A Stylite Brings in the New Year and the Church Is One with Limits

Thy Birth, O Theotokos, has brought joy to all the inhabited earth: for from thee has shown forth the Sun of. Righteousness, Christ our God. He has loosed us from the curse and given the blessing; He has made death of no effect, and bestowed on us eternal life.

Not only all the subjects of the Roman government know the famous Symeon, the great marvel of the world, but even the Persians, the Medes, and the Ethiopians. His fame has reached the Scythian nomads and taught his love of labor and his love of wisdom. Now although I have the whole world, so to speak, as witnesses to his indescribable struggles, I feared his story might seem to those who come after like a tale wholly devoid of truth. For what took place surpasses human nature, and people are accustomed to measure what is said by the yardstick of what is natural. If something were to be said which lies outside the limits of what is natural, the narrative is considered a lie by those uninitiated in divine things. However, since the earth and sea are full of devout people who, educated in divine things and taught the gift of the all-holy Spirit, will not disbelieve what I am about to write but will surely believe, I shall write my story eagerly and confidently. I shall begin at the time he was honored with his heavenly calling. 

—for Warren Farha

The way had become unbearably slow, progress

imperceptible. Even his hunger had become

less, little more than a poorly remembered myth

of never quite grasped significance. And the field

he now glimpsed far ahead as a failed

forest whose cedars—bleached and branchless—clearly reached

The unity of the Church follows of necessity from the unity of God; for the Church is not a multitude of persons in their separate individuality, but a unity of the grace of God, living in a multitude of rational creatures, submitting themselves willingly to grace. Grace, indeed, is also given to those who resist it, and to those who do not make use of it (who hide their talent in the earth), but these are not in the Church. In fact, the unity of the Church is not imaginary or allegorical, but a true and substantial unity, such as is the unity of many members in a living body.

The Church is one, notwithstanding her division as it appears to a man who is still alive on earth. It is only in relation to man that it is possible to recognize a division of the Church into visible and invisible; her unity is, in reality, true and absolute. Those who are alive on earth, those who have finished their earthly course, those who, like the angels, were not created for a life on earth, those in future generations who have not yet begun their earthly course, are all united together in one Church, in one and the same grace of God; for the creation of God which has not yet been manifested is manifest to Him; and God hears the prayers and knows the faith of those whom He has not yet called out of non-existence into existence. Indeed the Church, the Body of Christ, is manifesting forth and fulfilling herself in time, without changing her essential unity or inward life of grace. And therefore, when we speak of “the Church visible and invisible,” we so speak only in relation to man.

The Church is called One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic; because she is one, and holy; because she belongs to the whole world, and not to any particular locality; because by her all mankind and all the earth, and not any particular nation or country, are sanctified; because her very essence consists in the agreement and unity of the spirit and life of all the members who acknowledge her, throughout the world; lastly, because in the writings and doctrines of the Apostles is contained all the fullness of her faith, her hope, and her love.

Every Christian ought to set a high value upon unity in the rites of the Church: for thereby is manifested, even for the unenlightened, unity of spirit and doctrine, while for the enlightened man it becomes a source of lively Christian joy. Love is the crown and glory of the Church.

The sacramental theology of St. Augustine was not received by the Eastern Church in antiquity nor by Byzantine theology, but not because they saw in it something alien or superfluous. Augustine was simply not very well known in the East. In modern times the doctrine of the sacraments has not infrequently been expounded in the Orthodox East, and in Russia, on a Roman model, but there has not yet been a creative appropriation of Augustine’s conception. 

Contemporary Orthodox theology must express and explain the traditional canonical practice of the Church in relation to heretics and schismatics on the basis of those general premises which have been established by Augustine.

The unity of the Church is based on a twofold bond—the “unity of the Spirit” and the “bond of peace” (cf. Eph. 4:3). In sects and schisms the “bond of peace” is broken and torn, but the “unity of the Spirit” in the sacraments is not brought to an end. This is the unique paradox of sectarian existence: the sect remains united with the Church in the grace of the sacraments, and this becomes a condemnation once love and communal mutuality have withered and died. 

