Second Terrace

No Sale

On this Black Friday, which Sears has kindly extended all weekend long, I thought I'd publicize another sale first revealed to us by the inestimable Hilaire Belloc.

Here it is, from the magisterial The Four Men:

Story of the Politician Who Sold His Soul

You must know, then, that Peter the Politician, after having sold every public honour which he could drag upon the counter and every public office and every kind of power except his own, and after he had sold his country and his friends and his father and his mother and even his children, and his self-respect of course, and all the rest of it, had nothing left to sell but his very soul. But sell that he must, for have money he must; without money no man can live the Great Life and go out to dine in the new hotels that are built out of iron and plaster, and the Lord have mercy on us all!

Well then, Peter the Politician did up his soul in a little brown paper parcel, all beautifully-sealed with sealing-wax and tied up with expensive string; for the public pay for these things where politicians are concerned.

He did up his soul, did I say, into this little parcel? I err! It was his secretary that did it up; not his unpaid secretary – his real secretary, a humble little man.

For you must know that politicians have three kinds of secretaries: the first kind, who may be called Secretarius Maximus, is a rich man's son, and his place has been paid for: he is called secretary so that he may be advanced to office, and he does nothing at all except ride about in a motor-car and come and sit by when there is any jabbering to be done for his master. Then there is the second kind of secretary, who is usually a friend's son, and may be called Secretarius Minor; he expects no advancement to a politician's future, but only some little job or other in the Civil Service after his years of labour. And his labour is this: to tell the third secretary what he has to do. Now this third secretary, who may be called Secretarius Minimus, receives the sum of thirty shillings every Saturday, and for this he must sweat and toil and be at beck and call, and go to bed late and get up early, and wear himself to a shadow, and then at forty go and be a secretary at less wages if he can get the job, or else hang himself or stand in a row for soup on the Embankment; and there is an end of him.

Well, then, I say it was this third or working secretary who had done up Peter the Politician's soul in a pretty little parcel, in brown paper paid out of the taxes, with fine red seals paid out of the taxes, and with strong, thin, and splendid string paid out of the taxes; and since the politician was very careful about his soul and it did not weigh much, he took it with him himself and set off to the Devil's office to sell it; and where that office was he knew very well, for he had spent most of his time there while he was a young man, and had served his apprenticeship in another part of the same building.

When Peter the Politician sent in his card he was received with great courtesy by the Limbo-man who kept the doors, and he was asked to sit down on a chair in a sort of little private outer room where distinguished people await the pleasure of the Head Devil.

In this little outer room there were one or two books to read about problems, especially marriage, and there were some prints upon the wall which were not well done and which the Devil had taken as a bad debt from a publisher; and there was also a calendar, but there were no Saints' Days marked on it, as you may well believe, but only the deaths of conspicuous people, and Peter the Politician did not study it.

Now when he had been sitting there for about an hour without the need of a fire, there came in a neat little tight little dressed-up-to-the-nines little Imp in buttons, who was very polite indeed, and told him how sorry His Master was to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but the fact was he was in the midst of a great deal of business. Then the little Imp went out and left Peter the Politician alone – and he waited another two hours.

At the end of this time another taller and older Imp, dressed not in buttons, but in a fine tail-coat (for he was a Tailed Imp), came in and apologised more than ever and said that His Master the Head Devil was extremely sorry to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but would he kindly send in what his business was, and he hoped it would immediately be attended to?

Then Peter the Politician answered in his short, dignified way that he had come to sell his soul.

"Of course! Of course!" said the tail-coated Imp. "Dear me! You must excuse me; we have so much to do to-day that we are really run off our hooves. Of course," he added, anxiously polite, "there is the regular office …"

"Yes, yes, I know," said Peter the Politician as impatiently as his dignity would allow. "I know all about that office, but under the circumstances and seeing that I am known here …"

"Yes, of course!" said the big Imp again, and he went our hurriedly, and Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours.

He hummed a little and he shuffled his feet, and he drummed with his fingers, and he began very seriously to think whether he would not go somewhere else, only he knew of no one out of Hell who wanted his soul. So he sighed at last and continued to wait with as much resignation as he could.

And after another two hours there came in a very tall, gentlemanly, and deep-voiced Major Devil, who told him how exceedingly sorry he was that His Master should have to keep him waiting, especially now they knew the nature of his business, but the pressure of work that day was really awful! And would Peter the Politician, for this once, be kind enough to send in his offer, because the Head Devil really could not come out?

So Peter the Politician said severely –

"Luckily I have brought the goods with me." And he handed the Major Devil his nice little brown paper parcel, and the Major Devil went out apologising.

Then Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours. At the end of it there came in a really superior Devil with his hair parted in the middle and a standup-can-turndown collar, and the accent, and everything. He sat down genially at the same table as Peter the Politician, and leant towards him and said most affably and courteously –

"My dear sir, my Master is very sorry indeed, but there has been a terrible slump in this sort of thing since August; the bottom is quite knocked out of the market, and – and – well, to tell you straight out, what we want to know is how many you have to offer?"

"How many?" said Peter the Politician, with a real annoyance unworthy of his rank.

"Yes," said the suave and really important Secretary Devil (for such he was), "the fact is, my Master says he can't quote for these singly in the present state of the market, but if you could bring in a gross …"

At this Peter the Politician got up swearing, and went out, forgetting to take his soul with him, and leaving it there on the table all tied up.

