Crisis in the West - Part II
by Peter Wust
Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of RomeAnno Domini 2019, December 31
Three distinct phases of this peculiarly modern development of humanity must now be distinguished. In the first of these the supernatural idea of God gradually grows dim, and slowly but surely the supernatural order of life fades from the field of vision. This process extends from the beginning of the Renaissance to the Deism of the eighteenth century. The second phase is the comparatively short interlude formed by the German idealism of Goethe’s day. We ourselves are in the final phase. This evolves a positivist and historicist humanism and ends with the total uprooting of man.
It should be borne carefully in mind that it is during the course of the first phase – during the development, that is, from the Renaissance to Deism – that the really decisive crises occur. That is because it is during this period that the destruction of the religious unity of the Middle Ages is accomplished. This fact is usually ignored, because at that time, in spite of the inner decadence, an astonishingly high level of culture was attained, while the fruits of decomposition did not become apparent in any way until the second, nor fully until the final phase. […]
Perhaps the feature that characterizes the first phase of the modern spirit, extending from the Renaissance to the development of Deism, is the definitive substitution for the life of faith of a life that finds its end in secular culture as such. Whereas, in the best periods of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, the cultural achievement is, so to speak, the automatic result of a life steeped in the liturgical consecration of religion – natural in antiquity, natural-supernatural in the Middle Ages – at this point the center of gravity is suddenly and fatally shifted. The cultural achievement becomes the primary consideration, the sanctity of religious fellowship and the life of faith of secondary importance. […]
However the man of the Renaissance may have pictured to himself his increased delight in secular culture as a return to antiquity, he failed to perceive that in reality he took only a connoisseur’s interest in the fragrance and bloom of the old civilization and had little understanding for that fundamental piety from which the fair fruit of human culture had sprung. […]
The final dilution of the inherited faith of antiquity and Christianity is represented by the fourth type of man, in the second phase of secularization. It is the humanism of Goethe and his age. Again there is talk of a resuscitation of antiquity. And what is actually attained is but the last remnant of the faith that still survived from that idealism of the reason, itself little better than a ghost, which had characterized the Enlightenment. It is true that at times Goethe’s work breathes something of that delicate perfume which marks the Catholicism of the Rhineland. But, when we look more closely into it, we see that it is merely a pleasing play with aesthetic categories; the tremendous, supernatural substance is lost; we are but faintly reminded of the metaphysical depth from which once sprang as a serious reality the life of an entire age. […]
Now appears before us the fifth type of humanity, the completely uprooted civilized man of the closing nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who, with his ideal of a perfectly uniform and standardized internationalism, is preparing the destruction not only of Christianity but of human culture in general. It is man living a life in puris naturalibus, from whom every remnant not only of religion but of metaphysics also has been eliminated, and who, admitting nothing but the abstract law of Things, will recognize the religious convictions of mankind merely as natural phenomena witnessing only to the laws that have produced them.
~Peter Wust, Crisis in the West
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"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.
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