t speak in terms of a political or military decay but rather in more general terms of the decay of concrete aspects of human life, musical and culinary and literary. A civilization is formed from the ground up, the foundation coming from folk-music along with sophisticated liturgical music, nursery rhymes along with odes which celebrate concrete reality and what lies behind it, stories from the old country told by Grandpa as well as those great books we were taught to hate during our high school years. We are surrounded by art and entertainment that does more damage by its lack of intelligence and lack of historical roots than by its sometime despicable moral messages. But most of the art and entertainment which seems to preach moral truths is just as despicable. The seeming moral decency of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver was unfounded, smoke and mirrors under the control of wizards who just wanted to sell us products and ways of life that would replace traditional ways of life to the profit of the greedy and the ambitious.
I’ve consistently argued the human mind forms as we respond to our environments, a claim which may explain my observation that there are intelligent and knowledgeable human beings who don’t give any strong signs of having real minds, active and probing entities. They don’t respond to God’s world, don’t actively reach out in an effort to understand. They grow up as passive victims of modern school systems as well as passive victims of the entertainment industry. Perhaps it’s always been true that the vast majority of human beings pick up their most basic attitudes and beliefs in such passive ways. If true, that would argue against the possibility of good self-government in this dynamic world, but I’ll not argue that issue one way or another. It does seem true that we in the modern West have failed to exercise our own human nature in active responses to the world around us.
We must learn to be more active and more responsible for the formation of our own minds and our own moral natures, and we must help our children to do the same. The proper way to do that is to respond to God’s Creation as we best know it and understand it, the upsetting parts of science and history as well as those parts which generate material prosperity or make us feel good about ourselves. We must move forward, remembering the lessons of the past, lessons of what worked well and what didn’t work very well, but we must look ahead to a future which can seem awfully frightening because there are many signs of great changes in the world of men, changes largely forced by successes in exploring and using the resources of this world.
I’ll move on in my next posting or two to try to establish some coherent understanding of that misunderstood and misused word, ‘creative’, in terms of my updated Thomistic existentialism and then I hope to explore Flannery O’Connor’s observation that the good under formation is sometimes rather grotesque in appearance.