Crisis in the West - Part I
by Peter Wust
Feast of St Anysia the Virgin-Martyr of ThessalonikiAnno Domini 2019, December 30
This, then, was the quite unique and marvelous achievement of Christian humanity; the childlike cosmic realism of the ancients was not destroyed, but most admirably completed and perfected by a supernatural realism hitherto unknown. As a result, the whole architecture of being stood suddenly revealed with startling clearness before the eye of the Christian. This eye, with the strengthened visual power imparted to it by faith, now not only perceived the aspects of this world with a far greater depths of spiritual insight than the ancients had possessed, but also discovered, as never before, that most profoundly spiritual structure of humanity whose lines prolong themselves to eternity. It is true that Buddha also possessed an insight into this spiritual depth. Nevertheless, his view of the world, measured by the Christian’s depth of vision, was nothing more than a dim conjecture of the ultimate mysteries of the soul. With Christianity came to the human spirit a full awakening, and the vision of the far horizon of human self-knowledge. Christian self-knowledge meant the discovery for the first time of the complete extent of man’s metaphysical structure, and of the entire actual and potential range of his history.
Unfortunately at the present day – so great has been the aberration of the human mind – the man who upholds such a thesis at once exposes himself to ridicule. It is the crying scandal of the modern mind, which owes its present Promethean greatness to the spiritual and intellectual awakening of humanity affected by Christianity, that it has scarcely kept in remembrance even the actual historical fact of the discovery of all those spiritual continents which were then opened up for the first time.
It is especially noticeable in this connection that the Christian discovery of the spirit was not originally undertaken as a purely theoretical task with that intention. On the contrary, Christians had from the very beginning scarcely any other purposed in view beyond the solving of the purely practical problem of their adjustment, in the light of their faith, to the new objective world presented by revelation, in order that they might generate a new being within themselves. Their main task was the creation of the new man by his incorporation into a supernatural reality. And then, out of this new life by faith, there developed a new vision as well, and, simultaneously, the complete whole that is the Christian culture of the Middle Ages. […]
However, the primarily religious orientation of medieval man was already foreshadowed by the naturally religious pietas
of the ancients. It was simply raised from the natural to the supernatural plane. Belief in the supernatural mysteries of revelation now transformed the naturally religious attitude of the ancients towards immanent being into a piety that was in the strictest sense at once natural and supernatural. From this it follows that in spite of everything there exists a far more intimate spiritual relationship, from the point of view of religion, between the Christian of the Middle Ages and the man of antiquity than between the man of antiquity and one of us moderns. It almost seems as if a single great wave of faith welled up out of antiquity and spread over the Christian humanity of the Middle Ages, receiving, to be sure, at this latter stage, after the short interval of classical skepticism, a purely supernatural dynamism.
It is just this spiritual affinity between the classical man and the medieval Christian, inasmuch as both recognized the paramount importance of religion, that we must keep well in view if we are to grasp in all its bearings the transition to the specific forms assumed by modern humanity. For the decisive factor in this great process of reversal is the loss, despite the resumed familiarity with the spirit of antiquity which characterized the Renaissance, not merely of the supernatural religion proper to medieval Christianity, but also by degrees of the natural religion of the ancients. The revolution that produced our modern type of humanity is, judged by its final effects, in the last resort a radical rejection of piety in any shape or form. […]
Even through Stoicism, the most pronounced system of classical rationalism, there runs a clearly perceptible vein of the old religious dynamic. So much is this the case that even a man of the world like Cicero, when compared with a certain type of modern intellectual, is more emphatically a religious man. At the moment, however, when the complete disintegration of the old piety seemed dangerously imminent, there had already set in the new and infinitely stronger current of Christianity – stronger in that it drew upon a supernatural force – and thus, out of the flagging classical spirit was generated the new spring of a new spiritual age.
~Peter Wust, Crisis in the West
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
