A revolution you can believe in

What an interesting book Atheist Delusions is (by our reigning favorite, David Bentley Hart; out this year from Yale University Press).

The interest starts with the delusions, if you will, of its reviewers. They all meant well, I'm sure, but their method seems to stop short of the second stage of Adler's bookreading technique. The friendly urbane reviewers discuss Hart's tome as if it were a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists." One of them went so far as to suggest that Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, on the morning they were going to start writing down all their atheistical stuff, should have realized that David Bentley Hart was out there on the field already, sharpening up his Gimli battle axe, just for the enjoyable business of separating the loci of nincompoopery from the corpora of nincompoops. They should have realized this with dudgeon and ire and promptly told the valet to leave them alone and stuck their head back under the eider down.

Come now. Tut, tut and all that. This isn't at all the main job that Hart's took upon himself and done well. His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).

That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."

The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles.

Of course, the society launched by the Christian Revolution – the "Christendom" we remember nostalgically in our faux classicism (which is disturbingly like the maudlin Hellenism of Julian the Apostate) – is dead. The leftovers stand in the West like revenants and tombstones, like cute and cuddly slogans like "In God We Trust" that no one believes but feels warm and fuzzy about. Of course, that raises the strong likelihood that "belief" in the West, especially here in America, has been conflated with "warm and fuzzy": but I digress. In another place (The New Criterion, March 2004), Hart describes vestiges of Christendom, especially in Europe, in this way: "… the very desuetude of these remnants imbues them with a special charm. Just as the exuviae of cicadas acquire their milky translucence and poignant fragility only in being evacuated of anything living, so the misty, haunting glamour of the churches of France might be invisible but for the desolation in their pews."

In that particular article, Hart takes pains to draw a difference between America and the shriveling (and sterile) Christendom in Europe (which is cursed with "that misbegotten abomination, the European Union – that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity" – sometimes, one just sighs in near envy at such ripping eloquence). To this end, here is a particularly trenchant bon mot:

… it seems certain that Europe will continue to sink into its demographic twilight, and increasingly to look like the land of the "last men" that Nietzsche prophesied would follow the "death of God": a realm of sanctimony, petty sensualisms, pettier rationalisms, and a vaguely euthanasiac addiction to comfort. For, stated simply, against the withering boredom that descends upon a culture no longer invaded by visions of eternal order, no civilization can endure. ("Religion in America," In the Aftermath, pp45-6).

"A withering boredom" – that is Europe, for sure, and it will be seconded and ratified by the de-christianization of the European Union. No civilization can endure such boredom (the cognoscenti call it ennui to sound au courant). And it is a boredom that sounds disturbingly like the Matthew 12.45 demon (singing "Hell, hell, the gang's all here"): it was invoked by the secularist exorcism of "visions of eternal order."

America is different, Hart said in 2004. And I have oft said in these pages, America is a beautiful God-haunted land, though besotted with hillrod Gnosticism. He closes his 2004 article with some sanguine (or maybe, just less than bilious) hopes that America's penchant for God and Bible might pull her out of the biologically sterile, jaded and bored cultural swirly that the rest of the north-of-the-forties West is tubing in.

I don't think so. That penchant for God and Bible was and is a most Protestant thing. The trajectory started in the sixteenth century (or perhaps in the thirteenth) must always lead away from the sacred order. Perhaps Hart thinks so, too, because in 2009, there is no special mention of America as having a different eschatology.

I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.

But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.

That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.

The Christianity so warmly advertised – as a commodity – by the American religious community is digressing from the Christianity of the original Pentecostal revolution. Today's Christianity is often successful, to be sure, especially in mercantile and Osteeniac (two can play that game) terms. But it does so only by accommodating the transgressive and decadent impulse of today's world – which is dreadfully described as the "Third Culture" by Philip Rieff, and is populated by Nietzsche's "Last Men" – who don't sound like people you'd want to talk to about important things, because, you know, they don't know any important things.

Christendom is dead, and I'm okay with that. It was, after all, only a temporary arrangement. Perhaps God so arranged the Byzantine Empire to foster the articulation of the Seven Councils, to stand as an everlasting grammar of theological language; and to foster the composition of the full liturgical cycle; and to give us all memories of what has been, what could be and what is more to come to pass.

The "Christianity" of America must be scare-quoted. For it is predicated upon an increasingly greater incongruity with the Christendom characterized so beautifully by Hart:

Christianity produced a unique synthesis of Hellenic and Jewish genius; it gathered the energies of imperial culture together under the canopy of a religious logic capable of reaching every level of society and of nourishing almost every spiritual aspiration; it made temporal adversity more tolerable by illumining this world with the light of an eternal Kingdom immune to the vicissitudes of earthly societies; it promised every soul that sought God's Kingdom an eternal welcome; it gave the course of human history a meaning and design; its great epic narrative of fall and redemption, sin and sanctification, divine incarnation and human glorification provided the human imagination with a new universe in which to wander, expand, and flourish; and it infused the culture it inherited with a far profounder, far richer, far more terrible moral consciousness than had ever existed under the rule of the old gods. (Atheist Delusions, p197)

What is nice about Hart is that he says that while Christendom is dying, the Christian revolution goes on:

The true revolution was something that happened at far deeper – though often far humbler – levels; its true victories were so subtle as to be often all but invisible; it advanced not only by the conversion of individuals but also by the slow, tacit transformation of the values around it; and it became an object of genuine imperial concern only after it had achieved its principal victory among and through those whom no one would have imagined capable of threatening the foundations of the ancient order. (ibid, p197)

Hart ends with this:

… it may be the case that Christians who live amid the ruins of the old Christendom – perhaps dwelling in the far-flung frontiers of a Christian civilization taking shape in other lands [I think he means here the lands between the fortieth parallel, north and south] – will have to learn to continue the mission of their ancient revolution in the desert, to which faith has often found it necessary, at various times, to retreat. (ibid, p241)

This is a customary Orthodox conclusion, and I mean no pejoration here. The old Church has a pretty long view of things: the decline of Empire has been seen, and the disappearance of Christendom has been long foreseen. The desert was one destination when the healing Revolution of Christ seemed to stumble at the very moment of Christendom's legitimization, especially at the establishment institutions of Theodosius.

But there were other (and more likely) destinations for Christian revolutionaries. I agree that we need our monasteries for sure, and American Orthodox monasteries at that (you know: English, conservative, more on dogma, less on ethnicity). Our state of monasticism is not ready for the decline of Christianity in America. Neither is the general state of American Orthodoxy, for that matter. And no, please do not mystify me with the litanic cry of unity and canonical jurisdiction. Unity and canonical jurisdiction at this time will only foster a centralized and bureaucratic lurch toward third culture transgressivism, if you ask me (just take a gander at aggiornamento).

The desert and monasteries are vocations for only a few people. They are places to only visit for the likes of you and me.

But we are all called to the Christian Revolution. That is why I think that we should pay attention to dogma and ascetical prayer, and give "improvement" and "renewal" a miss. I do not think that organizational restructuring and ecumenical experiments are all that rewarding. It is better to become literate in Scripture and Patristics, than to be conversant in talk-show discourse on diocesan and uber-diocesan tumult. It is better to love the people in your house and parish, your neighborhood, and to regard carefully the objects in God's Creation around you. It is better to imbibe of the Springs of Pentecost in your place without moving, in your attention without gazing away into the alternative universes of "what might have been if we were only more sincere."

This is what I mean when I advertise a "sacred localism," a sacramentalization of the immediate and concrete, and a vision of infinite beauty and immersion in the energetic fellowship of the Holy Trinity.

This is why I wish that Hart's book would have stuck more to the sub-title (and I think original main title): "The Christian Revolution." The atheists who are deluded are a pretty dull lot, and are only "fashionable" (as the subtitle alleges): they are certainly not worthy "enemies."

That said. I am soon off to the desert, God willing of course.

For my fiftieth birthday, I plan to traverse the length of the Laurel Highlands Ridge Trail, about 70 miles long. I'm taking my brother along. I guess you could say that I'll be looking for America, as the sign said. But I will be praying to the Holy Trinity, in the Trinity, by the Trinity, discerning (I hope) splendor, and trying to recall, anamnetically, just how to say

Viva la revolucion!

Comments

[Fr. Gregory Long]

I hope for you a fulfilling and sacred journey. Thanks again for your thoughts.

[Stephen W]

"But we are all called to the Christian Revolution. That is why I think that we should pay attention to dogma and ascetical prayer, and give "improvement" and "renewal" a miss".

Just curious, but the word "Dogma" seems to hold an entirely different meaning for our modern society than it once did. How can we untangle this word of misunderstandings, as Orthodox Christians in light of the present culture and situation we are in?(I am basically wondering if you can give a succinct statement or working definition of how to view dogma in a practical way). Secondly, which I guess is the point; would a correct understanding of dogma practiced with ascetical prayer not bring about "improvement" and "renewal" on it's own?

[Fr. Jonathan]

It is interesting that "dogma" appears in Acts 16.4: "And as they went through the cities, they delivered them the decrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem."

The English attempt at "dogmata" is "decrees" in this context. It is clear that "decrees" have nothing to do with "opinion" or "consensus statement" or, thank heaven, "feeling."

It has to do with statements of reality, or "truth" if you will, which are "ordained of the apostles and elders."

Here there is a clear sense that the apostles and elders were participants in and communicants of the Uncreated Light, the theoria, the mystical vision, which is the source of doctrine.

I am quite sure that Dr. Hart would part company with me here, since I am happy to fly in rhapsodic theology while he must stick around in philosophical dialectic, making nice with other academics. God bless him.

But doctrine that is true is doctrine that gives articulation to the nous and forms the psyche. I have said repeatedly here that Orthodox dogma, which is symbolized by the Nicene Creed and the canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils (and poorly represented by contemporary prima facie) is the only predicate of peace and "mental health."

Now, about the poor words "improvement" and "renewal." They are Latinate constructions, after all, so I don't feel so bad about their sorry state. I take them to represent poorly designed, modernish banners that herald another project for institutional development and recruitment from the centralized elite administration. "Renewal," as an institutional expression, rarely has anything to do with novelty, Spring or Pentecost.

If renewal and improvement mean repentance, growth and theosis, then count me in, I'm all for it.