What Are We to Do? - Part III
by Peter Wust
Feast of St Malachi the ProphetAnno Domini 2020, January 3
SO WIDE a gulf has opened between the natural and the supernatural order that it might seem impossible to Bridge it. Is it then to be wondered at, if one party urges a policy of wholesale retreat to the status fidei, kept uncontaminated from all modern culture, though the desecrated world be thus left to take its own way to destruction? The Christian’s primary duty, they urge, is to secure his personal salvation and the purity of his faith; everything beyond this is the concern of Providence, and that self-regulating development of modern culture which has now lost the faith for good and all.
Obviously such a counsel of despair could not pass uncontested, and inevitably it has given rise to an acrimonious dispute on the line of action to be adopted in this critical juncture. Those opposed to the policy of wholesale withdrawal plead for a courageous apostolate to the modern world, they advocate a firm advance from a position which might justly be termed a form – if only partial – of Christian Stoicism. And, however seriously the demand for the preservation of faith at any price must be taken, from another point of view it represents a surrender to the power and fatality of our desecrated modern culture, and the extremist policy of retreat intra muros
manifestly involves a stoic despair.
But a further question arises out of this controversy. Will not our disputes about the line of action to adopt result in bringing all action to a standstill, and ultimately in making it impossible? […]
Of what use, however, would it be to settle this great question of the relation between nature and supernature, between culture and Christianity, theoretically, unless we also grappled with the practical demands of the times? At a crisis like this the most urgent necessity is to act. […] But here we are back to the question: What are we to do? What are we, each in his place, to do at a crisis which must decide the fate of an entire epoch?
In treating this serious question of conscience we must no doubt recognize the truth contained in the “catacomb” policy. Every important modification of the general ethos must proceed from the profoundest depth of personalities whose interior life endures unperturbed however the tides of contemporary opinion ebb and flow around them. Modern morality has entirely forgotten that the wellspring of all ethical change must be sought in the interior depths of the soul, and that, therefore, the root of every ethic is embedded in a radical stability of disposition, in the ground once more become unconscious of the acts which manifest a moral and moralized nature.
Operari sequitur esse; actions follows being: this maxim also holds good for the being that has been and is constantly being produced by our action. Thus the first duty of the Christian today is to comply as strictly as possible with the demand of the secessionists so far as the preparation of his own soul is concerned. He must not at first presume to think of anything but of strengthening from day to day the life of faith in himself, as the early Christians did amid the decadence of antiquity. And the more cheerfully and earnestly he works at this primary task of personal preparation, the more sure will be his success. This, however, entails much more than would appear at first glance. For it means that we must eradicate in ourselves the critical, indeed hypercritical, spirit with which even Christians, as partakers of the modern mind, are filled. It means that once and for all we must avert our gaze from the temporal aspect of the Church, which, like a creeper, covers with its rank growth the eternal, and in the tendrils of which we are in daily danger of becoming entangled. We must try to recapture the quality of reverence, reverence for what is eternal in the Church. The criticism we must then employ upon the temporal accretions that surround the eternal nucleus will then become of itself different, from, what it has been of late years in certain quarters. Even if in individual cases we find much to displease us, we must accept with complete trust the general line of development that runs through the Christian tradition of the centuries. Such a confident and positive attitude, however, is possible only if with childlike joy we identify ourselves with the unity of faith. If we will do this, all the obstacles arising out of modern social distinctions will automatically vanish. The man who kneels in church before the gracious image of the Mother of God is not divided by his intellectual culture, be he statesman, artist, or thinker, from the intellectually less cultivated man who kneels beside him, for he shares with him the same supernatural atmosphere. Indeed, he feels at once that the mere presence beside him of the relatively less cultivated man passes over to him something of his being, so that a union is effected between them, in the very substance of the soul, which no method of intellectual cultivation that modern pedagogics could devise, however ingenious, could produce.
Moreover – and here also the uncompromising secessionists are in the right – this personal preparation involves of itself a certain apostolate. It is always the being of a personality which has the greatest power to attract his environment, if the latter is inwardly weaker. Moreover, it is the being of a particular quality (ad hoc) that chiefly performs this miracle of attraction; the serious, genuine being, which is no mere show, but lives in the center of the self – is objective, childlike, happy, and trustful, fed by the central energy of faith itself.