And that is why some people go about saying that he has lost his soul, for he certainly never sold it; and this should teach you that it is not easy to sell one's soul, though it is exceedingly easy to lose it or to give it away.

Mimeograph

A church lady, at an oxymoronous event called "the coffee social," chided me for not being up to date.

"Are you on Facebook, Father?"

"No, I'm not," and she looked stern, because she was ready to offer me a prize that had something, but not exactly, to do with Friendship.

"But Father What's-His-Name is on Facebook sitting on a motorcycle in his cassock and everything."

"That's okay."

She expected me to go on with a long rationale, not getting the punchline that rationales are not needed for not having to determine the correct canonical posture for straddling an 883 in ecclesial dress.

"You could be on Farm Town, you know, I was just at So-and-So's [a mutual friend] Farm the other day and we chatted for hours."

The word "Farm" woke me up, the faux agrarian that I am. The word "chat" provoked a post-beer dull headache. And the real meaning of the word "at" made me wince, and resolve to be charitable.

"I guess I'm not up to date on these things," I stipulated – and that was me saying this, the first in his class who did the concatenation command in old DOS … the fellowship grad in his department who assured the psych Chair that "we'll never need more than 40 megs on a hard drive."

I sounded, I'm sure, like my dad's old mimeograph to her, if she knew what a mimeograph was. I mentioned this, hoping to insinuate a nuance of history into the conversation. She said she had dim memories of getting purple-printed pages in elementary school that smelt funny. I wanted to tell her "No, that's ditto, not mimeo," but I resisted – for once – the chance at doggerel.

"You probably don't even Tweet." Her disdain was peeking out from under her suburban charm.

No. I shook my head like Charlie Brown in the discouraged pumpkin patch. She probably thought my sadness was due to a wan self-discovery of obsolescence and artifacture. My melancholy was real, but it was for her and her generation.

All this chatting and texting and cyber-talking leads to over-familiarity, which the Spiritual Fathers sternly warn us against. Because, if you must know, over-familiarity always ends in disappointment, if not outright betrayal.

She's found Orthodoxy on websites (probably not this one) where one can virtually (not virtuously – that is a different thing altogether) "go to Church." She's "done" Orthodoxy on podcasts and social networking sites, on desktop and Ebook and PDA and iPhone (did I get the gnomic capitalization convention right?).

So much activity. Her and her household's schedules are frightening in frenetic scope and Saran Wrap depth. I wondered whether the home was held together with such plastic that clings.

I couldn't manage it. I could not read or think with all the chatting and practices and associations and shows and games. I could not think in paragraphs, or a sentence, with all the talking about what other people are doing while they themselves are wondering what I'm doing while I'm pecking and swiping with thumbs on a touch-sensitive screen.

What are you doing? Typing? What are you saying while you chat? What are you thinking, while touching the wares at Chico's and Brookstone's? What do you mean, behind the screen?

Nothing, of course, is the answer – but nothing while the background music is at full.

She and her Facebook Friends, usually frenetic, are bored. Full of information, but unable to hoist belief against the anxious and despondent tide of the 4 am abyss. I suspect that she prays as behavior, and cannot very often get herself away from being aware of herself trying to pray. Not praying in knowledge, when you are quite unaware that you are in the act of praying, and aware only that you are praying to Whom.

I wonder.

This is what I wish, on this blog that is more like a mimeograph.

Here is my Christmas wish from Chesterton, in a piece from the Illustrated London News on October 20, 1924:

The whole object of real art, of real romance – and, above all, of real religion – is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to fell in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments.

Chesterton and Belloc in Pittsburgh

Warning. This is something of a self-serving notice, but read anyways.

For those of you in the Pittsburgh Metro area, I will be teaching a course on Chesterton and Belloc from January to April this Spring Semester at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary (Perrysville Avenue off McKnight Road).

The class will meet on Monday nights from seven to about nine-ish. Full graduate credit and auditing options are available. Check out this Spring Semester page for contact info: http://www.byzcathsem.org/news/springcourses2010.php.

The course is entitled "Moral Theology in Chesterton and Belloc."

In addition to a number of essays and drinking songs that I will distribute, texts will include Orthodoxy, The Man Who was Thursday, The Four Men (of course), and Essays of a Catholic.

We'll have a good time.

Manhattan Regrets

I was handed a very nice invitation a few days ago.

Someone wanted my autograph on a statement that was also signed by big Christian names in the Evangelical and Catholic worlds, and this time, the promoters sought out Orthodox signatories, even hierarchs.

That is a new thing for the impresarios – the DeMoss group – who brought us the Evangelical Manifesto and the Mitt Romney campaign.

I went through my checklist of "nice things manifestos/declarations/statements/charters/resolutions/affirmations ought to say." The Manhattan Declaration ( with its own .org, no less) carries a lot of good stuff:

• Bipartisan abortion is wrong
• So is the killing of human embryos for "therapeutic cloning"
• So is the promotion of assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia
• It is wrong to dress these things up in the language of "liberty," "autonomy" and "choice"
• Of course, these things are just as bad as labor exploitation, sex trafficking, abandonment of the aged, racial oppression/discrimination, religious persecution "of all faiths," and "failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS"
• Christians and Christian institutions have been complicit in culture of divorce
• The redefinition of marriage to accommodate "same-sex and multiple partner relationships" is bad
• Non-marital relationships should not be treated as marriage
• Conscience clauses should be protected: no one should ever be forced to perform infanticide or geriatricide or socially-therapeutic homicide
• No one should be punished for preaching against homosexuality

Huzzah! Hooray! I agree with all of these.

