For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Romans 1:18
And the old man, who was then so old that he hardly spoke at all, said suddenly out of his silence, “‘I should thank God for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul.” G. K. Chesterton, quoting his father in the Autobiography
In a political season there will be a great deal of talk about what we deserve. If we are economically well placed, we deserve an ever-ascending stock market. If we labor day by day we deserve ever-ascending and certain wages. We deserve health care, job security and home ownership, and, by the way, everyone has a right to go to the college of his or her choice.
And in a certain sense this is all quite true. In a perfect society, under the doctrine of the common good, although we may not quite deserve all these things item by item, day by day, we do deserve life and liberty, a just reward for our labor, and a government good enough to create stable circumstances.
But in another sense the thought that we deserve the good life is one of the great causes of misery and political dis-organization. Chesterton once wrote that the doctrine of original sin was the most cheerful dogma he knew. He meant by this that, at the least, the Christian doctrine of original sin makes life tolerable by helping us understand ourselves, and helping us understand as well the evil that befalls us in a fallen world. But original sin, the taint upon our nature born of Adam’s rebellion, has a deeper meaning and a more immediate bearing on life. Christian theology teaches that we come into life as flawed creatures, owing a debt that we cannot pay and suffering a condition that, unless it is relieved, will mean that life cannot end before the throne of God but must end in the punishment due creatures who cannot but displease their Creator.
This doctrine, graphically illustrated over cathedral doors in the Middle Ages by the carved display of Christ with the elect on his right hand, the damned in pain on the left, seems harsh to modern ears. In fact, its harshness is surrounded by conditions: the unwillingness of a just God to punish with eternal fire those who cannot know; His willingness to receive those who, not knowing, seek righteousness with a single heart; and, above all, His mercy. But none of this obviates the great fact that we come into the world as, in St. Paul’s very direct words, children of wrath.
This is a fact. It is also good news. The Fathers often call the fall of man a happy fault because it opened for mankind the gates of God's providential love, and that redeeming love then filled and fills the world with joy. A culture of rancor, ingratitude and anger at a world that sometimes imposes hard conditions, cannot build Chartres, compose Mozart’s Requiem, or write the Tempest. It is striking that a Christian world, the world of St. Paul, Augustine, and Anselm, secure in the knowledge of damnation justly deserved saves us, says the Mass, from final damnation. This world was yet more secure in the knowledge of Christ’s grace, making this a happy world, happy because it was effused with gratitude. There is a reason why the Eucharist is a title taken from a Greek word that means simply “thanks-giving.” And while we are thanking God for all the blessings of this life, we are most of all thanking God for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ which has brought us grace and life.
It is hard to find a sustained literature of victimhood and complaint in the Middle Ages, or even in Dickens, but complaint and victimhood poison the very air of the early twenty-first century. That this occurs is the direct result of the pernicious doctrine that we are born good, a doctrine that makes the world unintelligible and bitter. From Renaissance optimists like Pico della Mirandola to the Deists to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, there runs the theme of the innocence of man, and with it the thin crescendo of complaint that we have been corrupted and betrayed by law, tradition, custom, and government. The world as it is must then be explained by the corrupting nature of the laws and customs of civil society (Rousseau) or by human malice. The bitterness that threatens to ravage American culture is born in part of the conviction that what is wrong with the world, since I am innocent, must be caused by the malice of others. My struggle in life is caused by the rich. The government causes the economy to fail. I am good; the environment is damaging. At worst, the evil and pain that impinge on every life are caused by lack of education; knowledge will set you free, a doctrine originally espoused in the Garden by the serpent and since propagated by Gnostics, Anabaptists, illuminati, philosophes, rationalists, Horace Mann, the National Education Association, the Humanist Association and its allies, the A. C. L. U., the national librarians asso-ciations, the sex education industry, and National Public Radio. The latter is an especially poignant example, for NPR greets the world every day with a kind of breath-less disingenuousness, amazed that after all the education, after the United Nations, after contraception, there are still, as the Great Authority said, wars and rumors of wars.
