Second Terrace

future phobic

 

Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. Fearful of the the future, that is. Sort of a phobia of "The times, they are a-changin'."

And I shouldn't be, that is. Shouldn't be future-phobic. After all, the first generation of Christians incorporated into the Word made flesh, destroyer of hell and raised from the dead, was not future phobic at all. 

They were radically orthodox enough to say, without question, "Maranatha." It doesn't matter whether this ancient aramaic term is taken in an imperative sense ("O Lord, come"), or in a perfect tense ("Our Lord has come"). In both cases, there is a huge confidence in the fact that Christ is Person and He is infinitely Real, and His Body is a mystical culture of Peace that embraces all reality. Seen and unseen. And beyond.

"Peace to you," He said, and that Christological peace prohibits future-phobia. This peace through Christ and in Christ is the only possible peace at all. So in this, the fundamentalist anti-cultural doomsayers (and future-phobics) are correct when they intone "No peace until the Prince of Peace." 

But on the other hand, this peace is not deferred to the future. It is present as Christ is present. Christ is even more present, after Pentecost, than He was in the events of the Gospel. It is the height (or depth) of "un-orthodoxy" to speak or act as if Christ were somehow "not present," or somehow less experienced than the Gospel experience of the apostles. It is a tragic pathology to reduce the meaning of the "Word" to just the printed text of Scripture -- such a reduction is a modern invention, and may have had a hand in turning the modernist project so awry.

Christ is present, as Peace, to you and me in the Eucharist (and all the mysteries) and in the Orthodox Gospel of theology -- a narrative "project" that began with the apostles and has been elaborated to moderns ever since.

Sacraments are the substance of Beauty. Theology is the experience of Beauty.

And Beauty is the prophecy of Peace.

And Peace displaces and overcomes the future phobic temptation that seems to be afflicting many of us.

This fact has practical implications. There are more, but these are just a few.

The first is a mere suggestion of doubt. Not in divinity or orthodoxy by any means, but in institutionality as a ecclesiological construct. In particular, I'd like to serve up an irritating question (something like a grain of sand ticking off an oyster): is it really profitable, or even ethical, to worry about institutional viability when it is hardly certain that what is worried about (i.e., the church in the future) is an institution at all? A few texts -- like David's own experience with a census (1 Chronicles 21); Gideon's phobic insistence on numeric strength (Judges 7); and the Lord's own failure in the church growth movement (John 6.66) -- might be instructive. 

I mean, just Whose institution is it anyways?

The second implication is like unto the first. Permit me to preface the proposition with an abbreviated litany of the usual doomsaying. 1) The Pew Report (always the Pew Report, or the Barna Report, or some sociological occult prophecy -- has anyone noticed how close surveys resemble augury?) in its latest screech warns that the "nones" are gaining the upper hand and millennials are leaving the church in droves. 2) The church cannot retain her young people, and young people are not taking their place in stewarding the church (i.e., no one new is running for Church Council). 3) America and the World are getting so damn immoral. Cohabitation. Non-traditional sexuality. Gender identity fluidity. The dominance of pornography as cultural force. 4) The news cycle makes it sound like Arkham's been busted open and the basement's been let loose (e.g., ISIS, riots, gangs, terrorists using pressure-cookers, meth labs in the sticks, heroin in Smallville). 5) Because entertainment and celebrities with power.

Note that I didn't take time to make a nice bulleted list, for the simple reason that you've heard all this already.

But I will set out two more sentences of this dark litany for special notice:

6) The Church is entering into a time of persecution in America. This has long been said all over the place in conservative Christian America, and now it is being chanted in Orthodox America (perhaps because of importation by converts like me). This article is a good example of such a jeremiad prophecy -- tightly analogous with the OT prophet's warning of state dissolution as a consequence of moral ruin. I was intrigued, in this essay, by the possibility of juxtaposing the bedtime reading of Madeline with a narrative of a confessor's torment at the hands of a modern tyrant. The conclusion of the essay was clear:

"The kids wanted to hear more, so I promised to find other (appropriate) passages to read for them later. That boring Sunday liturgy looks different in light of what Father George suffered for it, and to be able to say it in prison. I could tell a change in my children’s view. These are the stories we have to start telling our kids. They are the stories that belong to the church."

Please note that I do not doubt any of these sentences. I, too, am honored to be a member of the fellowship that includes Fr George. I think young people ought to be acquainted, well, with the history of the Church, and the biographies of her saints and martyrs -- if only to reinforce the reality of Christ's presence and His transcendence.

