Mass, Baths, & Battles with the Nameless One

This day we celebrate one of the most remarkable feasts in the calendar. We commemorate a Saint who gained the heavenly crown by prayers indeed and tears, by sleepless nights and weary wanderings, but not in the administration of any high office in the Church, not in the fulfillment of some great resolution or special counsel; not as a preacher, teacher, evangelist, reformer, or champion of the faith; not as Bishop of the flock, or temporal governor; not by eloquence, by wisdom, or by controversial success; not in the way of any other saint whom we invoke in the circle of the year; but as a mother, seeking and gaining by her penances the conversion of her son. It was for no ordinary son that she {2} prayed, and it was no ordinary supplication by which she gained him. When a holy man saw its vehemence, ere it was successful, he said to her, "Go in peace; the son of such prayers cannot perish." The prediction was fulfilled beyond its letter; not only was that young man converted, but after his conversion he became a saint; not only a saint, but a doctor also, and "instructed many unto justice." 

The theologians praise God by every name—and as the Nameless One. For they call it nameless when they speak of how the supreme Deity, during a mysterious revelation of the symbolical appearance of God, rebuked the man who asked, “What is your name?” and led him away from any knowledge of the divine name by countering, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful” (Jg. 13:17f.; cf. Gn. 32:29 and Ex. 3:13f.)? This surely is the wonderful “name which is above every name” (Phil. 2:9) and is therefore without a name. It is surely the name established “above every name that is named either in this age or in that which is to come” (Eph. 1:21).

And so it is the Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is. Truly he has dominion over all and all things revolve around him, for he is their cause, their source, and their destiny. He is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28; cf. Col. 3:11), as scripture affirms, and certainly he is to be praised as being for all things the creator and originator, the One who brings them the power which returns them to itself, and all this in the one single, irrepressible, and supreme act. For the unnamed goodness is not just the cause or cohesion or life or perfection so that it is from this or that providential gesture that it earns a name, but it actually contains everything beforehand within itself—and this in an uncomplicated and boundless manner—and it is thus by virtue of the unlimited goodness of its single all-creative Providence. Hence the songs of praise and the names for it are fittingly derived from the sum total of creation.

R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) was an Anglo-Welsh poet and Anglican priest who lived in Wales and served in small rural parishes with his wife, the artist Mildred “Elsi” Eldridge. Thomas’s poems bear witness to the Welsh landscape, its rural inhabitants, and the changes wrought by war, mechanization, and English tourists. They also articulate a deep longing for a God who usually remains silent. His poetry is a bracing guide to living well in an ugly age, an age flattened by efficiency, an all-out quest for profits, and the globalizing machine. His verse is subversive in the best sense, plowing the packed soil of our hearts, turning over desiccated imaginations, and preparing our souls to bear fruit.

This gesture of turning aside appears in many of Thomas’s poems and reveals much about his poetic vision. There are three elements to this motif of turning: The first is that turning aside brings us “within listening distance” of the ineffable, whether that be the Welsh landscape, other people, or God himself. Second, as in “A Bright Field,” turning aside becomes an alternative both to mechanistic progress and to simplistic nostalgia. Finally, though Thomas may not see God “when I turn,” he finds him “in the turning” itself; the practice of Christian faith entails precisely this turning aside to “the eternity that awaits.” If we follow Thomas, we may learn to see beauty in an age dominated by the machine. Our situation may seem bleak, but hope lies in the eternity that awaits if we would stop hurrying on and instead turn aside.

We have had names for you:

The Thunderer, the Almighty

Hunter, Lord of the snowflake

and the sabre-toothed tiger.

One name we have held back

unable to reconcile it

with the mosquito, the tidal-wave,

the black hole into which

time will fall. You have answered

us with the image of yourself

Kyrie

Because we cannot be clever and honest

and are inventors of things more intricate

than the snowflake—Lord have mercy.

Because we are full of pride

in our humility, and because we believe

in our disbelief—Lord have mercy.

Because we will protect ourselves

from ourselves to the point

of destroying ourselves—Lord have mercy.

One of the reasons that I love the writings of Dostoevsky is his unvarnished treatment of the human condition: an axe-murderer with nothing more than silly Nietzschean musings as an excuse; a family so confused and conflicted that the wrong brother is convicted of his father’s murder. In the midst of this there shines some of the most brilliant displays of Christian understanding. There is no utopian dream of progress—only the possibility of the Kingdom of God breaking in where it should least be expected.