It is easy to see that this doctrine of original goodness can turn the world into a hell on earth. It renders Christianity essentially irrelevant, because it renders Christianity essentially optional. If the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, that fear must be rooted in the reality of God’s existence, perfection, power, and justice, and in our fallenness. If we are good, saved by knowledge and benevolence, Christianity is rightly what it has become in the United States: at best optional. God’s mercy is not then the central fact of my life, because I owe His justice nothing, and Jesus Christ is but a kind of gentle encourager who wants to help us make the world a better place and comfort us in times of personal crisis. The four last things are then not death, judgment, heaven or hell, but a good obituary, a sufficient estate, successful progeny, and a happy sendoff to the woozy-white terrain of the nice God, in whom we may have had only conventional interest, while in the church below our associates describe our excellences in ways that would embarrass St. Augustine or St. Thomas. The doctrine of original goodness—the doctrine that man never fell and therefore requires no salvation—is the cause of spiritual desolation. If the Bible is wrong—if we do not come into the world as children of wrath—we do not in fact need God. To be anxious for one's soul is not an outmoded pathology. It is reality. While the end is love, the Church will accept as a motive for repentance and confession fear of the Lord because that fear is the first step along the road to God’s love, and awareness that without Christ we are children of wrath is a reality that blossoms in a life of gratitude and hence of joy and peace.
The political consequence of the doctrine of original goodness is rancor that seeks not reform but revenge. In theory it should be possible to make the world good, for is not my weakness and failure the result simply of inattention or lack or effort on the part of a pusillanimous government whose agents are unwilling to allocate sufficient funding, or, as noted above, the result of implacable ill will on the part of others? We now pray for everlasting peace. The Mass more wisely prays for peace in our time. We look forward to a world from which pain has been expelled. Governments should be able to control hurricanes. Post modernity is liable to say, “We are innocent; unaccountable difficulties have befallen us. Let us complain and sue.” Happy sinners, the recipients of unaccountable grace and mercy, will say, "While we were in our sins, Christ died for us.” Joy to the world.
Blessed Charles of Austria and the Kingship of Christ
From the reign of David at the beginning of the first millennium before Christ until the day before yesterday, the form of government in the Christian world was kingship, and that Christian kingship was, given the vagaries of human nature, arguably the best government the world has known. That this might be so is now carefully concealed from school children under a specious historiography which teaches that kings were always tyrants and that the New Testament is about democracy, the latter fact unaccountably obscured during the Dark Ages, rediscovered by enlightened founding fathers, perfected in the United States and spread throughout the world.
Let it be said at once that the founding documents of the United States are works of local genius, offering what may have been the only possible political solution for the modern age in which the idea of an organic culture professing a common faith is unthinkable. But gratitude that the republic has existed for two centuries ought not obscure the fact that our constitutional republic, now increasingly a democracy, was made workable and successful not only by the Constitution and Declaration, but, as the greatest of the founders wrote, by locating those documents among a religious people, Christian, in fact, adherents of a religion founded not in 1689 or 1776 or 1789 but on that hill in far away Palestine at the beginning of time as we count it.
The modern republic at its best is government for a fatherless world. Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddhin, the notable Austrian political theorist, wrote that the three natural political realities are the Fatherhood of God, expressed through His kingship, that makes all men brothers; the fatherhood of the king over the nation; and the fatherhood that creates the family. The age of kings is past, destroyed in part by the feckless, unkingly attempts at absolutism that brought down the Stuarts, Louis XVI, the Enlightenment, Hapsburgs, Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm, and in part by the age of revolutions that on philosophic grounds sought a fatherless world, not of brothers but of equal competitors, each living out the dark myth of social Darwinism. In that destructive brew, the last ingredient is the anti-patriarchy which seeks the destruction of fatherhood, that is, secular feminism.
That being as it must be, one of the last, apparently anachronistic, acts of John Paul II, and one that should engage attention in an era of political malaise, was the beatification of Charles of Austria, the last Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the year 2004. Son of Archduke Otto and Princess Maria Josephine of Saxony and great-nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph I, Charles maintained a strong devotion to the Holy Eucharist and the Sacred Heart of Jesus from boyhood. His life motto was: “To seek to know and to do God’s will and to seek to do it in the most perfect way.” His marriage to Princess Zita of Bourbon and Parma in 1911 was founded on their common dedication to Christ and the Blessed Sacrament. With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, in 1914, Charles became heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, succeeding as Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary on the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916.