It may be that all the surveys and all the observations are correct. They are likely true because America has never been as Christian as people thought. Morality may not have been so successful in the past as has been assumed, in the popular narrative. And, dare we say it, ethnic communities that revolved around the church have been completely assimilated into the dominant culture.

But I doubt the efficacy of doomsaying in either keeping kids in church after they graduate or insuring the survival of orthodoxy. And I struggle against such (and all) future-phobic language. 

I have lived with the language of impending doom for over fifty years: in that narrative, America has always been in decline. The Rapture was always coming. The Communists were always on the verge of taking over. The liberals were always toxifying the faith. Strangers were always invading the community, messing things up. 

And I have to tell you, these narratives never worked. They never packed the church. The kids, made to watch "A Thief in the Night" and "The Burning Hell" and getting entertained by rock bands and praise choruses and made to feel important, left anyways.

Future phobic language not only does not work.

Future phobia is, more importantly, toxic.

This leads me to the last sentence of the litany, a sentence one can either be phobic about, or faithful about. And that is this:

7) Never before in human history until this moment -- when there is one civilization unified with one culture (whatever we want to call it) -- has humanity been so non-metaphysical.

Indeed, if civilization is anything, it is anti-metaphysical (despite its complete dependence upon metaphysical realities).

And what can we do for that, when it comes to our kids, our church, our communities, our personal existence?

You can go ahead and tell the scary stories and linger in a doom that might even be likely.

But far, far more important is this: Tell the narrative and doctrine of Christ. Teach your children well -- tell them how to answer the insane and inane anti-theistic complaints of our nitwit culture. Teach orthodox theology by first learning it yourself -- a theology that must go far beyond the simple propositions of brochure catechisms and even exceeds the likes of Pomazansky and Romanides -- these catechisms are not enough for an anti-metaphysical age. By all means, read out loud the saints and the elders: but you need to read and teach the Fathers' doctrine much, much more.

Abba Zosima told Alyosha, in The Brothers Karamazov, to "tell the stories." Certainly do this. But the abba's advice, while necessary, is not sufficient. It is not enough to narrate stories: wisdom (i.e., apostolic theology that is continuous with philosophy) necessitates plunging into the depths that lie beneath the prima facie "simple reading of the text."

We don't want to admit this, but come, let us reason: theology calls for a humble surrender of Occam's Razor.

So ...

Take your kids and yourself to Liturgy every single Sunday -- not to survive the future, but to live today.

We need the Eucharist to live in the here and now. Only secondarily do we need it to prepare for a future that we will never predict accurately.

Do you trust God with Time?

Do your kids believe that God's Will is a Good Will? Because you are convinced of this yourself?

And one more thing. Do you know the real reason why kids not only leave church, but do not return?

Because they are sick and tired of church fights and family arguments. They are tired of denunciations at Sunday dinner. They needed discipline and order and love: they never needed domination and authoritarianism and cultish anti-cultural esotericism. They needed guided and encouraged to engage the present, not to run from the future into a fictional narrative that lies about the past.

They were told "Peace be unto you." 

They looked for peace.

But didn't find it.

A proposition for evangelism

Real conversion to real Christianity starts with the awareness that God is not only real, but He is Love (and thus Trinitarian), and entrance into His communion.

And as He is Love, His culture is Peace.

Thus, His Church must be peace, and the ways of evangelism can only be that: transcendently peaceful and beautiful.

So, the felt and experienced culture of the Church will be different, necessarily, from the surrounding dominant culture of violence and domination. The Church really does not need to worry so much about other religions as it needs to be concerned about the opposite of its own Christological culture. After the Resurrection, the other gods are only constructs.

Simply put, when St Paul said to "come out from amongst them," he is calling the Church to exchange the values of the dark world for the values of the fellowship of the Light:

Competition is exchanged for Cooperation.

Conquest is exchanged for Compassion.

Celebrity is exchanged for Humility and Meekness.

Rulership is exchanged for Servanthood.

Demand is exchanged for Generosity.

Anger is exchanged for Reconciliation.

Materialism is exchanged for Sacrament.

Anger is exchanged for Reconciliation.

Solipsism and Soliloquy are exchanged for Prayer.

Isolation is exchanged for Solitude (thanks, Henri Nouwen).

Conformity is exchanged for Fellowship and Personhood.

Acquisition is exchanged for Simplicity.

Self-Pity is exchanged for Repentance and Meekness.

Lust is exchanged for Friendship.

Self-Orientation is exchanged for Worship and Taxis.