The current world order, beset by various threats and political chaos, is only one of many sources that stir our passions and distract us from attending to the truth of our condition. How a priest or bishop is presently handling the Church’s response to the pandemic, for example, is not a crisis nor a threat, no matter how clumsy or ineffective it might be. Indeed, if we truly attend to crises, then we will look to our own heart.

A proper goal of the heart is described in the virtue of “nepsis” (sobriety). It is that state where the passions have been stilled and we quietly keep watch for those things that would disturb and interrupt our communion with God. Quite often, what passes for “communion” in the lives of many, is an idea about God, held in an idea about a spiritual life, argued for in the context of an idea about Christianity. These “ideas” are, in fact, passions. They do not even rise to the level of true thoughts. Far likely, they represent little more than a constellation of feelings, echoing our unattended neuroses.

In our present difficulties, there is an avalanche of alarming information. Most of it surrounds the political lives of nations, some of it surrounds the present life of the Church. There are certainly real challenges within the Church, though they are not far different than the challenges that have gone on before. Those who suggest otherwise are not, I think, speaking from a place of neptic perception. As for the lives of nations, anyone who has expected great things from them is a fool. The nations daily fulfill the expectations of every cynic.

My only confidence is that the Church will abide and that the nations will get worse. These are things that need to be settled in our hearts. There, within the heart, it is possible to find the Kingdom of God where all the kingdoms of this world must kneel. There we can also find the peace that allows us to resist the siren songs of those who would draw us away from the life of the parish into delusional anxieties. Writing in the first century, where things were ever-so-less clear than they are now, St. Paul said:

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. (1Cor. 1:10-11).

Almost every creation myth begins with dark primordial water. Water is the grave. And water is life. The person rinses away the old and is purified with the new. Dust comes clean. The ancients did not segment life into compartments the way moderns do; before they were medicinal, or social, or political, or even recreational, washing and bathing were religious rituals.

Among most ancient cultures, a bath was a rite of passage. Temples and sanctuaries had fonts at their entrances. There was the first bath of a newborn in wine mixed with water, the immersion in water as a religious commitment or vow, the receiving of a guest by washing feet and offering a bath, the ceremonial bath of a bride and groom, the ritual bath after intercourse, the purification bath of a woman after menstruation, the ceremonial bath, the washing of hands as a prelude to prayer and libations, and the bathing of the dead. We find all of these and more in Japanese, Celtic, and Jewish cultures, to name a few. But the golden age of the ritual bath, at least in the West, was in Greco-Roman culture.

And these water rituals continued with the regular use of religious washings as part of spirituality in Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam. But early Christianity chose a different path.

Bradbury has stopped being a person and has become shorthand, a reference for weird fiction many would call science fiction. Even this is insufficient. Bradbury’s stories—even when they did deal with science fiction, such as “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” “R Is for Rocket,” and “The Rocket”—were not, technically speaking, science fiction, certainly not the sort that was being written by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The worlds Asimov created felt like they could work on a technical level. For example, he used his knowledge of science (he held a doctorate in chemistry) and history to make future places with backstories and their own rules. It created the illusion that a place like the Foundation or Solaris might exist in the future, whether in 50 or 500 years.

Bradbury was different, as he would attest. The ins and outs of the worlds and places he created were never really explained, largely because his worlds were meant to be experienced, much like a Greek myth or a Grimm’s fairy tale is supposed to be experienced, not intellectualized. Bradbury even described himself as a teller of fairy tales. More often than not, his stories explored ideas that could have been dissected only in a fairy tale.

His story “The Murderer,” for example, looked at what would happen if people became cocooned by and umbilically dependent on technology, and how society would react when a person tried to break out of that shell. “Punishment Without Crime” took a similar theme but approached it from a different angle, raising the question of what makes a human being when he cannot be distinguished from a robot. “The Haunting of the New” took what would be called today a Puritan lens to the idea of sin and its consequences, and “The Blue Bottle” examined contentment and desire played out on the face of a dead Mars.

