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)