With this is connected St Augustine’s second basic distinction, the distinction between the “validity” or “reality” of the sacraments and their “efficacy.” The sacraments of schismatics are valid; that is, they genuinely are sacraments, but they are not efficacious by virtue of schism and division. For in sects and schisms love withers, and without love salvation is impossible. There are two sides to salvation: the objective action of God’s grace, and man’s subjective effort or fidelity. The holy and sanctifying Spirit still breathes in the sects, but in the stubbornness and powerlessness of schism healing is not accomplished. It is untrue to say that in schismatic rites nothing is accomplished, for, if they are considered to be only empty acts and words, deprived of grace, by the same token not only are they empty, they are converted into a profanation, a sinister counterfeit. If the rites of schismatics are not sacraments, then they are a blasphemous caricature, and in that case neither “economic” suppression of facts nor “economic” glossing over of sin is possible. The sacramental rite cannot be only a rite, empty but innocent. The sacrament is accomplished in reality.

In the sects themselves—and even among the heretics—the Church continues to perform her saving and sanctifying work. It may not follow, perhaps, that we should say that schismatics are still in the Church. In any case this would not be precise and sounds equivocal. It would be truer to say that the Church continues to work in the schisms in expectation of that mysterious hour when the stubborn heart will be melted in the warmth of God’s prevenient grace, when the will and thirst for communality and unity will finally burst into flame. The “validity” of sacraments among schismatics is the mysterious guarantee of their return to Catholic plenitude and unity.

The Terror is where the first guillotines led France. The Red Terror, which took vastly more lives, was the same principle at work in the Soviet Union. The ideas that led to both Terrors—well, they’re right there in Dyson’s racist harangue, in which he refuses to answer Peterson’s perfectly legitimate and necessary question because it is posed by a white male.

“It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”

The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, biphobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”—his word—that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

Well, I still read Andrew Sullivan, and I will defend him. I’m going to do so in this post. I do it as someone who has spent the last twenty years sparring with him over homosexuality and Christianity, and who has been the target of some of his most poisonous barbs. But he is a friend, and a writer I admire, and I am going to take this opportunity to stand with him against those who tried but failed to cancel him.

Smith writes that Sully has more than doubled his income—from less than $200,000 a year to $500,000 a year—after being pushed out of New York magazine, and going to a personal subscription model at Substack (I’m a subscriber). He also writes in some detail about how incredibly influential Sully was in getting the gay marriage cause into the mainstream. I remember back in 2015 or 2016, having coffee with Andrew in Boston, and learning from him that even though he is one of a handful of gay Americans most responsible for making gay marriage a fact, he could not at that time speak at many colleges. Why? He was thought too conservative, especially by the gay left.

It is hard to overstate the role Andrew Sullivan had in shifting elite opinion to the pro-marriage side. I know this because I argued with him publicly about it for over a decade, and lost. He was often my opponent, but never my enemy. He changed history, but now he is considered radioactive. Back then, as I recall, Andrew was considered radioactive for defending the religious liberty of the people he defeated—this, because he is a principled classical liberal. Today he is considered radioactive because of race.

Here’s the important thing about this Times attempted hit job on Andrew Sullivan: he refused to say what they wanted him to say, and for that, he deserves the support of all of us who value free thought and free expression, even if we think he’s wrong about this issue.

[…]

I don’t subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s weekly newsletter because I want to be told something I already agree with. I subscribe because he’s an interesting writer who often makes me cheer, sometimes makes me angry, and always makes me think. He also has a gift for pissing off the right people.

I want to shun you from my community.

If gatherings were safely happening, I want you to be shunned from all events hosted by decent people. No wedding invitations. No conference tickets. No backyard barbecues.

I want decent event hosts to send you a card, explaining you are not invited because you are a Trump supporter.

I wish stores like Ikea and Target wouldn’t let you buy their products.

I wish your internet provider (who for sure knows you’ll be voting for Trump), would cut you off as a customer.

I want to see you shunned by every person and organization that doesn’t support Trump. No more access to their books, movies, products, music, events, artists & influencers—till you are left with nothing but Smashmouth concerts, and Ben Shapiro talking about his sex life.

Design Mom thinks you Trump voters should be unpersonned. And there are people who still don’t understand what I mean by soft totalitarianism as a real possibility for America. Bougie women like Gabrielle Blair would be very happy to be commissars.