Of course, there are some things missing in this Declaration – especially the things we might do that promote these activities. There is nothing about the redefinition of sexuality (i.e., "Everything and anything is okay, just as long as they're married") which has probably contributed to unwanted pregnancies. There is nothing about the dual-career frenzy that has "necessitated" abortion, sterilization, day-care centers, and the closing of the door of the home to the very aged whom the Declaration rightly says have been abandoned. Nothing was said about the roles of industrial, contractual society and scientism in the redefinition of human nature, and all nature for that matter.

Of course, there were the usual verbal constructions of what I call "Declaration-speak." There must be seminars in strategically chosen academic and neo-Christian hotspots in the writing of important statements, and in the wordsmithing of phrases like:

• "While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings …" Note the half-hearted stipulation that prefaces the immediately following counter-claim –
• "We claim the heritage …" Is it even possible to not claim a heritage? One can be untrue to it, which is far more likely.
• "Christians today are called …" Who is doing the calling? Is this the famous "divine passive"?
• "We … make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities …" See below on whether it is possible to do this.
• "We set forth this declaration …" How about "We declare" or "Chuck and I say" or dispense with the declarative preface phrase altogether: it is only an abstract separation from the meat of the statement.
• "… we note with sadness .." How can one be sad and just "note"?
• "We call on all officials …" What is the instrument of calling all officials? This statement?
• "We will be united and untiring …" We'll see. Institutions always get tired out or bored.
• "Our message is …" Is everything else non-message?
• "A truly prophetic Christian witness …" One thing the real prophets never did was to use this line.
• "Our concern is not confined …" Oh for the good old days when concern was confined.
• "Vast human experience confirms …" The snarky possibilities raised by this line are vast and confirming.
• "We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed …" You can always tell when homosexuality or sexuality is being talked about, because the best abstractions and ambiguities are used.
• "We further acknowledge …" So much acknowledgement. By the way, just what is "acknowledgement" anymore? A tip of the hat? An "oh, you're here"? What happens to you when you are acknowledged?
• "We understand …" Am I wrong, or are we running out of preface phrases by now?
• "As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition …" Biblical admonitions, all of them, are meant for seriousness. Are there any that Christians don't take seriously?

These non-concrete, first-person plural and "greatest-common-factor" statements will insure that this Declaration will go the way of all Declarations. And there have been many. There is the already mentioned Evangelical Manifesto. There is the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement. There are many others (check out the Ochlophobist for a recent history).

This sad history (and rather full dustbin) raises a question. Of what use is Declaration-making?

Don't get me wrong. I am not against the declarations of the Declaration. I am not even against the making of Declarations. The making of this one is surely not detrimental or injurious.

But I wonder if it is all that productive.

When such statements and temporary coalitions are made "across historic ecclesiastical boundaries," the signers always take the unsettling risk of "homogenization." That is, they take the real risk that others – who are not as well-read in the labyrinthine histories and dictionaries of the Christian world – will assume that all the signers (and the organizations that they represent) are pretty much the same, practically speaking.

It really doesn't matter that there is that nice defense clause: "we sign as individuals." Look here: if you're a signer, then the reason why the DeMoss group lobbied your signature was precisely because of your association with a judicatory or a "ministry" or a council/thinktank/lobby/PAC/university or wannabe university.

Thus, the many "cultured despisers of Christianity" (Schleiermacher's single decent phrase) are going to lump Orthodoxy together with Roman Catholicism, and with a whole dizzy array of denominations and "parachurch ministries" and even strange things called the "Alliance Defense Fund." The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh is listed six entries down from something called "Performance Matters Associates." Metropolitan Jonah is sandwiched between Dr. J. I. Packer and Tony Perkins.

I prefer (please notice that I did not begin with "We acknowledge the desirability that") a simple response from my bishop to a specific disorder of the times, just in case Vladyka's faithful are not discerning enough. If they need told that homosexual sex is wrong, then he should say so, preferably in one sentence with good Anglo-Saxon diction. If they need told that hyper-capitalism causes pride, gluttony, lust and despondency, then yes, by all means make a statement (and he has) to the faithful.

Just please don't put out one-hundred-page statements written in mind-colloidizing committee-speak (multi-syllabic latinate constructions, passive voice, first-person-plural in the non-royal sense) with "study guides" (the bane of all Sunday Schools) and "companion DVDs" and bulletin inserts.

There is one possible good use of the Manhattan Declaration: I would like it employed as a shibboleth for the National Council of Churches. If someone (you know who you are) would stand up and wave this document at the next plenary or plenipotentiary conference or consultation of the NCC and say, "Sign this or we leave," then I will cheer. I might even sign.

Okay, that was a daydream. Now I'm awake: Will Congress read the Manhattan Declaration and repent? Some may use it – as long as the focus groups and the consultants think so – for expediency's sake, but not for long. But even them, the usual friends and fellow-travelers of the Manhattan crowd: will they repent?

Will anyone repent because of the Declaration?

Repentance, and baptism, are the only reasons why we preach, or declare, or say anything out loud.