Violence and Power are exchanged for Peace.

Finally, and ethically speaking, evangelism is only for neighbors. It is not to be directed to anyone else. But just who is my neighbor? Ah, there's the rub.

Do this, and God will give your Church (whether local or diocesan or ecumenical) all your neighbors who want to know Him, and accept His love. Don't do this, and all the PR campaigns and media slots will devolve into shadow and dry dust, shaken off the sandals.

Gravitational heresies

Here is a list of attractions that have persistently invited Christians, over the centuries, to veer off course. Surely, when you're off the course, you've dropped into heresy.

But there are bad attractions (like sin and passion and atheism), and then there are "good" attractions. And for these latter ones, Christians really ought to always be "attracted" by these:

1. Universalism -- i.e., the belief that everyone (including the devil) will eventually be saved. Yes, it's a heresy (ask Origen, maybe). But the idea should at least remain appealing. No one should be happy about the inevitability of perdition. And, for God's sake, no one should ever "need" or be assured that someone is going to hell. It is better to be a Universalist than to be a Double Pre-destinarian. Better to believe in Gaia than to believe in a deity that damns before conception.

2. Pacifism -- yes, we all know that there will never be perfect world peace until the Messiah comes for the second time. But frankly, in this day and age, Christians need to "man up" and admit that there is and never was a truly Christian warrant for violence. At best, the "just war" theory -- as dubious as it really is -- is an accommodation with the way the world is. And at best, the provision of personal and family defense is just that also -- only an accommodation: it can never be part of one's Christian birthright (please note, before the fever sets in, that we are speaking of defense against humans and not sport or, less likely, the necessary provision of food).

3. Charitism -- this is a made-up word, admittedly: but it represents the tendency toward giving money and food away to those in need, and even supporting the State's involvement. Indeed, one can go too far along these lines (and one often does), and becomes so liberally accepting that he gives up on theism completely, and becomes "religiously" communistic (and ends up supporting a tyrannical culture of revolution). After all, it was the Byzantine State that invented hospitals, and one doubts very much whether present-day libertarians would have enjoyed the taxation economy of Constantinople's regime. True, there are real Christian criticisms of socialism (as usually defined) -- enough so that prevents any acceptance of a socialistic state. But at the same time, there are real Christian criticisms of capitalism: enough so that prevents any Christian acceptance of the system that we now have.

4. Environmentalism -- yes, there are crazy EarthFirster's and moonbats who demand a "return to the wild" (like l'enfant terrible Rousseau). But Christians should be able to tell the difference between these folk, and the much more valid concern for the land. All Creation belongs to the Creator -- so the whole idea of owning land is temporary at most -- and we call this temporality "stewardship." "Dominion" has never meant foolish exhaustion of resources, or the ugly befouling of natural beauty -- which is itself a symbol of God's Beauty. Christians should always "tend" toward environmentalism. They should at least remember that the paternal protection of the beautiful land and its creatures is the first and truest meaning of "conservatism."

Wanted: stuff for the new year

In January's past, I've posted glum and glowering prophecies/prognostications and cranky resolutions.

But I've gotten tired of the chicken little rhetoric, and have gotten more used to flux. I say this with some caution: the fact remains that "the times they are a-changin'" is truer of the last decade than the sixties, I kid you not.

So instead of making an annual Jeanne Dixon litany of predictions, I'd rather list out a series of essays that need written for the American Orthodox audience.

These are things I think we need:

1. A history of the convert experience in the Orthodox Church. I suggest that we select, arbitrarily, 1987 as the "since date," since that is the year of the most famous influx of evangelicals into Orthodoxy. I would like to know how converts have fared in this odd new home that differs so profoundly from the American style protestantism that they left. There are so many paths that converts have taken: some have gone from one jurisdiction to another, seeking for the most faithful rubric. Others have become politically liberal -- even liberal in social moral issues. Others have gotten tired of the radical difference and have gone "back home." And others have rejected the Nicene faith entirely.

2. A study of the value (or unvalue) of maintaining old world cultural traditions in the contemporary American experience of Orthodoxy. Does ethnic tradition sustain retention? Does it help in evangelism? Is it as important as old world ethnics say it is? Is it really as bad as what many converts (and some ethnic rejectionists) say it is? Is there, really, a continuing value in hellenism or russophilism? Are these interchangeable values? Are "lesser" cultural traditions -- i.e., carpatho-rusin, serbian, syrian, ukrainian (vis a vis russian), georgian -- just as important? Should newer (at least "newer" to Orthodoxy) ethnicities be just as valued -- like hispanic, african (and I accept that this term is a simplistic abstraction of many distinct cultures), japanese, chinese and native american ethnicities?

