What Are We to Do? - Part II
by Peter Wust
Feast of St Sylvester, Pope of RomeAnno Domini 2020, January 2
Now, first of all, it would be possible to allow things to go quietly forward in the direction they have taken for the last three or four centuries, the steady downward trend of intellectual and spiritual secularization to proceed unchecked. We should then look calmly on while the positivist spirit of the age reinforced still deeper its dogma of the mere immanence of being and propagated it steadily among the great masses of people. The inevitable consequences of such a nihilistic apostolate are scarcely doubtful. The example of Moscow should have proved to the most blind indifferentist that where the purely fatalistic principle of laissez-faire
is given full rein events will work out their inevitable logic and produce the fall of Western civilization. For when man loses faith in the power of positive ideas, things begin to dictate to him the law of their intrinsic development, arid – amazingly enough – always find nihilistic personalities to carry out their work of destruction when constructive personalities are wanting.
We might, indeed, ask what it matters, after all, if Western culture is destroyed. It would not be the end of the world. World history would merely assume a fresh aspect, by the shifting of its center of gravity from Europe to some other continent. And the Catholic could go further, and add that even if Western culture were destroyed, the Christian work of salvation and its natural-supernatural institution, the Church, would survive the ruin intact.
No Catholic worthy of the name would attempt to deny this last contention. For him the Church of God – portae inferi non praevalebunt contra eam
– stands fast as a rock amidst the ebb and flow of temporal movements. And yet we, too, we men of the Christian West, are called upon to assist, by our action and our sacrifice, in assuring the stability of the Christian sanctuary in a non-Christian world. This indeed belongs to the supernatural aspect of our Western history. But from the natural standpoint also we are faced by a demand no less grave. For “man must make history,” as Willy Helpach aptly puts it; that is, it is not permitted to any man or race to renounce the will to heroic action, so long as even a spark of life remains in that man or people.
It is, of course, possible to visualize another possible development. History is, after all, not only the work of the human will. It represents a certain cooperation between the human and divine wills, a mysterious interplay between the providence of God and the intentions and deeds of men. We might therefore ask whether God’s providence may not someday intervene directly to effect a decisive turn in this downward process? God could indeed raise up among us great saints, men and women, who would set an example to their age of supernatural life actually lived, and, at the same time, by their personal sacrifice, mystically effect, as it were, a vicarious redemption from the tremendous load of universal guilt, whose weight prevents our contemporaries from ascending to a higher level of existence.
Has not this perhaps actually happened in France? Was not the spiritual life of nineteenth-century France penetrated in its entirety by the silent, one might almost say anonymous, sanctifying work of quite simple people, who offered themselves to God in order to make atonement, not for themselves alone, but for their country and their age? And were not these souls genuine springs of spiritual power which, as time went on, watered the land which Voltaire and his fellows had laid waste? Already we can estimate how much the revival of the Christian spirit among the Catholic intelligentsia in France owes to the holy life and work of such a man as the saintly Curé d’Ars. Do we not meet everywhere with the profound traces of his activity. Those who have read Huysman’s Cathédrale
or En Route
or Bernanos’ Sous le Soleil de Satan
– I have no intention of excusing or concealing the jansenistic blemishes of this latter work – will understand the extent of France’s debt to this single man. And they will also understand what it means. It means that for humanity there is not only a degrading solidarity of fate and guilt, but a solidarity of goodness also, and that whenever a human being in silent self-dedication devotes his life wholly to God, the general level of personal conduct around him immediately begins to rise, whether or not we are conscious of the effect.
Why then, we may ask, should not God raise up among ourselves also some great figure, like, for instance, St. Francis or St. Dominic, who through the miracle and grace of his character would bring about at one blow the great reaction, which the weakness of our hands and the poverty of our souls makes it impossible to effect by the natural way of isolated actions. It would surely be a mistake if we men of little faith denied the possibility of such an amazing intervention of Providence. But it would be equally mistaken to get rid of all personal responsibility. That would be as disastrous a fatalism as that described above. It is true, spiritus ubi vult spirat; we can never force the Spirit’s miracle of grace; we must hope for it, wait for it, beg for it. But we must never make such a hope the pretext for sinking into a mystic lethargy, for shirking personal effort. We ourselves must begin to take action, and only then may we justly expect that God will act with us. We must ourselves try to prepare for the new outpouring of the Spirit.
~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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