Charles inherited his office from his great uncle Franz Joseph in the middle of the Great War, a war begun by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and enflamed by Austrian insistence that Serbia, the putative sponsor of the assassins, be punished. The tale of the summer of 1914 has been told often: how Austria, having exacerbated Balkan instability by annexing Bosnia in 1908, unwilling that the murderers of their future king go unpunished, encouraged by Prussia, went to war, bringing Russia, France, Great Britain, and finally the United States into the field for a bloody debacle from which Europe has never fully recovered—the Kosovo-Bosnia-Serbia hostilities of the 1990s being in part its inheritance. From the time of his accession, Charles worked to bring the war to an end, his being the only government to support Pope Benedict XV's peace effort. The dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the supplanting of monarchies, especially Catholic monarchies, by secular ethnic democracies was an understandable but baneful goal of the victors, having as such actions do their own unintended consequences, notably the unchecked rise of German influence in Europe. Exiled to Switzerland in March 1919, Charles, confident of his title and inspired by his sense of duty and the threat of post-war communism, tried twice in 1921 to regain his throne. Since he refused to be the cause of civil war, Charles accepted exile to Madeira in Portugal, but, considering his office a vocation given by God, he never abdicated his crown or title. His widow, Princess Zita, lived in mourning her remaining 67 years, until in 1989 she at last returned to Austria to be buried in the tomb of the Hapsburg emperors.
In the race for sanctity, the fact that Charles was the last emperor is merely grist for the mill, the question being, as it was with the missionaries, martyrs, and founders of religious orders beatified with him by John Paul II, how did Charles fulfill his particular vocation to sanctity? That vocation was exercised through his discharge of his duties as the ruler of the multi-ethnic, religiously diverse central European empire that was the remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, that empire founded in one sense by Charlemagne but in another as old as Constantine—or Augustus. Its boundaries shifted as nationalism broke France from it; and after the religious settlements of the sixteenth century divided its religious heart, the empire was increasingly a shadow. Napoleon, that bureaucratic wrecker of tradition, abolished it in 1806 and after the Congress of Vienna in 1814 the empire was an ideal represented by the House of Hapsburg, whose kings, even after the rise of Prussia, still ruled a territory that stretched from Tyrol to the Russian frontier and from Silesia to the Dalmatian coast.
Charles of Austria was beatified not because he was a king but because his life as a Christian, lived in the context of his vocation, was heroic, his witness to Christ, whose name was on his lips at his death, unfailing. The events of the Great War, the end of kingship represented by the death of Charles in 1922, and the subsequent establishing in 1925 by Pius XI of the Feast of Christ the King cannot have been unrelated events. The Church and the Empire had lived in uneasy alliance for sixteen centuries—the imperial prayers would not be dropped from the papal liturgy until 1955. But the ideas of Catholic kings and kingdoms had become inconceivable. Yet the original on which that ideal was built, poorly realized as are all things human, remains eternally. Christ is king forever. Thus the Feast of Christ the King was established, first in October, but subse-quently celebrated on the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last November Sunday before the Church celebrates the coming of Christ the King both as the Son of Mary in Bethlehem and with great glory at the end of the age. For that Sunday the traditional preface to the Mass recites the anointing of Christ as eternal High Priest and Universal King; that “offering Himself on the altar of the cross, as an immaculate and peaceful oblation, He might complete the pledge of human redemption; and all creation being made subject to His dominion,” delivering into the hands of the Eternal Majesty, “a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”
Other Suns, No other Son
Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in conflict with our faith because we can’t put limits on God’s creative freedom. Emmanuel Carreira, Vatican astronomer One might think that the Vatican astronomer, in the light of the perduring bad publicity occasioned by the handling of the Galileo affair, might wish to avoid even the appearance of theological controversy. But now there is the assertion that we have brothers on other planets, or at least that we may hope this is so. I leave aside the implication that His “creative freedom” might, in a somewhat Islamist or nominalist way, move the divine will beyond God’s nature as Word and Reason, into absurdity.