3. A ecclesiological analysis of how church administrations have "programmatized" ministry into "needs segmentation" -- much in imitation of American protestant jurisdictions. We have church schools and youth ministries that are -- aside from some obvious content issues -- indistinguishable from their protestant analogs. Many Orthodox summer camp (itself an evangelical derivation) campfire song repertoires are exactly the same as evangelical campfire repertoires. It's really weird when a konvertski priest goes to an Orthodox event and finds himself singing along with "Pass It On" -- "It only takes a spark, to get a fire goin' ..."

4. A nice "projective" essay that draws a line between two realities: Orthodox Holy Tradition, with its ascetical and sacramental ethos of synergy in theosis, on the one hand ... and on the other, the realities of this American moment -- informed as it is by the very weird American narrative and its nested gnostic gravitation; and, at the same time, confronted by the aggressive press of technological and oligarchic globalization. In other words: If we had to do it from scratch, how would we do it -- without any concern for funding or keeping less-than-holy constituencies happy?

5. And finally: a good answer to the question "Have Cyril and Methodius arrived at the American analog of Prince Rastislav's court?" If not, how far have they gotten?

I can answer, confidently, the first of the two questions with a big fat No. But I'd like to ponder, with you, the second and more important of the two.

An academic question

I do not think I've ever done this before on this blog, but I'd like to pose several questions.

There is no irony here, and this is not a rhetorical question, so do not worry. I am interested in your response.

What do you see as the value and goals of an Orthodox Seminary today?

How do you think such a Seminary needs to change in order to accommodate cultural changes -- which, as you may have noticed, are going on at light speed?

As some of you know, I teach at a small and faithful Orthodox Seminary, and these questions literally comprise a matter of life and death for all such institutions.

Seminaries are where we train priests -- at least, for now: do we dare consider giving up, wholesale, all the artifacts of the humanist university, and relocate clergy-training more locally into the diocese, deanery, the parish or monastery? Do we settle for "distance-learning" and/or internet-enabled "virtual academic communities"?

Time was when we required the learning of "old country" languages, like Church Slavonic, Byzantine Greek, or even Latin, and some facility in philosophical discourse. Nowadays, I wonder whether a seminarian wouldn't be better off learning conversational Mandarin AND Spanish, and learning how to code (i.e., web apps, etc.).

Here is a current article from WSJ that brings a few of these issues into view. Russell Moore suggests that there might be some hope for seminaries who preserve a strong, organic attachment to the ecclesial communities they serve. Usually, such an attachment is a given in Orthodoxy -- but at my old evangelical alma mater, one is hard pressed to find explicit signs of denominational distinctiveness. So I am happy about my school -- it has certainly fared better in continuity than my old protestant seminary.

But the pressures for distance-learning continue to mount. The economy for the middle to lower-middle class population -- from which most seminarians by far are derived -- has made attendance at seminary more and more difficult. Distance-learning (and/or "virtual community") appears to be a convenient fix for this problem. I, however, think that community and fellowship -- especially a fellowship so critical as a seminary, which is modeled ideally on the three-year sojourn of the apostles -- must involve the exchange of molecules, not just electrons.

Is this just me, a romantic agrarian luddite wannabe?

And this is just one area that pertains to my general question: what do you think about the future of the Orthodox Seminary?

A penny (well, at least a virtual one) for your thoughts.

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 …

Yet

A friend of mine and I had lunch the other day. He told me that Obama had to go. I said it didn't matter. He said that the country was descending into a Nanny State, and that we were being turned into a socialistic society. I said he should have noticed this a long time ago, when the last twenty Administrations were in power.

Conservatives like T. S. Eliot critiqued the Nanny State for engendering a culture of boredom. He, in particular, hoped that the existence of "classes" actually structured or ordered society to provide meaning: an existence that is more than "hollow."He was, of course, incorrect.

To be sure, Eliot could not have imagined that virtual reality – in its present near-total extent – could have ever been so possible. Much less he did not know that such is not only possible, but so widespread. It is now the rule.

The post-industrial society has made fools of conservatives (I speak as one). With its ubiquitous and polluted fog of virtual reality – which eclipses reality, or direct experience of creation – conservatives who would still like to use the historic language of reality are left speechless. God knows there are too many shrill and bumpkin voices who fly the conservative banner, but are really boorish right-wingers.