So to the nice people that sent me the invitation, I tender my regrets. To the nice organizations on the signatory list at the end of the Declaration – especially to the six or seven with whom I am (or used to be) associated – I bid you godspeed in your latest attempt in the public square.

But this is not the way to not bow down to the iron crown.

Locality, part three

Home Sweet Home

Orthodoxy is a religion of memory, but conservative America (rightly reacting to statism) is dedicated to nostalgia. The past is framed with a sentimental, hallmark peachy filter, where the blemishes and moles are airbrushed away. Nothing happens in the past of nostalgia, except a succession of Norman Rockwell prints. The whole montage is narrated by the whisky voice of Thornton's Our Town narrator: birth, youth, romance and marriage, hearth and home and death. Stephen Foster sings offstage.

I love this montage: I am drawn toward it like a siren. For me, the Sirenum Scopuli are not between Scylla and Aeaeia. They are at Almanzo's farm in New York, or at Walton's Mountain with the little old ladies and those inimitable mason jars and the Big Chief Tablet (I had one of those, just as graphite-smudged).

Nostalgia and sentiment are perilous reactions to Babylon and its progress: going home and trying to find the little house on the prairie, with the apple-wood smoke curling up from the chimney and crunchy leaves and a ham on a marble slab and the silence of winter chill groves, draped in silver gauze is a place you want to visit now at your peril, and can, despite the morose fact that you were never there.

Christianity is history, which is always forgettable: the imaginations of nostalgia are easier come by. Christianity is history: history is Christianity.

Sadly, Christianity is also a very urban, revolutionary thing. It is urban in that it cannot be thought of outside of fellowship. Moreover, it claims that human nature is rooted and must flourish in communion. There is no sense of rugged, Marlboro Man, Wyatt Earp individualism in Christianity: many Americans – and I'm one of them – dream dreams of riding into the sunset, but are awakened rudely by the knowledge that we couldn't cut it, we're too humane.

It is revolutionary. It is the only revolution. All other movements that took on that name failed to deliver on the fantasies they whipped up like gas on a fire. In the two thousand years since the Risen Christ paraded the old gods like wizened strumpets down Time's gate, the false revolutions have raised up hopes and deferred them and made hearts sick. Not so with the Christian Revolution: it alone invaded the heart where all other movements failed to answer, and it alone established the peace the passes understanding there. It alone made men, male and female, slave and free, Greek and barbarian, citizens of a trans-global heaven … not a utopian dream for sociologists who can't stand the Creed, but a hard and blinding Reality which thunders from Hope and makes rumble the soul.

It is not very conservative: if it is conservative at all, it is only conservative in a typological way. Old things and memories are meaningful insofar as they are gathered up and together into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Christianity is teleological: it is aimed by the past toward an end. Nostalgia is a visitation of ghosts and attics, like Chevy Chase in a mink fur stole at Christmas.

But Orthodox Christianity is history, and it is memory, and the only home to go to is the city we're looking for. The city we sometimes see.

I wonder how nostalgic is the Front Porch, and the American narratives I find sweet, deep and frosting to the mind's touch? How sentimental is American Gothic? Wyeth? Tom Sawyer? Copeland?

Sure it is, if I try to draw religion out of the stories and the evocations. It is sentimental if I try to run from the gray press of the world pell-mell into an emotional, semiotic ghetto. I am afraid that this is why some people are agrarian. It is also why some converted to Orthodoxy. In both cases, time will scour away all that does not co-inhere with the Word (as is its wont), and they will fail. Sentiment and nostalgia cannot found belief, only memory can and sacramental vision.

But, it turns out, memory and vision constitute the true and only relationship with the Land that there ever was. Adam the Steward discerned, through the balance of his powers (intelligence, appetite and emotion), the logos of every creature and thus he named them – simply because a name is the articulation in human speech of a creature's logos. Adam discerned, through his complete attention on the Logos as Jesus Christ the Son of God, one more reality – a discernment and reality that eludes the attention of lapsarian historians, scientists and philosophers of all strips … and that reality is nothing less than Time itself.

I go back to Adam because he is, after all, the proto-agrarian (and, come to think of it, proto-Orthodox). Except for the ineffable Christ, Adam, along with Eve, was the only human who was naturally human. As immature as St. Irenaeus said he was, Adam was at least fully and completely natural – something that cannot be said of ourselves. Thus, Adam knew of and cared for his fellow creatures under his pall. He understood the design of yesterday, and how it was enfolded into today, and how the not-yet future was known by God and was anticipated as an unfolding of beauty and peace.

The nights were for meditation and memory. The mornings for expectation. The evenings for prayer, face to Face, when all things were surely brought up in thanks, and blessed. It was, so to speak, the primitive Eucharist. All experience was remembered and articulated – history, don't you know – and spoken to the Word, Who was and is spoken by the Father to the world.

Now here I am in a decidedly non-rural place. Once upon a time I baled hay and shoved them up bat-infested haymows. I did not like it, but I did like the sweetness of cut timothy in the amber dusk. I liked the cold quiet of the snow cast fields that stretched forever gray blue into the sky behind our four towering hemlocks that used to wave, pentecostal, praise to the northwest wind.