In making this claim, the Vatican astronomer joins that band of wise men who watch the skies like the wise men of old. But they were looking for the King of the Jews, not for what is called “life.” There may, we are assured, be “life” on Mars or Venus or somewhere beyond this terrestrial globe. The word “life” is itself part of a vocabulary in which the word “life-forms” and “lifestyle” play an important part, the supposition being that there is something called life which stands around in the universe waiting to take form, rather like prime matter in Aristotle, perhaps presently unformed, but ready to spring into being at the right moment. The search for extra-terrestrial life seems to bring exaltation when there is rumor of moss on Mars. If there were a superior race of creatures on Jupiter, it would go far to clinch an argument made consistently since the Renaissance that man is not after all, to use modern rhetoric, so very special. After all, are not all high school children told that one of the great benefits of Copernican astronomy was to show medieval man that he was not the center of the universe? So, it is thought, if we were to find our elder brothers of greater intelligence, or perhaps any creature at all, we would be put in our place.
In fact our place, for better or worse, is as the crown of God’s good creation. And the reason this is so is located at the heart of the Nicean Creed, where we are told that Jesus is God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God, not as Arius would have had it, an emanation of the divine. He is rather and gratefully God, and the Incarnation is not a manifestation of one power but the fact of the everlasting and personal union between the Son of God and human nature. That union was before the foundation of the world in the mind of God. It has been the center of history since Christ came to Bethlehem. That divine humanity is located at the heart of the Blessed Trinity eternally. There can be no other Incarnation-like event because God has been made man in an eternal union. There cannot be another rational creature somewhere in the universe because, did such a creature exist, they too would be creatures of a fallen universe and would require the sacrifice of the Incarnation, an Incarnation that would require the union of the Word with another. And this is impossible. When C. S. Lewis told the story of that enchanting world of Malacandra, with its several rational species, he knew that it must be presented as an unfallen world, a world that could be saved by being preserved from sin and death. But the universe is one. The moon is not a barrier that will keep out wickedness. And the one incarnation that sets things right has been accomplished. Indeed it is finished. There might be other organisms from moss to mammoths that share in the condemnation of the fall and the redemption of Christ, but there cannot be another Incarnation of the Word of God in another kind of nature. There cannot be another Son. When Fr. Carreira argues that the existence of God’s creative freedom makes it possible that there are other intelligent beings, he is tapping the relation between theological nominalism, the doctrine that within God’s self-subsistent being there is no focused and final perfection, and Arianism, the doctrine that God does not become man but merely expresses himself in man.
Particularity is a scandal to fallen imagination, which tends against the narrow way. One may ask why the claim that Jesus is God is so hard to accept, when it is easy to believe, like Jefferson, that He was a prophet, a teacher of a sublime morality. Why is it difficult to believe that God has been made man when we believe that God may arrive in the next space ship or that he may permeate all creation in the New Age sense? Perhaps because while God Incarnate must be loved and worshiped, He is not an idea to be played with in the mind as the fulfillment of vague hope or the answer to a cosmic loneliness, but a Lord to be reverenced and obeyed. Before Him every knee must bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord.
Walsingham New Church
The Oxford Summer Studies program was held this year at Cardinal Newman’s College in Littlemore, a village in the Oxford suburbs to which Newman retired in 1842 and in which he built the original Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas in 1836. The College in Littlemore was originally a post house, then Cardinal Newman’s college, and finally, in the 1990s, became the home of the Work, an order whose members, mostly Dutch, German, and Austrian, now manage the college as a shrine and conference center. And of course being in England gave me an opportunity to spend two peaceable days at Walsingham.
The Slipper Chapel, the tiny fifteenth-century Gothic chapel where pilgrims took off their shoes so as to walk the last mile into Walsingham barefoot, is really in Houghton St. Giles, a hamlet the center of which is perhaps a quarter mile south of the Slipper Chapel, and in it is a fourteenth-century church, Church of England now for five hundred years. The great treasure of St. Giles is a rood screen that escaped the destruction of the Edwardian iconoclasts in the 1550s and the Cromwellians in the 1640s. But it did not escape entirely, for the panels in the rood screen wainscoting depict on the left of the chancel gate painted figures of female saints and their children and on the right the doctors of the church. One can be lost in wonder at their beauty until one notices that the face of every saint has been roughly and thoroughly gouged away.