It turns out that the right wing is not conservative at all. They do not conserve: it goes without saying that they are not interested in conserving the environment; but neither are they interested in conserving quiet community, decent agriculture, home industry and Christian sexuality. They are not really interested in conserving or perpetuating the virtues nested in the Beatitudes – especially meekness.

You may add, rightly, that the left wing cares not a whit for these things, and I am inclined to agree. The liberal movement has ever fought the Church and her moral witness: listen, if you've a mind to, to the cacophony of media slander against the "Thou Shalt Not's" of the Church. The left wing cannot tolerate, even in their vaunted multi-cultural sensitivity, the Church's insistence that one must not engage in physical or psychic sex outside the nuptial union; that one must not participate in the homosexual sub-culture; that one must not join or abet armed revolution or rebellion; that one must not speak or act in the customs of either Sodom or Gomorrah.

I may add, just as rightly, that the right wing also disapproves of certain "Thou Shalt Not's" – interdicts that are as Traditional as the ones just listed above. The right wing cannot abide being told that Church is not something you can invent out of marketing questionnaires; that virtue has little to do with value; that goodness and beauty have an inverse relationship with consumerism and comfort; that the virtue of protecting family and land should not be confused with the protecting of wealth and privilege – the protection of which is cowardice.

I am all for reactionarianism (if that is a word) – but one must have a Tradition one uses as a criterion with which to react. Ask a Tea-Partier what is important to him or her, and they will say nothing really Traditional. "Expedient," yes, and surely so: the politics of Tea-Partying & Townhall-Whining (e.g., no taxes, yes guns, no aliens, yes drilling, no GM workers, yes rich bankers) is much like the histrionic arguments of James Carville and Mary Matalin over dinner at home.

But is there any reference to "Tradition" as the nexus of moral imagination? As a force for the ordering of mind against the hegemony of world and shadow? As a culture for the harmony of the soul with Heaven, against the epidemic toxin of passion?

No. There is no one who succeeds or leads in politics who cares dearly for the permanent things and Tradition. There is no one who conserves Nature and Human Nature.

The main reason for this, I fear, is that post-industrial society has rendered the conservative critique trite at best, and probably idiotic. (Although I take issue with being called a "village idiot" together with my fundamentalist friends – with whom I join in solidarity at the abusive expectoration of Franky Schaefer.) The old myths of bootstrap and fishing now sound cloyingly stupid: the poor who are becoming poorer and more indentured will not be helped by Amway or Horatio Alger stories. It is not enough, nor was it ever enough, to tell the poor as a class to just get a job.

In this moment – however one wants to describe it, and whatever one wants to call it – the old prescriptions do not work. We would like all the poor people to work instead of taking a dole. We write books and hope that the poor will read them, so that they will raise themselves up by their own bootstraps – a physical feat, if taken literally, whose very impossibility underlines the mythical role this expression fulfills in the cult "rugged individuality." Then there is the old saw "give him a fish, and he's hungry again … teach him to fish, and he feeds himself." That, too, is a myth that cannot be realized until the poor gets just as much welfare (and socialistic intervention) as do the rich: one cannot fish when he is starving, or worried about sheltering himself or his children.

We have forgotten that the Gospel ethic demands feeding the poor: it is silent about the business of turning the poor into capitalists so that they can care for themselves and release us from the Gospel burden.

Regionalists and phobics (like me) who hate Leviathan worry about the growing and menacing pale of the State. But we are not brave enough to consider the strong possibility that the post-industrial world, inbreathing virtual reality, is predicated upon a State that is both humanitarian and totalitarian.

And that predication means, simply (and appallingly), that such a State is here to stay, no matter how many guns we tote to tea parties, no matter how many signs are waved – misspelt – by angry flabby short-panted white-sock-and-rockported Tommy-Bahama-shirted social security and medicare pensioners.

We always knew that "Tea-Partiers" -- a group who would be happier as hobbits in Bywater -- are generally unaware of their historic and occultic surroundings. That is made cringingly clear by so many signs depicting Obama as Hitler (comment from Jesse Owens on this one?), and by those that equate Nazism with Socialism.

But what we should consider is just how unaware we non-Tea-Whiners are. We who hold our nose (rightly) at the off-scourings of Dreck TV and Il Magnifico radio-rooter-rants – we like to read Kirk and Eliot and romance our sentiments with agrarian and regionalist lyrics. 

