The most important essay of the year

I'll go out on a limb here, knowing full well that raspberries will be sputtered by my marxist friends, but here goes.

This is the most important essay of the year, and the next. It is without peer. I cannot believe that the New Criterion folk framed this as a fourth part of an otherwise forgetable series called, annoyingly, "Future Tense Part IV."

Here is a paragraph, a sample:

After all -- and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny it -- the structure of a culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation. A civilization's values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendent desires, and a people's greatest collective achivements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order.

(I break the paragraph into more manageable bits)

This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but oly because the gods have first called out to mortals.

There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elemtns.

They disclose their unseen world (!!!) by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privleged places where divine and human gazes breifly meet.

Well, then. I'm glad to be alive in 2011, and to see this on a page printed for the first time.

Comments

[FrKevin Long]

Thanks for bring this article to our attention.

[Reid]

Yes, thank you very much.

[FrGregACCA]

A certain blogger of Mexican descent, recently having reverted to full-blown Marxism (a lousy economy will do that), states that in fact, Marxism is a synthesis of Hegelian dialectical idealism and materialism.

Or, as Marx himself put it, "Theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses."

[Greg]

I thought this essay was rather wandering, unfocused and occasionally wrong headed. You are quoting the best and most true paragraphs. Let me offer another quote in compliment and perhaps as partial corrective to the latter half of Hart's contribution:

"One must ask whether evangelical religion was simply colonized by capitalism during the peak of the U. S. industrial revolution. Were these churches merely the gilded totems of a capitalist age? Were they artifacts that furthered the ideology of wealth and consumption, bathing it in a glow of sanctified virtuosity and thus justifying it and the materialistic lifestyle it encouraged as sacred?"

Jean Kilde, When Church Became Theater

[Fr. Jonathan]

You know, Greg, by the time I mulled over everything, especially the conclusion, I've come to the same assessment.

For an astute and ascerbic philosopher, who usually demands precision, his critique of the gnostic American religion is pretty soft.

I think human nature declines toward a default gnostic "culture" (if you will) -- and so the American gnosticism that is ascendent in mormonism and neo-revivalism is not surprising. That it is so powerful a phenomena has more to do with its sociological inevitability in a consumerist age, and less to do with its validity -- or, in Hart's interesting term, its "angels."

You're right: the paragraph I quoted (and waxed enthusiastic for) was the high mark: everything after fell into a mix of Harold Bloom and a nod toward the neo-cons.