Why, one may wonder, did some inhabitant of Houghton St. Giles hate the saints? This hatred was not particularly English. The churches in the Spanish Netherlands were despoiled in a three-day rampage in 1566, and this was emblematic of Europe. God must not be incarnate. The classical iconoclasm or image-breaking of the ninth century had espoused the principle that God Incarnate, Christ the Lord, could not be represented in time and place, a theme taken up by the Edwardians, who called holy images and roods idols and burned them. But I suspect that their hatred of the images of Christ and the saints ran deeper. The Incarnation, when it is more than a romantic doctrine of God’s presence in everything, is troubling and intrusive. Catholics bring God too near. He is here on the altar, Body and Blood, the Christ Himself. He is here in the confessional helping me to become holy. The insistence of the Reformed that men must have immediate access to God becomes, paradoxically, a means of pushing God out of life, keeping Him at arms’ length, so that the more Calvinists emphasized the majestic otherness of the Lord, the less the Lord has to do with the day-to-day decisions that make up the moral life of the soul. For centuries the saints have been all around us, one great company. They pray for us because to be a saint is to be full of love, and we reverence them, one family. In the sixteenth century it became important that man face God alone, without the intercession of the saints, without our prayers for the departed, and without the prayers of the saints for us. Thus the saints of Houghton St. Giles must be faceless.
Alas, in the village of Walsingham there is another kind of iconoclasm, for the diocese has built a new church hard by the pilgrimage center. The old church had been at best ordinary. It invited the thought that perhaps it had originally been a war-time temporary building, but over the years decent statues had been collected and the little church was hallowed by prayer. Its design, such as it was, was traditional, laid out along an axis defining a path to God’s altar, a place of prayer. The new church is a theater in the round with that characteristic feature of modernity, a design that is intended to establish an affective relation between the priest and his congregation while saying little or nothing of the Majesty on high. In a subtle way the new church in Walsingham village distorts the path to God as surely as does the desecrated chancel screen at St. Giles.
The meaning of architecture, the texture of affirmations established by design, is more subtle than that of any other art. It is easy to see that the subject of poetry is life; the subject of painting is the visible world. Susanne Langer calls the subject of architecture ethical domain, a pattern of activity, it being the purpose of architecture to image this pattern in three dimensional spaces. What the old Walsingham church said was “God is here.” What the new church says is “We are here,” an iconoclasm more subtle but no less damaging than the erasing of the saints’ faces at Houghton St. Giles.
Churchill famously wrote that we first shape our buildings, then they shape us. The quality of the liturgy offered to God in the Roman Catholic churches is not everywhere the same, but too often the ethical domain thus defined is characterized by a heart-breaking ordinariness that borders on the vulgar. One can sympathize with the sentiment Evelyn Waugh expressed in a letter he wrote just days before his sudden death on 10 April 1966: “I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored.” Or only in few places and with much heroic effort.
Piers Plowman and another Fourteenth Century
The fourteenth century was like ours a time of intellectual and political dissolution. Philosophy was in decay. The great religious orders of the thirteenth century had begun to lose their zeal. France and England were at war. The pope had left Rome for Avignon.
The long poem Piers Plowman, written about 1389, was called by Neville Cogill the greatest English religious poem. A few words cannot touch the directness of heart, profound insight, and poetic skill that make Piers Plowman a classic. The author, William Langland, for whom Piers stands surrogate, was a cleric in minor orders, living in a fat country at a fat season, who sang the office for the dead to make a living. From his place near the bottom of the clerical hierarchy Piers wrote a story of the salvation of mankind, the tale of the progress of souls from “Do Well,” through “Do Better,” to “‘Do Best,” a journey made possible by Christ the Knight who took upon Himself the armor of human nature to give His life for our sins. But Piers found himself critical of the great and powerful, the merchants of course, but especially of the professional religious classes, the bishops and abbots. So critical indeed that Protestants have hastened to see this profoundly orthodox medieval poem as a kind of herald of the reformation. Aware as Langland was of the bishops and bachelors (university-educated clerics), some of whom deserted their cures under Christ for London life, who wound up working in chanceries and neglecting to hear matins and Mass, there is no malice in the poem. There is a note of regret, as in Piers’ words, “May Christ in his kindness save the cardinal and prelates/ And turn their wit into wisdom and to welfare of the spirit.”