But how absurd it would be if in sight of a personality that has thus molded not isolated deeds but its very self, we continued to torment ourselves with the question whether we ought to undertake the official task of evangelizing modern culture or not? The problem is already in a fair way to solution the moment we set our hand to the plough and seriously undertake our own moral and religious purification. Inevitably the effects of our interior life and personal disposition will reveal themselves in our action upon our environment. The alternative, Christianity or culture, now loses its meaning. Every view of the universe immediately generates its specific cultural energy. Why, then, should Christianity – which, after all, is no mere view of the universe arbitrarily adopted, but the junction of man’s nature and supernature with an objective, natural and supernatural truth – be unable to effect what is within the power even of purely subjective conceptions of the world?
To be sure the faith of the Christian can never be pragmatic. From him above all is demanded a being genuine through and through. He must never content himself with the flower when the root and stem are of supreme importance. Yet if he complies with this primary demand, inevitably, given certain conditions, his tree of life will begin to bear its buds and flowers, for such is the nature of every living plant. There can be no doubt that Fra Angelico had in the first place to become Fra Angelico the saintly friar, and that with all the ardor of his Christian and childlike spirit. But it is equally unquestionable that once this condition had been fulfilled, or rather while it was being fulfilled more and more every day, the artist within him was putting forth – and could not do otherwise – the splendid blossoms of his art.
Why should not that which was possible centuries ago be possible again today? The intrinsic laws of history and of the human soul are the same at all times and in all places. We may indeed ask ourselves how long it will be before that great process of secularization is reversed whose final phase we are now witnessing. But a Question like this is, after all, thoroughly un-Christian, born of an impatient anxiety over this world. Christian faith does not live by sight, but by belief in the Invisible. And, therefore, it always involves Christian patience, that is to say, the long deep breath of Eternity. But it is actually possible to answer the question here and now. This process of regeneration will be accomplished in the very hour when we unite in the serious reform ourselves. When we have one and all effected this self-reformation, each in his own place, at once, inevitably and simultaneously, a force of attraction, natural and supernatural, will be generated so potent that none of those standing without will be able finally to resist it. No doubt the difficulties involved by the opposition between Christianity and a de-Christianized culture will not be disposed of at one blow. But they will begin to disappear, and a new age will dawn.
Yes, what are we to do? What am I to do, and what are you to do? It is, of course, impossible to answer the question in detail. But a general answer is easy. It will be this: crede et fac quod vis; ama et fac quod vis; ora et fac quod vis. Believe and do what you will; love and do what you will; pray and do what you will. And that in turn means – get on in every respect with your own work. Make yourself Christian: completely Christian. Then look around you, and perform the work that has been given you, according to your capacity. But wait in patience. For it is only sowing that his your business. Leave, with childlike trust, the gathering of the harvest to the generations that God has called to that magnificent task.
~Peter Wust, Crisis in the West
(1931)
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Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College
"God became man, so that man might become God." St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation (54:3) These words from St. Athanasius may sound, at first blush, provocative. However, St. Athanasius is restating, perhaps more simply, what St. Peter says in his second epistle: the promise of being united to Christ is that men and women made in His image will partake in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul Kingsnorth's latest book, Against the Machine, inverts this idea and opens our eyes to the world emerging at a rapid rate, the world dominated by what he calls The Machine. The new mantra of The Machine age is, instead, this: Man will become God by Man's own self-creation. Reading Kingsnorth is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to be overcome by despair. The goal of the Machine age is "transhumanism", to be liberated from the constraints of the body. For the transhumanist (self-described), the future is disembodied. The future is limitless. But this is not liberation. Because the Machine is not limited to the physical world, it follows naturally there is a spiritual nature to this lifestyle, what he ultimately identifies as a manisfestation and/or manipulation of the demonic. Whether or not you agree with his ultimate conclusion, we can see its effects. An entire generation, and many across generations, addicted to screens. Disintegration of communal life, most disastrously in the breakdown of the family. Increasing rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide, especially among children. It's clear we need a Savior, and the Machine isn't it. Instead, Kingsnorth encourages us toward a revival of community, men, women, and children living embodied lives in the same space and time: working together, eating together, worshipping together, loving each other, carrying each other's burdens. If this sounds like Eighth Day Institute...if this sounds like what the Church is meant to be, it is because this is exactly what the Church is. We are saved together in Christ. MICHAEL SIMMON currently serves as the Secretary of Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and Coordinator for Hall of Men. He resides in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and four children.
"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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