I don’t like Trump either, but this is unhinged malice. Honestly, it is becoming so clear that this political season is class warfare, disguised as culture war.

“Unlike the imperial Russians, we are not likely to face widespread rioting and armed insurrection.” This sentence just after a reference to COVID-19. Gives you a sense of the pace of 2020 that this already feels like a small time capsule.

Yes, it’s true. We are living in Big History now. We cannot afford to be caught off guard. I’m worried that a lot of people will assume that if Trump is re-elected, that the threat from soft totalitarianism will have been averted. Not true. Not true at all. It won’t have an advocate in the executive branch, which is something to be grateful for, but I guarantee that all the woke capitalists, the media, academia, and the professions will double down on fighting “fascism” through wokeness. If you are planning to vote for Trump, don’t think that a Trump victory will solve this problem. In some ways it will slow down the drift toward soft totalitarianism, but in many other ways it will speed it up, as those in charge of corporations and institutions freak out and respond by intensifying their radicalism.

This is not a reason to vote for Trump, or not to vote for Trump; it’s just saying that the phenomenon of soft totalitarianism is far, far bigger than the presidency. Again: we can’t afford to be caught unprepared.

Farley is one more example of a gutless university administrator who is abandoning standards to placate the woke mob—in this case, anticipating what the woke mob wants before they even demand it! We are in a country now in which bronze statues of the Founding Fathers stand to be a “source of embarrassment” to our elites and the institutions they run.

This is class war conducted as culture war. 

The ruling class in our institutions want to erase American history, to purge our cultural memory. It has never been more important for us to commit ourselves to preserving our cultural memory. Chapter Six of my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies is about cultivating cultural memory as a means of resistance to soft totalitarianism. Excerpts:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

These people hate America. If Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, signers of the US Constitution, are too offensive to be memorialized at a law school in Topeka, Kansas, then what other conclusion can we draw?

Now is the time to start protesting, loudly, against this gutting of American history and American higher education by these radicals and the cowardly institutional leaders who will not stand up to them. Washburn is a public university. What does the Kansas legislature have to say about this outrage?

I think there’s also a liberatory political character to people just getting what they want for free. […] Rich people get it from the exploitation of people working for them and through their generation of rents and profits, through labor and through ownership of factories and stores. I think that when people loot during a riot, they are solving a lot of the immediate problems that make their lives very, very hard, and they may also take the opportunity to make their lives more pleasurable. Liquor is also really expensive, and it’s often one of the only pleasures people who live in those neighborhoods can actually afford, but it’s still expensive on their terms. And being able to have that stuff for free allows you to have more communal pleasure, pleasures that are totally normal.

Despite my deep unease about moving the Overton window towards the morality of looting, it is probably for the best that we know that this is how some on the left are thinking. If whether or not looting is morally correct is considered a legitimate topic of discussion and debate among normie liberal journalists, well, this is very important information for conservatives, and decent liberals, to know. You might even call it an ideological broken windows moment .

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory is quite helpful in giving us a framework to understand all this. […] Haidt writes:

The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.

It seems to me that liberals lack the conceptual framework to deal holistically with grave and complex problems like this. (Something similar happened regarding rampant gay male promiscuity in the AIDS crisis; for some reason, many liberals seem unable to hold people they regard as society’s victims responsible for their own behavior, even if the suffering of those people is to some degree society’s fault too.) We can and we should fight brutal policing through reform legislation and policies. It’s not an either-or situation.

But if you want to avoid having potentially fatal run-ins with police, then you should stay away from the drug world. If the police arrest you, you should obey them. If you have friends or lovers who are involved in criminal activity, you should get away from them at once. You should not valorize lawlessness, and you should reject a culture that does.

This 2011 video, filmed in the violent and poor black part of my city, by a rapper who is now quite famous, is an example of this last point. You tell me how young men acculturated by this kind of thing are going to avoid a life of lawlessness, and not risk violent conflict with law enforcement. It’s not going to happen. Common sense tells you that. But common sense is quite lacking today. People who grew up in functional homes, in functional social orders, may take for granted the internalized sense of lawfulness that gives us the freedom to carry on our lives without violence. Maybe we have forgotten this, and this inhibits our understanding.