What one is witnessing in Piers Plowman is the schism between the professional clerical classes and those in the church whom we might simply call the observant. There is reverence for Peter and a profound awareness of the reality of the church, but also criticism of priests and cardinals and abbots, not on the grounds that they have left the faith, but on the grounds that they are imbedded in the culture in ways that make them irrelevant to the life of faith and charity.
What Piers saw as weaknesses in 1390 would become rampant failure one hundred and fifty years later, for while the English bishops, with one or two noble exceptions, were bending to the will of Henry VIII for reasons that at least included a desire to maintain their wealth and station, More, Fisher and the Carthusians were marching to their martyrdoms.
This unlikely appearance of heroic sanctity in the middle of clerical defalcation goes some way to explain the paradox illustrated by Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, which represents English parish life in the 1520s as vibrant and well-rooted. But as events would show, the prosperity of English parish life was fragile for it was leaderless. When the test came, only one bishop, perhaps two—one might count Warham of Canterbury—stood the test. Large numbers of religious took the pension offered by the government and gave up their vocations without protest. This scene would be repeated. When the crisis came in France, in the 1790s, perhaps half the clergy abandoned communion with the Holy Father for the favor of the revolutionary state.
The image is uncannily reminiscent of the 1950s, when parish life in the United States flourished in a traditional, unre-flective way, with churches abuilding and seminaries and convents full. But Catholicism is a religion that flourishes best with leadership, never democratic, always hierarchical. St. Paul assured the Corinthians of one generation that while they had many teachers they had only one father and St. Clement assured the next that their clergy were not elected by their favor but appointed by authority, and from that day the faith has flourished when leadership in things pertaining to salvation was given fearlessly. When leadership fails, and of course it never fails universally, the church does not die—it cannot—but the distance between the observant and the hierarchy grows. As the interest of the hierarchy in accommodation with the culture grows, the piety of the observant may persist for a time, but the body of the faithful, most notably the vast body of the half-struggling un-heroic, is at risk.
In sixteenth-century England, the feckless neglect of the moral life of priests and people occurred in the midst of the building of King’s College Chapel and the finishing off of Westminster Abbey with the glorious chapel of Henry VII, and the embellishment of village churches that Duffy documents was carried out while the spiritual life of the Church was decaying under the hands of a clerical class that had other concerns. The bishops would be bullied into submission by Henry VIII; monks, most of them, bought off with a pension. And thus the people of God were laid open to the slow destruction of their faith by a political culture that scorned it. Courage and clarity returned, as ever it does, but not until suffering and deprivation had begun to recall to clergy and laity the truth that we can never make peace with the world. By 1559 the bishops had recovered courage and upon their refusal to yield was built the great edifice of martyrdom that saved the Catholic faith in England. Then as now the cancer was moral, a failure of courage and a confusion of conscience on the part of a people untaught and unled who have learned from a spiritually enervated clergy no longer to fear God more than man. The world Piers knew would not see a serious movement toward reform until the Council of Trent completed its work in 1564, and then it would be more than two hundred years until Trent had permeated the life of the Church.
So perhaps the 1390s come again, and with them days that require something of Piers Plowman’s ability to maintain love while realizing that the heart of the clerical leadership is too often not so much devoted to its Christ-given work of making saints—nothing against it of course—and to teaching the entire faith in its troublesome fullness, as it is committed to the survival of the institution and staying in touch with the culture, both projects rooted in the world that is passing away.