We are troubled, however, by apocalyptic visions. We do not like to disturb our Amish reveries: we push away unbidden suspicions that prophets like Berry may hold mainly for Arcadia (and not anywhere else), or only for little clusters like the insular community in M. Night Shyamalan's Village.

In an age where world hunger lurks monstrous around tomorrow, and coastlines likely will be sinking, can agriculture really abandon the legacy of Norman Borlaug?

Can conservatives really hope for social renewal? Can they intelligently hold fast to the dream of cultural triumph? The very substance of thought has changed. And that fact alone has rendered much conservative thinking wretchedly obsolete.

Despite the lullabye croonings of Internet cheerleaders like Vincent Rossmeier, our mode of communication has profoundly affected the quality of our ability to think, and the quality of the things we think about. When our thinking is forced by events to stretch beyond routine and the usual events of our week, we usually fall apart at the first onset of any disruptive passion. Moreover, the things we think about usually do not follow the solid lines of goodness and beauty: rather, they are overpopulated by demotic urges, menial demands for comfort and a denial of Time in favor of the Moment.

I would like to say, with Eliot, that we are surely the Hollow Men. But unlike Eliot, I have to remember that Hollow Men themselves are unable to say such a thing. By definition. They look in the mirror and do not recognize the face.

The Wasteland is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous, so invisible, that the fish is unaware of its vast and profound presence. We are fish.

Liberals cannot ever know this, to be sure. Their hope is ever in mortal princes, despite their incessant and perennial disappointment. They would rather believe in Benthamite doctrines than in the simple Law of God: but dealing with God means accepting the status of "sinner," and no self-respecting liberal will ever put up with that.

Right-wingers are hopelessly unable to learn this, because they are Philistine. They are not village idiots (it is more idiotic to say so). They simply do not care about things that should be cared for. They need to grow up out of their prurient addictions but they never will.

Conservatives should know this, but they have been ambushed by industrialism and the gas cloud of virtual reality. They should have discerned the spirit of antichrist. They were busy looking for him in the ecumenical movement, in heresies and other religions, in foreign nations. But wherever they looked in other times and places, he was there at their back creeping in.

The humanitarian, totalitarian State is here. It is only secondarily mediated by the Government. It is directly mediated by the media and marketplace, which has combined into one environment – and this environment has entered not only our home and hearth, but has interposed itself in the midst of our consciousness. There are very few thoughts these days that proceed unaccompanied by phosphorescence and pixilation.

Our problem is not the Nanny State. It is, rather, the Nanny Marketplace, whose commercials are broadcast these days on the dark side of our foreheads.

That is why I tell you not to worry so much about Obama or his Republican predecessors and successors: they are, to a man, impotent at stemming the tide (even if they cared). The conservative mistake in the last hundred years is that they were too political, and boorishly so. They cared more for elections than for stories, for art and poetry. They insinuated political contests into religion, of all things, and wondered why God discredited them at every turn. They abandoned philosophizing and turned instead to Philistine sarcasm (think of Buckley here).

They have willingly joined the Gadarene rush down over the cliff and into the briny sea.

The foe of real conservatism is the spirit of antichrist. The substance of real conservatism, as the inheritor and steward of permanent things, is of course orthodox Christianity. I say this with dread, as I worry that orthodoxy, in its American manifestation, is distinctly unready to confront this malevolent spirit. God is cleaning His House for sure, and His broom is sweeping many bureaucratic corners. Leadership in a time of trial and unease must be leadership that has attained apatheia, that can discern and test the spirits, that is practiced in the fight against passion and demonic insinuation. (This lack is the single reason why there is no correction of Orthodox jurisdictional miasma, and why so much Orthodox administration is in turmoil.)

There is not enough of this spiritual fight and test today. The darksome spirit is trying to cover and confuse the permanent things. He has set up billboards all over the interstate highways of our speeding minds, billboards that hide the hollowness with plastic and charming self-esteem … billboards that hide the waste and what lies foreboding on the horizon.

Mortal princes will never look beyond the billboards. Spiritual princes should, but have not.

Yet.

Jaki and the wilderness

The Benedictine priest and renown physicist Stanley Jaki reposed in the Lord last April (2009).

I honor him especially for his afflicting all Theories of Everything (TOE's) and Grand Unification Theories (GUT's) with that especially cranky invention of Kurt Gödel, the "incompleteness theorem." Fr./Dr. Jaki used this theorem like a crowbar: and as I think that TOE/GUT's lie as the organizing myth of the current ethos, the good Benedictine physicist did the Gideon stomp on this age's fetish idols like no one else.

