What was not said (part 2)

Gone are the days when homilists could play with time, when the Golden Mouthed one could exposite verse by verse, illuminating each event or logion with Trinitarian back-light and mystical analogy.

Today there are watches, and watchers of the big sweeping radius approaching north (i.e., noon). There is heat, no AC (we are, after all, Slavic), and thus we are more uncomfortable than the ancients. There are other things to do, promises to keep, many miles before (well, already) one sleeps.

So homilies are really introductions today, and rarely proceed beyond the proem. There is much that is left unsaid, just because it’s time.

So at Graduation on Sunday, here is what was not said. It’s probably a good thing it remained unsaid: don’t tell anyone I told you.

There’s war in the heavens, between Church and University. This may as well be said out loud, plain and right. The old liberal conversation in the public square, presided over by Rome, has deteriorated into a multiplicity of liberation narratives. The only academic language left is not the grammar of the liberal arts, but the newspeak patois of egalitarian pragmatique. It is very hard -- and more likely impossible -- to do philosophy in a contemporary dialect where even helper verbs are run into dispute.

There is no real quarrel between the Church (“apostolic,” that is) and the segment of the University culture that does more thinking than politicking. But there is an increasing divide between the ecclesial culture of Holy Tradition, and the abstractionist social engineering departments whose agenda collide and roil in the Petri dish of the colleges. True religion is now the only place where philosophy is intuited, and worked out in craft.

A generation ago was a piteous attempt at a non-religious craft. There was the secularist enterprise of modern art, which attempted to replace religion with an agnostic mysticism, comprised of exploded shapes, colors and lines: witness its disarray in absurdity, spinning in the white porcelain maelstrom of millionaire philistinism.

The main reason why there is diminishing polite conversation between Church and School is not only that the Gospel is the rhetoric of peace and not a triumphalist dialectic (apologetics is dead), but mostly because the School has no philosophy to talk about. Just as psychologists no longer, as a whole, believe in the soul, so also philosophers are no longer lovers of wisdom. They are partakers of theory, yes, if not veritable partisans: but not lovers, and not wise. The newly departed Richard Rorty was one of these.

Is it possible for a rejecter of trans-species evolution to win tenure at a major university science faculty, or to be appointed as director of a significant institution?

Is it possible for a president of an important university to express non-egalitarian opinions and keep his/her job?

Is it possible that the MLA would permit an encomium for patriarchal language and culture, at its annual maypole dance?

Is it possible that a seminary, tied up bound and gagged to a major university, could ever state that Christianity is the only salvation? Could it, dare it, ever say that homosexuality is framed by the first chapter of Romans? Can it even pronounce the word “reprobation” anymore?

The answer to all these questions is simple, of course, and it is “no.”

Of course, there are miraculous exceptions, but they truly are miracles – especially as miracles are defined by those who do not believe in them: an “interruption in the continuum of usual expectations.”

It is embarrassing to complain about academic unfriendliness. It has happened before, especially when the Church was rightly seen as atheistical by the pagan cognoscenti. The Christian Gospel then was relegated to "hick" stature -- surely, a position that resonated through St. Paul's discussion of the foolishness of the Cross. This antipathy from the learned, with its more recent history of traison de clerc, can hardly be called persecution.

But it is opposition nonetheless. This year’s graduates will feel the press of the number of the Beast. Today, you cannot make money or gain prestige in academia without some denial of Creation and the Creator. Today, in order to buy and sell, one must subscribe to the new and improved anthropology, sworn to by the right hand, or better, internally scribed, like a lobotomy, on the brow.

This leads me to the real persecution that may be lurking below the world’s edge. It is not in the colleges, where the worst that can happen is dismissal and ridicule. These are the petrushka tactics of thespians, who still believe themselves to sit, sophistically, in the seats of principalities and powers.

Their crowns are paper, of course. The grantors of tenure and sheepskin dither about the manufacture of God in their own images of convenience. But this is not the conversation that matters in the world. Real power is not marked by deconstruction -- this is only a tool, a mystifying agitprop to keep the histrionic sophomores of academe at bay.

Real power is clear in its own house, and doesn't waste time with mystification. Its conversation does not now, nor did it ever, dither about the Truth of the Gospel -- it knew, without a doubt, the reality of God from empirical evidence, from its own direct experience of perdition.

God no longer matters in the conversation of humans (clearly, an achievement of the principalities). He only matters in His Church, as this is why the Church has always existed. But the silence about God in the agora is the simple reason why the Great Conversation has sputtered into silence.

Philosophy without God is nothing more than the chattering, fly-specked vestibule of Dante.

But what does matter to the principalities (whose crowns are real) is the re-invention of man. It is anthropology, not theology, that you can get killed for even today (just ask the victims of infanticide and geriatricide). Man is to be understood as an individual, and as a spot on the matrices of actuaries. He is to be quantified as a profile of five super-factors of personality and genetic markers. He is to be valued as a resource and an income. He is to become a proper contributor to the growing capital of society. He is to be a consumer, not a craftsman: a user (especially a hyper-user or "addict"), not a maker, definitely not a steward. He is to be seen as a life form on the continuum of non-discrete evolutionary processes that may be tinkered with, modified, and terminated if he becomes too inconvenient to himself, and especially to others.

Much, much can be done in the course of human events if man can be found to not have a soul.

Or, at least, re-defined as soul-less.

Especially Image-less.

As my graduates proceed into this graduated, post-God world, they will never be asked what they believe about God, as the ancient martyrs were.

They will be asked, rather, about man and who they really are.

If they say, as we have taught them, that they are sinners saved by grace, creatures of God, and immortal, then I will be proud of them.

But I will fear for them, for the world's aversion is looming against this stumbling stone -- a scandal for the world that could just about ruin everything in the end.

Comments

[Maximus Daniel Greeson]

As always excellent posts Fr. I liked the throw to David Bentley Hart.
I doubt it, but by chance will you be attending the Orthodox Readings of Augustine @ Fordham?
Or will you be overseas?

[Postman]

You don't know how much I regret not attending the Fordham conference. It sounds like a lot of ortho-blogo-spherists will be there. Please accept and extend my regrets, and have a great time with, as Seraphim Rose called him, Saint Augustine.

I'll think of you all from Pittsburgh, and kindly.