That was my place … but not still -- for the Trees have been felled and the no-place of surburbia has sprung up in that "there." None of my old places, for that matter, are still there. Things have happened, bad and good, mostly melancholy if you want to know the truth. Asphalt and blue-light specials have plastered themselves, and the children who used to build hay forts and live in the summer are now stuck in the web, exhibiting themselves to the Google Cloud, volunteering themselves to Bentham's old fantasy of the Panopticon, now a reality, and banging on the door like the foolish virgins to the Wedding Feast: but this time the door opens, but the Master is not the Bridegroom and the Feast is not very nuptial, and the virgins are not just foolish but very non-virginal, but this time they are welcomed in, especially because of their want of oil and the deadness of their light.

Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the first sociologists, thought he could see a future in which the world would become "one large city," a "single world republic, coextensive with the world market, which would be ruled by thinkers, scholars and writers and could dispense with means of coercion other than those of a psychological nature." (Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, cited in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, p 141)

Please, your pardon for that apocalyptic lapse. I fear not a Mayan 2012, a Palin/Beck ticket or Obama's embrace of a muezzin. I fear no socialist or fascist or even a wahhabist/salafist putsch. These are all stupid fantasies – science-fiction nostalgias if you will. What I fear is the coming of an anti-Jerusalem, a dis-mental no-place where memory is vanquished and the Word – the principle of all thought – is expunged.

What I have, against this fantasia, is this Place and my Time, and my memory of all the places and times before and a history that strings them together. What I have is a real embrace, a vision of certain smiles, and a field of stars projected from a little yard. What I have is an amateur garden and a church where iron sharpens iron with full communion. What I have is a glimpse of the One Place, the New Jerusalem, which glimmers through this Pittsburgh in which I live.

What I have is the locality of Tradition in a very contrary and modern now. I have my wife's voice and smile, and the laughter of daughters. I have a choir and a council, and communicants that receive God from a service that I barely apprehend but fully commend in fear and love.

And I, who somehow missed for ages the evening walk in the first garden, pray my Place to Him. My locality thus becomes forever.

And saved.

Localities, part two

Ah, Liberty. Lady Liberty. Sweet Land of Liberty.

Never has a word been sung so much but kept so ill-defined. Under cover of ambiguity the word is exploited, and much shenanigan is done.

Liberty is usually defined for the moment: and, more often than not, for convenience. A speeder wants to be free from the approaching flashing red light. A pregnant careerist wants liberated from a bump that will turn into a game-changer. A gun-collector wants rid of restraints that frustrate his armory-building. A consumer wants tax relief to reduce his bills so he can buy more stuff. A corporation wants laissez-faire, you know, wink, so "it can employ more workers."

Orthodoxy does not understand this sort of liberty: or maybe it does understand, but it usually links this definition with the category of things to be avoided, even things that need to be repented of and renounced. The "freedom to do" seems to be the only freedom that matters these days. Such a freedom digresses (and devolves) from the old-fashioned "freedom to be," or "freedom to become."

It used to be that the highest form of freedom was more than "being able to not sin." It was, rather, "being unable to sin." This, obviously, is intelligible only in a culture where one wanted to realize one's essence, to grow into the fullness of what one is and ought to become. Any restraint hindering this "fruition" is bondage, the opposite of liberty. As David Bentley Hart remarked in his sharp little book, Atheist Delusions:

... true human freedom is emancipation from whatever constrains us from living the life of rational virtue, or from experiencing the full fruition of our nature; and among the things that constrain us are our own untutored passions, our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices (p. 24).

Times have changed. Freedom has been moved from essence to "will" – as in, "I will be satisfied," or "I will what I want, and don't stand in my way."

No kenosis nonsense here (irony fully intended).

It should not be necessary to say that Orthodoxy is still stuck on the obsolete, non-progressive meaning of liberty. But necessity demands that it be said, for there is a lot of "accidental" Orthodoxy that is besotted with freedom of the will, the freedom to do, the freedom of unrestricted choices. This is the only way I can understand some of the recent arbitrariness of administration, and some of the inward creep of commercial doctrine, and some of the taste of the faithful for modern haute cuisine like first trimester infanticide, extramarital (and gender non-specific) tickling frenzies, embryo harvesting, cohabitation, and membership in the National Council of Churches.

But still, Orthodoxy (in her inerrant state) understands freedom as "freedom to be," and does not understand the fuss about choice. The choice of commodities should never have been given the dignity of "freedom," but it is, and it is the only way freedom is understood nowadays. The choice of whether to kill an intrauterine kid should never have been enshrined under the rubric of liberty: but it is, and is now enshrined in law. Choice is accidental, and is potentially perilous to freedom.

The "freedom to do" tends toward nihilism, the belief in nothing. It is impossible to believe in choice, and because people do, their thinking and language founders – simply because belief that is contrary to nature is belief that shrivels the soul. 

That is why membership in the progress cult – a membership that embraces both sides of the political spectrum, from foraging (and forging) Acorns to a-historical (and hysterical) Townhalls, from the Heritage Foundation to the Ford Foundation – ruins the very possibility of belief and detracts from real religion. Despite their fundamentalist affectations, right-wing Christians are just as "secular" in their religious leanings as their left-wing counterparts: no one is going to tell them what to believe, out of history and memory and mystical vision … no one is going to tell them that liturgy will save them, just as no one is going to tell them that they should not purchase a widescreen TV, the newest smartphone, the latest grease-festered sandwich at the drive-through, or a mortgage they cannot hope to repay.

But this is not "liberty," my fellow Berry-ites protest: this is libertinism. And of course they're right.

