What Are We to Do? - Part I
by Peter Wust
Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and of St Basil the GreatAnno Domini 2020, January 1
To answer this question seriously we must first of all clear up some preliminary questions which appear to be blocking the way to a solution of this fundamental problem of the age.
The first of these preliminary questions is this: is it still possible in principle to arrest a destiny so overwhelmingly powerful because it is the result of an accumulation of energy which has proceeded unchecked for three or four centuries? This is no idle question. The pessimism in both life and culture that has existed ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century is sufficient proof how far Western man has lost his old belief in the power of the mind and free will, which still dominated the eighteenth century, with its boundless confidence in reason. Contemporary fatalism, as manifested, for example, in the historical philosophy of Oswald Spengler, has proclaimed to the entire world that man must be regarded as simply the passive channel through which flows a stream of cosmic process wholly determined by natural law, which leaves no room for personal action.
If, in reaction against this conception, a handful of idealists take refuge in an equally one-sided method and attempt to hide with a few cheap idealistic declarations the tremendous burden of fatality which at present presses so hard upon us, this rash idealism is just as blind as the blind fatalism it combats. We have but to consider the difficult problems involved by the modern economic system, indeed by the entire machinery of that civilization which we serve, to realize that this potent destiny which we ourselves have prepared cannot be averted by an airy wave of the hand. Even the man who withdraws from the contemporary world into a lonely Thebaid soon discovers that the tentacles of civilization reach him even there, for the monasteries of today make use of the comforts of modern civilization, however determined their rejection of the spirit which that civilization represents.
Or consider the Machiavellian principle of autonomy accepted as the political principle of the modern state. How could a Christian statesman today absolutely reject this political bestiality, and build up his state entirely on the foundation of the Christian ideal of love? Obviously he could not, for by such an attempt either he would gravely imperil the existence of his country, or his own career as a statesman would speedily be cut short by an all-powerful public opinion.
We are therefore compelled to recognize both alike; the objective burden of destiny, on the one hand, and, on the other, the power of ideas, freedom, and personal action. But we must not ignore the constantly shifting relation in which, historically, these two factors of liberty and fate stand to one another. The opinion of Hegel, for instance, that history consists of a beeline progress towards freedom, must be emphatically rejected. There is no constancy whatever in the relationship between these two historical forces, liberty and fate. On the contrary, the latter force, fate, is always developing by its own momentum until the opposing force, freedom, seems reduced to the minimum of a mere potentiality. The marvel is that this mere potentiality of freedom though faced by a fatality grown so excessively powerful is sufficient to enable the human will to rise superior to fate, and, at times, with such catastrophic force that in one night, so to speak, it uproots the jungle of poisonous growths fostered for an entire age by a destiny whose sway had known no check. This occurs whenever personalities inspired by a fervent belief in their mission intervene at the right moment in the causally determined course of events. The example of a man like St. Francis in the thirteenth century should prove to us how erroneous is the doctrine, recently advanced by Max Scheler, that ideal factors are impotent in face of real factors; that is, we regard the former not, like Hegel, as ideas acting impersonally, but in that concrete form in which alone ideas normally take shape, namely personalities, inspired by a powerful faith, which have always been, through the world’s history, the agents of the Eternal.
We have only to look about us to find contemporary examples of the spiritual energy which at times a single man can infuse into his age. In Italy, for instance, Mussolini appeared, and Italy followed him. In Russia Lenin, and Russia abandoned the lethargy of Oriental mysticism and took his path. I am certainly not suggesting that in future the world must travel along one or other of these two routes. These two figures, both of daimonic power, are simply examples of what man’s personal will can accomplish when face to face with a destiny apparently overwhelming. They further prove that in principle nothing prevents humanity from returning to the Christian road, if hereafter personalities arise who will make the Christian spirit an effective factor in world history with that enthusiasm which alone has from the beginning accomplished the miracle of freeing man from the burden of his animal nature and leading him upwards to that hallowed summit which rises above space and time.
~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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