(I don't know if Jaki knew anything about Paul Elmer More. He would be happy to know that More, almost a century ago in Harvard, contended that any comprehensive explanation of the workings of life and the world -- i.e., "monism" -- amount to error. In his nice article on More, Prof. Brian Domitrovic points out Rousseauianism and Darwinism as two examples of "monism.")

Recently, I dredged up one of his prophetic essays in which he ventured out of the jungle of physics and onto the plain. On the cusp of 9/11, when the world was still thinking about Y2K and Clinton's peccadilloes (what halcyon days those were), Stanley Jaki wrote a jeremiad entitled "A Thousand Years from Now" (which can be read in its entirety here).

Here are some of my gleanings. Jaki's words are in italics. My snarky comments are enclosed, fittingly, in parentheses:

It became the mark of modern times to glory in turning things inside out and applaud those who claim that it is better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

(I think Jaki was referring to Rousseau here. This is not a hard guess, as most negative references about libertine secular humanism end up at Rousseau's nudist self. He is also referring to Irving Babbitt's distinction between Burke's moral imagination and Rousseau's idyllic imagination, which Babbitt and Eliot suggest is always prone toward totalitarianism of either the Marxist or fascist sort.)

(Oh, and by the way, just in case you haven't noticed: the media is populated only with fake somebodies, and has no interest – by definition – in real nobodies.)

The explosive rise of the stock market allows the media to lull the public into thinking that millennium is around the corner as the new millennium begins. This new age, as any other age, will have its own ethos as well as its ethics, because ethics are merely the reflection of ethos, or the climate of thought. The ethos keeps revealing its shallowness because pragmatism can have no depths.

(Please note that Jaki wrote this in 2001, when Wall Street was still being celebrated as the secular temple of salvation. Please note, too, that Jaki says something rotten about pragmatism – something with which I fully agree, even while taking into consideration the considerable weight of William James. James is wrong. Bentham is wrong.)

Conservatives … would be hard pressed if asked what exactly they want to conserve. The comfort of the mere status quo? The pleasure of seeing one's children thinking no differently from their grandparents? … The stability of banking rules? The supple rigidity of political power brokering that favors the conservatives? Or something deeper? Of course, there are conservatives who know better. But only a few of them dare to call a spade a spade and when they do they all too often put their feet in their mouths. This they do when they identify conservatism with politics, and, horribile dictu, with capitalism.

(Gee, I wonder who Jaki had in mind here? Let's read further --)

As to capitalism, conservatives, like anyone else, love to conserve their holdings. … For note a few conservatives … the accumulation of money, or the art of capitalism, must be acceptable only when hemmed in by strict moral guidelines set forth in the great social Encyclicals. Some Catholic advocates of capitalism have now thrown those guidelines overboard to such an extent as to create some strange perspectives indeed.

(Ahhh, it must be tough to be a neocon catholic, or at least one who actually listens to his metaphysical feedback loop. What is Bottum doing with the likes of Novak and Wiegel, who are turning into the rightist philistines that Mssrs. Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Lewis and Tolkien and all of the Agrarians and Romanides despaired of? Maybe "turning into" is the wrong term here.)

According to John Locke the purpose of the political state was to secure the unhindered accumulation of private holdings.

(This doesn't seem to square with the minimalist theory of state described in the Epistle to the Romans, or the Pastoral Epistle to Timothy; or even with the maximalist theory described in Paradiso. Maybe it's a new idea. Maybe it's even non-Christian, and if it is, then that fact adds an unpleasant metallic taste to the civil religion stew that's been brewing since Falwell's "Moral Majority" and that gloop of historiography, The Light and the Glory.)

Tools do not connote their proper use.

(This is a real scientist who said this, not a bioethicist, who usually brews – in his alchemical kitchen – intellectualized rationalizations of profit-making procedures that require human vivisection if you just look at it directly, but you never get the chance because you're too busy reading through the bioethical 5-inch binder notebooks in the hotel convention center. The bad-science/hyper-technology ethos in which we live and move and have our being has no place for explicit "proper use" – it's that "implicit" propriety that now obtains and that is hidden away from view at the behest of those who change the meaning of words. I wonder, just wonder, if "Christian bio-ethics" would be necessary at all if Christians were more faithful about capitalism.)

There was not a word in [the Wall Street Journal] presentation, "How Christianity Created Capitalism," about the late-medieval agonies over whether usury was no longer present when modest interest was taken on the loan or of the keen awareness at that time of the blunt dictum of Saint Jerome (no small mind, to be sure, and a saint at that) that merchants live in a permanent state of sin.