I protest right back that there is a lot of libertinism in libertarianism, surely a big waving flag in the front porch anarchist march. Bill Kauffman, in his mostly agreeable Look Homeward America, describes with gorgeous sonorities the attractions of regionalist poets and painters, writers like Berry and even heroines like Dorothy Day. But then, in the same book, he pats the heads of gun-right squadrons in the hills and winks at secession movements (movements which I think are more of the bowel variety than anything sincere).

I too am an anarchist when it comes to protesting the march of Leviathan. Hobbes' dream is a nightmare to me, as Leviathan to Orthodoxy is nothing other than the Beast. But I will not fire a shot nor man the barricades, nor will I paste a bumper sticker that purports to be a "Prayer for Obama" – to wit (or nitwit): May his days be few; may another take his office. (Such evangelical fervor for imprecation makes me despair.)

I am not an anarchist who cannot abide order. Orthodoxy commends order, even the order of a state that persecutes Christianity. And this very possibility seems utterly unacceptable to a libertarian.

A Christian can survive under someone like Nero, even Diocletian.

A libertarian agrarian, like a contrary farmer, oddly enough, could not.

To be continued

Localities, part one

Is it possible to be an agrarian and Orthodox? Is it possible not to be?

The slogan topping off one of my favorite sites, the Front Porch Republic, baldly proclaims "Place, Limits, Liberty."

"Limits" is not a hard word for Orthodoxy to commend. The liberal political idea is based upon the unfounded certainty that commercial and industrial expansion is limitless. There is a mystical, eschatological belief that human nature has evolved, is evolving, and will continue to evolve into more complex form (and thus of a higher order). The expansion of civilization is a program that becomes the standard upon which all other values are based: local traditions, customs, folkways, family ties, dialects, mom and pop shops, little farms should all be bulldozed by the eminent domain of "progress."

(For progress is what a liberal believes in, not taking care of the poor: don't get excited, neocons and Obama-bashers – you don't believe in conservatism either. You, oddly, are just as progressive. It is not at all conservative to believe in the gospel of democracy, nor in its rather marshal evangelistic methods. It is not even conservative to be capitalistic: once upon a time, long ago and far away, people were rich and were thankful to God and to the poor, and did not presume that their riches were deserved and sacramental, and meant for the secular sanctification of the Western world.)

There is no way that Orthodoxy can believe in progress. The Nicene dogma is stern on this point. The Father is the Maker of all words. Human nature does not evolve: it is polluted by sin and death: it is regenerated by Christ: it is up to you and me whether we want to be human and become like Christ. We should feed the poor because we are Christian, not to make them Christian without knowing it.

Society does not evolve, either. The only reason why civilization is at all more humane than earlier brutal ages is solely because of the presence of the sacramental Church. Liberals consistently take too much credit for the humanitarian ethic, when caring for the poor and the sick is strictly a Christian legacy. So-called conservatives who attempt to base their values on classical virtues are embarrassed to discover how like Nietzsche they turned out to be, and how likely they could not survive such a society were they to time travel there.

There is no social evolution that is commensurate with the mentally disabled commercial cult of progress. Everyone in the industrial revolution was taught to buy and consume and distribute wealth through commerce. Virtue was replaced by value. Tools and things were evaluated purely on marketplace auctions, rising and falling according to supply and demand. Memory was given over to nostalgia. Belief was exchanged for opinion and preference. Needs were replaced by wants.

The end result of that cult has been a degradation of human nature to near total depravity: acquisition and consumption have descended to the basement of the human psyche, to the point where the passions have become so prevalent that they are invisible to objective view, and are redefined now – in this "therapeutic" Oprah/realityTV culture – as "natural" and (God help us) "normal."

It is a sad thing that the bitch goddess of limitless progress has produced a depravity that the Reformed heterodoxy could not.

The limitless groupthink of the marketplace is predicated upon an escape from history. Nations have risen and have fallen, and everyone used to know this bitter truth – and the very bitterness of that limitation used to function as a crucial restraint. People used to know that one can't do anything he wants, or (worse) become anything he wants, that it is pretty stupid to "believe in yourself." They used to know that their ancestors were smarter people, and that success was something predicated on Providence and inherited from the good will of many people. 

They used to know that human nature required nurture, that the human psyche extended infinitely beyond the wretched, ignominious containment matrices of assessment inventories – but it needed a set of certain conditions that included law and memory, mutual submission, divinely-bestowed peace and a doctrine that could not be reduced to fruitcake soundbites.

But they don't, not now. We believe only in a vague "better future." We are so inane that we say, out loud and to our shame, insane things like "Change is good" (no, it isn't, if unaccompanied by repentance). We even have modern 2.0 releases of "churches" that buy into the limitless cult of progress: that, by the way, is the only way to understand chimera like the "church growth movement" and reprehensations like the "megachurch."

So, "limits" is a good, easy word. An Orthodox Christian, used to ascesis and submission to dogma, can really sink his teeth in that one. But "Liberty" and "Place"?