While he might have been a writer of gothic fairy tales, which like the pulp stories before them were seen as of lesser quality than stories by “serious authors,” Bradbury stands alongside people like Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, and G. K. Chesterton, who used their fiction to elucidate the world, both of the dangers it faced and of the path it should take. As civilization crumbles around us, Bradbury and his fiction offer several primordial lessons we would be prudent to reconsider.

[Abraham Lincoln’s] first public speech, written well before he became a father, focused heavily on how parents have to care enough to make the case for the system to their kids, or a basic understanding of what is worthy of protection, and why, will be lost. One paragraph basically argues that everyone should talk incessantly about American values, the spirit behind them, and how they connect to each other to form a foundation for the system (in his words, “the Constitution and Laws” of America). He even argued for a special focus on infants, to eliminate the possibility that any child could experience a moment of doubt: “Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap… ”

To put it bluntly, you can’t win an argument by yelling “free speech is important, so knock it off with the cancel culture stuff!” if you’ve never convinced your child that free speech is important!

I’ve had this working theory, for as long as I’ve been thinking seriously about the arrival of soft totalitarianism—basically, since just before I started writing my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies—and trying to figure out how it is likely to arrive in full force here. As you will be able to see in my book (it comes out September 29; pre-order it at that link), the progressive left has been moving steadily to conquer American institutions, especially cultural institutions. This is not something that politics can really stop. But it has been happening for some time, and it has accelerated this year.

We are an increasingly unstable country. The state cannot live with that forever, and won’t. Unlike the late 1960s and early 1970s, the last time we faced such unrest, the state has far more technological resources at its disposal to manage dissent, and it also has a population that is less committed to traditional norms of liberal democracy. A Trump re-election might slow the soft-totalitarian process down, but it won’t stop it. A Biden election will accelerate it, because that process will have total buy-in by the ruling class within institutions and networks, especially the media.

Prepare. Everything is possible—and in a very short time.

Here is a good example of how the public schools can conspire against parents to help your adolescent child turn trans. Someone who is part of a support group for parents of kids who are going through Rapid Onset Gender Disorder sent this to me. She writes:

It is horrifying and plays into every facet of gender ideology, as you will see when you open it. The statements basically grading parental “support levels” for gender ideology and the plan to keep information from parents is doubly horrifying.

I’m sure this stuff is being rolled out throughout on-line schooling. It underlines the importance of Live Not By Lies. I hope you have time to blog about it. The left-wing atheists in my group are as upset about it as the rest of us (we have Orthodox Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic parents in my group, as well as progressive Protestant lesbian moms)! All of us are equally horrified.

In Live Not By Lies, I write about how one of the most important lessons I learned from my interviews with people who resisted Soviet totalitarianism is the absolute importance of community in small groups. It keeps up your courage and lets you know that you are not crazy, and you are not alone. Sounds like the parents in this group are living that reality.

I’m a frequent reader of your blog. Your posts, especially about wokeness in America, have been especially helpful to me in navigating the current political climate over the past several years. I felt affected by it, but only today do I realize just how directly affected I am, or will be, in the next several years.

I am an undergraduate student at [large public university]. I am taking a course this semester on technical editing, and have learned, along with the rest of the class, that our professor is “committed to anti-racism.”

The professor—this is a professor of writing—says that she is committed to “anti-racist pedagogies,” and as such, refuses to accept that technical writing and editing is about correct grammar and mechanics. This reproduces racism by upholding the idea that white American English is the only correct form of writing in the workplace. Therefore, the professor has decided in her course to root out the racism in the way she was taught, and to respect language diversity in her students’ work. She will no longer teach as if there is a correct standard for grammar and writing. Students are free to choose how to write, but they must argue for why their choices were the right ones; they can’t fall back on claiming that they are writing what they were taught was correct English.

I want people to recognize that America today is in a pre-totalitarian condition. The Arendtian factors that are clearly observable in our culture and society make us vulnerable to a strongman, or to a strong party capable of restoring order.

Andrew Sullivan sees Trump positioning himself as that figure. I think this is correct, but I also think it is quite deceptive to people on the Right. All the social-justice totalitarian things I write about in Live Not By Lies are processes, institutions, and trends that have grown much worse under Trump, and he has done nothing to stop them. It is one thing to tweet your opposition to cancel culture. It is another thing to act meaningfully against it.