(I bet you've never read that quote of Jerome's in First Things, or Touchstone.)

For if there is an epitome of the perversity of the modern age, it is the coining of the acronym GAY. It was coined not so much to remove the legal strictures on strictly private homosexual acts, as to launch a moral crusade on behalf of homosexual fusions. GAY stands for "Good as You," that is, for the claim that living in homosexual unions is as good morally as living in "straight" marriages. In this crusade there came to a head what has been the chief aim of the modern age from its inception. The latter is to be located in the Renaissance, which aimed at the rebirth of that paganism that found in Christianity its sole real challenge and antagonist. The truth about the Renaissance has for long been an open secret, but recently Christians have become rather secretive about it. It took no small courage on Etienne Gilson's part to put, two generations ago, the matter bluntly: "The Renaissance marks the opening of an era in which man will profess to be satisfied with the state of fallen nature."

(Jaki must be forgiven here for his small error. The Renaissance was not the "rebirth" of paganism, for paganism cannot exist again after the Resurrection. What really happened in the Renaissance (despite the fairy tales in your high school "social studies" texts) was the murder of the Byzantine cultural commonwealth, and the lesser culture of western Christendom – a murder that took about five centuries to complete. Conservatives are aware of this: the Right Wing is not, as both "Wings" -- by definition -- usually get nauseated by self-awareness.)

Believers are under increased pressure to rethink their lifestyle, to take it for just one of the alternative lifestyles … any naïve Tom, Dick or Harry can be demolished in his inarticulate faith if he is ruined in his moral stance and integrity. Nothing comes so naturally to fallen man as to construct a set of perverse dogmas on behalf of moral perversity. The easiest means is to change the vocabulary.

(I'm okay with that.)

… such is the modern age in which man takes perverse pleasure in his fallen condition, by taking it for the height of his evolution.

(Jaki is complaining here about Einstein in particular. He wondered why no one noticed, when Time magazine elected the Relativist "the Person of the Century," that Einstein was quite the lothario, or casanova – I can't decide which. Apparently, Einstein enjoyed the company of scores of women in the interstitial spaces between his chalk talks. No one said anything, even the media who today rightly excoriates Republican – and sometimes Democrat –legislators and governors for their moral pipsqueakeries. I guess if you're smart, you're allowed to be "wicked," especially since we no longer use that word for "evil," but reserve it instead to connote some gaseous and pimply meaning like "really cool.")

(Oh, and by the way: has it ever occurred to any evolutionist that -- were their fantasies to ever work out -- we might get displaced by higher organisms someday, and it might not be the pleasant LSD trip rhapsodized by Teilhard? More likely is the nightmare of Lewis' Abolition of Man, where there is a constant devolutionary pressure to lapse into materialistic totalitarianism, dictator or no.)

[There is a] basis for a very measured optimism about the future: a thousand years from now there will still be room for opportunity to rejoin the war for a culture which is steeped in true cult and not in the cultivation of the self. Without true cult, culture is a mere counterfeit, a mere frill of increasingly decivilized civilizations that are at each other's throats.

(I think it was Coleridge who once quipped that "There is no culture without a cult." At the basis of every culture – a self-aware society with an ethos – there is a cult, no matter how squalid. We may be living in the first civilization that rejects the very nature of culture, if only to maximalize the revolution of "self-cultivation" and the sub-bestial enslavement to the Will. Note that Jaki's optimism – which is a hard thing to muster for a true conservative, as must needs be – lay only in "room for opportunity." I think, with my patron Saint John Chrysostomos, that the Last Day will be a thousand years hence at least, even so Maranatha. So I hope for opportunities to be apprehended, but I think the wilderness and the mountain, and the sea, are our place in time.)

Man will have cults because he cannot live without them. Cults will, unfortunately, clash. Unless the West wants to deny its very nature, it is most important for its survival to know which cult to cultivate. No tree has ever been known to flourish once it was uprooted, a truth valid even a thousand years from now and beyond.

(Here is Jaki's obligatory optimism for the West. The problem here is that the cult cultivated by the West is not the Orthodox Christian cult at all. It is the cult of self, and this is predominate in rightist circles and left. The West, in all likelihood, has been uprooted from Christianity once and for all. Civil religion will remain and entertain the tens of thousands, for sure. But the cult of Being and Becoming, of Truth and Trinity, of Atonement Sacrifice and the One Liturgy: that will go back to the byways and the meek, back to its mystical agrarian vocation: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.)