To be continued …

The Final Revised Houts Modified Inventory of Spiritual Gifts

(replacement of the Wagner Modified Houts Inventory)

In each item, select one of the two pared single words or phrases, separated by an ellipsis:

1. Comfort … Peace
2. Nostalgia … Memory
3. Mission Statement … Great Commission
4. Optimism … Hope
5. Probability … Providence
6. Incontrovertibility … Catechesis
7. Individuality … Co-inherence
8. Dysthymia … Grief
9. Ecstasy … Joy
10. Anxiety … Prayer
11. Freedom to Do … Freedom to Become
12. Entertainment … Order
13. Fun … Submission
14. Virtual Reality … Icon
15. Potpourri … Incense
16. Celebration … Quiet
17. Empowered … Meek
18. Self-esteem … Hunger for Righteousness
19. Confidence … Poverty
20. Dance … Penance
21. Contemporary … Pure in Heart
22. Influential … Persecuted
23. Convenience … Trinity
24. Excitement … Jesus
25. Education … Sacrament

Scoring: the more right-handed responses, the better.

Rain and the Word

On a rainy morning, the day after Pokrov (our celebration of the Virgin's Protective Veil over the Holy City), we are bludgeoned with the party announcements that welfare-recipient AIG (and probably other Wall Street dole-addicts) is rewarding itself with Gomorrah-bonuses for successful necromantic antics. A few blocks away, Goldman Sachs is handing out $23 billion in bonuses to itself for Christmas (I am willing to call this a sin, especially as it is money derived from indentured servants – how's that for a non-ambiguous, non-ethical-board-attenuated-and-sans-committee-studied position statement?).

One percent of America has more dough than everyone else put together.

I will resist, for now, the temptation to wax despairing on Babylonian hijinks. Alas.

But I wonder, for now, about one troubling, vexing question.

The Church tells us that the Cross and Resurrection rendered the old pagan pantheon of gods – Olympus, Valhalla, Tenochtitlan, Angkor Wat – powerless once and for all. No matter what our moonlight and crystal friends say, whilst promenading around the maypole, there is no going back to Tír na nÓg. There is, if the Christian witness is to be believed at all, only the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ is the only Word.

I know that's pretty offensive, but that's that in the Easter optic. There is no other god on the horizon after the cosmic cataclysm of Pascha.

This is old stuff. We know this already.

But god-making is always appealing. The wilderness of modern living makes one long for a golden calf, as opposed to the headaches and frustrations one gets from the rumbling lugubrious cloud on the Mountain.

So after Zeus and the Dagda, Odin and Quetzalcoatl and Shiva have been shown the cranial door, the modern world has been very busy at the fire, gold-plating one object -- or conceptual framework or weltanschauung or critical theory -- after another.

Not "gods" (God forbid), but certainly cognitive structures that wield divine-looking authority. Not "myths" in honest full disclosure, but certainly organizing and criticizing cultural constructs that have their own modern – but very religious-looking – categories of sacred and profane, clean and unclean, open-minded and close-minded, modern and contemptible.

Still, Pascha has given those sneaky gods, too, the pink slip. There is nothingness behind their vapor. 

And here I must admit to no little nostalgia: I would rather the old honest pagan gods than these new post-Christian ones. At least they were less bloodthirsty: the twentieth century wars were, after all, occult liturgy. Every modern battle (i.e., fought for policy or ideology instead of morals) is really an incantation.

But the new gods are the philosophies and schools, the narratives that were fashioned in the shadow of the receding Church that's been retreating back to the catacombs ever since the statecraft of 1500 and beyond. These are the attempts to stand on one's own in time and space and meaning, without any reference to Heaven.

I wonder, today, while I and our Father's House are covered by the Protective Veil, whether "Christ or Nothing" applies to just the gods of old. I wonder if it also applies to everything that functions as a golden calf. I wonder if it applies to the non-theistic theologies of Adam Smith and Marx, Rorty and Lawrence, and to the just as non-theistic fundamentalisms of Hitchens and Dawkins, along with those of Kristol, Perry and DeMint, Falwell and Osteen.

I wonder if the Paschal light not only portends the Twilight of the Gods, but also the twilight of meaning and knowledge. Take away the Word, how is any sentence possible? Take away the primal Story of the Incarnation (which is the DNA, if you will, of Time), and how can there be any narration at all?

I wonder – stupid proletariat anti-abortion creationist and agnostic-capitalist that I am – while I am told that bonuses are good for the country and that anything that Obama does is bad for Christian America – I wonder if meaning itself can stand by itself, for very long at all after it leaves the light of Pascha?

It is a sad thing that well-intentioned people like Eliot and Lasch, and good people of the earth like Berry and Hanson, really hope for the renewal of culture, or – as Lasch put it – its "redemption" and "conversion." These are Christian words: even the concept of "renewal" – in the grammar of critics – is really an idea that cannot be divorced from its familial setting in the Church. I think their hope is misplaced.

Has cultural conversion ever happened, apart from apostolicity?

Is conversion even possible when the logos of nature – both outside and inside, human and extra-human – is forgotten, despite our microscopic analysis? Is it possible when people's experience is becoming even more vicarious and less direct? When their language carries less ideas and more mere data? Like bees communicating to the hive where the pollen is to be found?

After the Word is forgotten, will sentences fall apart?

But here in the precincts of the Veil, we hope that the salt and light will continue to illumine and preserve, even in the courts of the agora. Here, apart from the cosmic muzak in the mall-flourescence, there is Sacrament and Tradition to save us from the many-headed hydra of the gnoses. There is still the Story told that keeps history intact, still enables the mind to articulate thought in complete sentences.