The irrelevance of the clerical caste can be measured by its failure to defend the family. A hierarchy interested in the success of the institution will avoid issues that distance the church over which they preside from the culture in which it is embedded. It is a fine and obvious thing to oppose abortion, an action condemned by human tradition and natural law—many philo-sophers and a majority of evangelical Protestants do no less. It is a finer thing to oppose the presupposition which allows the alienation of begetting from the context of conjugal love. The weakness of leadership with regard to Humanae Vitae will ring down the history of the post-1960 years as a source of spiritual desolation issuing in a vast unwillingness to deny ourselves and, incidentally, of our political destruction at the hands of those who love life. When pleasure is alienated from procreation, the result will be warfare between men and women who no longer have a common project that teaches charity, the destruction of marriage, the acceptance of homo-sexuality as an alternative good rather than the curse it is, and in the end, failing a great renewal, the death of the civilization.
Piers thought the issues of his day were covetousness and sloth, the love of money, ease, and station, and believed that the clergy and religious were often part of the problem, not its solution. The terms of the battle are different now, for the ecclesiastical willingness to tolerate isolation of procreation from the rich context of human love, the persisting gentle, intransigent condescension toward tradition, and the tendency to avoid teaching and preaching the necessity of conversion from love of self to love of Christ, are not as uncharacteristic as one might hope. Once again the greater one’s love for Christ and the Church is, the more distanced in heart one may find oneself, not from its heroic, Fisher-like individuals but from the hierarchy viewed collectively.
In such periods it is important to remember that the real aristocracy of the Church is not those clerks in the chancery but the saints. Routinely to confuse the moral leadership of the church with the hierarchy is like concluding that the management committee of the National Football League, not the quarterbacks, exemplifies the best of the game as it is actually played.
More than Marxism
Ideas cannot be put against the wall and shot, and the complex of ideas represented by the French Revolution, ideas that broke out again in Russia and Germany in the early twentieth century, became endemic in the 1960s and will always be part of the American political story. This complex of ideas is like Marxism but it is more than classical Marxism; it is a richer brew, and owes much to the anarchists of the nineteenth century. Its adherents are to be found in your local university, in the local teachers’ union, in the city council, in NGOs and foundations.
As a system this complex of ideas is propagated by the upper middle class on behalf of an imagined constituency of designated victims whose innocence and political righteousness is presumed. It is revolutionary. Language is not a means to truth but to power. As a system it is atheistic and perforce materialistic. It is dedicated to the destruction of the family and (typically) advocates polygyny and homosexuality. Its action committees include most of the professoriate in the soul-shaping disciplines and the educational arms of the mainline churches, including many Catholic seminaries.
To learn more of the origins of this way of looking at life and the world, read those from whose thought it is derived. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1754), with his insistence that the very organization of society, with its laws and customs, creates an unnatural inequality, is a good place to begin, and Rousseau’s life was itself an anarchic foray against what he considered convention. Then go to William Goodwin (Political Justice, 1793), to find an early opponent of marriage on the grounds that it is repressive for women. Next read one of the great nineteenth-century anarchists Max Stirner (The Ego and Its Own, 1846), for one source of the idea that any idea is repressive and that reality and self-assertion are synonymous. Go on now to Antonio Gramsci (1896-1937), the Italian philo-sopher and revolutionary who developed the concept of cultural hegemony and popularized the idea that civilization is not (as Marx maintained) driven by inevitable historical forces but is defined by a hegemonic complex of ideas that revolutionaries must make their own, preferably through gaining control in peaceable ways of education. Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, 1964) was a great favorite among campus revolutionaries in the 1960s, bringing to philosophical fruition the conviction that liberal toleration could be as severely repressive as the detested politics of the right. William Ayres, of Weatherman fame, is a disciple of Saul Alinski (1906-1972), the original community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals (1971). Ayres is the heir of this tradition, and, not unexpectedly, occupies a chair in the University of Illinois.
If this polyglot collection of thinkers shared one idea it was that the western tradition is unjust and corrupting and must be overthrown. If there is a second it is the anti-essentialist position that forms and meanings are products not of truth discovered but of will asserted.
You, gentle reader, have paid and are paying for these ideas through your taxes and through your charity. Marx said that capitalists would sell communists the rope with which to hang their capitalist enemies. In fact the rope has been a gift. For these ideas, often in weak form, are the staples of university and seminary life. So when in a political year we see them, in form weak or strong, each paraded across the stage of public debate, be not surprised.
James Patrick / C ollege of Saint Thomas More, Provost
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