Still, there is Prayer to the Trinity that keeps the world turning round, even with so many who refuse to believe this is true. Even with so many who flock to a new slavery, who trade their minds for the patently modern comforts of consumption and demagoguery. Even with so many who have so much but rejoice so little.

Under the Veil, in the Holy City, the Paschal Light so shines before men.

But outside, in the rain, the sentences get shorter.

In the young morning

In the young morning nowadays in an October chill sharpness with a subtle burnt leaf overtone, I think, from burnings the night before from a rusted fire can in the East Pittsburgh ravine where Westinghouse armature winders used to live,

Sapphire up about forty degrees, a third of the sky from the westing gibbous moon, there is Aphrodite looking right prettier from afar as a star than she would up close and scientific, eight hundred sulphuric degrees and very volcanic: the soviets found out from a dying whimpering probe crushed by heat and fried by weight and acid. Just like the soviets to find out just where hell was, so damn close.

But in the silver pre-dawn black rum velvet she's still goddess, far, beyond and not what the nasa dossier and elementary science text books say she is, the smirching books that have scrawny names on the inside of the front cover where last year's is the very guy who kicked you into the urinal at Roosevelt Junior High, you, heh, did better than he.

But she and the stars, the places in spaces, moon and delta soon and abysmal noon and ethereal flight in aching joy, sapphire fire, she and the stars and the far mysterious places can be walked to, still. The paths are free, abide and are stretched far over the sundering seas.

In 1969 Frank Borman sent me a sign with the noble centurion heads of the three who rounded the moon on Nativity, in literal gnostic space he read on gnostic radio, "In the beginning," which gnostics don't believe in. Been a fan of nasa, the only agrarian one, ever since, a life scout who liked knots and neckerchief ties and waited for apollo and gemini.

They'll go far, maybe, stealing money from poor people, the saying goes, but as the rocket throws up moon dust for ice and circles comets and near-earth asteroids and finds other little oids marbeling around fuzzy stars through subtle permutations of radiations and hoping – with religious ecstasy, mind you – for new earths, and floating humans for weeks and years rehearsing for Ares and Constellations and Orion, I say a rousing amen.

My friends wedded to ceres and persephone who say things like trust the land which I don't understand forget that whack kerouac and wanderlust padding in American dust, the road ever going on and on for there and back again, they forget that part of nature who goes and seeks and doesn't always return exactly homebound by circumnavigating the world: there is, GK, that elevation of spiral after all, coming full round.

There, a real one flaring, trailing fire forty, seventy degrees, to the Pole vault high, LEO then LaGrange, let us drink to their manhood, God bless the wayfarers and bring them harbor home.

But they do not sail on water, or kite the wind, they do not make it noon, and even in sargasso sea, even in the monster tides below the capes, it is still the earth, still the natural voyage, still the familiar terror, still Adam reminded. They do not slog through rain-drenched laurel leaves or bank a fire against a dusk of portents and wolves and blue black woods, and do not know the husky smoke tinged scent of laphroig in a seasoned battered cup, at the end of prediction, at the beginning of time.

It takes an earth to journey, and man.

Mission control in Houston is gnostic, full of eschatology.

They steal the rhyming away and erase the other side of appearances, these eschatologies of other worlds to escape to just in case this one is messed (and the transhuman choir goes "amen"); of other intelligent life forms – nay, of just good ol' life-forms since there's still just static on the good ol' radio – to escape the Trinity with (and chaostician choir intones, sentimentally, "amen," despite the fact that Kurt was right); of other technologies – more dembodying – to escape the weather and the soil, and the mundane tragedies that frustrate masterpieces of career extrapolations and ego-trajectories … these outer space eschatologies are just old reruns, in cathode ray black and white, sandwiched between I Love Lucy's, of lucifer's endless-loop hype, orbiting the world in a gnostic ship but never getting down to earth, knowing about but never knowing, abstract and only self.

Jacobin eschatology will destroy the world, the world that abstraction leaves behind, the world of inns and oak tables, ale and cheese rounds, stars and time enough to navigate our paths back together again.

Come with me out of your phosphorescent space ship that is no good for you, blue flickering in the last night of your nature, climb out into the starry noon. Come with me in this bistro of mine by tallow flame: is not this tempranillo from la mancha gracious, carrying in its breath the spanish dusk of mediterranean September? Come with me, we've stuck a candle in the empty fifth, and let us be convivial in song and story, let us talk about our women and children and their games and brightness; lay aside their plans and aptitudes and salaries, as curses and vulgarities, agenda for lesser societies that suck on hell. Come now, let us be friends again and laugh and think orthodox thoughts and poetry about blood and bread, wine and body, water, grain and oil, and the sunrise wind of anodyne.

Come with me, we can still walk the path of stars, the lady light still shines in silver sapphire and sable deep shining. Come with me and soon, for true seeing and eloquent eyes, and remembering ears and childlike gaze that stands open, surprised, to the nightwind echoing the shore in the eaves, this is the way back to the moon.

The way back in the light of night, in the young morning, when the lady still shines through the bridged abyss, whence will and act, word and time, are one.

Up there is Major Tom, drinking Tang, floating in a metal can, velcro-stuck between shots of pink bismuth. His sensors will make observations and make Venus even uglier, more infernal. Facts and abstractions take the journey away: go a million miles, still locked in an orbiting brain.

Here on the last homely house we journey still, we who know and do not know, in young mornings and October chill.