There’s
an interesting piece at The Catholic Thing [here] by David Warren
called “The Counter-Culture”. I find myself agreeing with his conclusion, but
not with everything he says along the way.
Warren takes issue with those Catholics who disparage Western
Civilization, and insists that the Church is the author of that civilization,
however much it might owe to previous societies (just how much is included in
that “however much” is the rub; more on that in a moment), as well as
secularists who tout an oddly non-Christian interpretation of it. He concludes that championing that culture,
and particularly its Christian dimension, is the only way to counter the
rapidly decaying culture of secularism that has grown up around us in recent
decades.
So far,
so good. Problems arise, however, when
Warren attempts to counter secularists who would draw a direct line from
Greco-Roman times that, somehow, skips over the heavily Christian period from
about 300 A.D. to 1968. Warren commits
the mirror-image error of dismissing the critical importance of Greece and
Rome:
The conceit of the
modern “gliberal” (glib plus liberal), since Humanism began exiting the Church,
is that our Civ was founded in ancient pagan Greece. There are fragments of
that built into the whole, but only because Holy Mother Church preserved and
adapted them, to her own purposes.
Likewise the old pagan
Roman conception of open roads and tranquil freedom, under the law to the far
horizon – Christendom was inspired by that. But it could equally have been
inspired by the Chinese, or any other vast, ordered realm. It was Holy Church,
and the minds she applied to worldly government, which transformed that model,
introducing such principles as subsidiarity to make what was, in effect, a vast
and extremely fertile theocracy.
Vergil and Dante in Hell |
Again, I am in complete agreement with his main
point, which is that our civilization is not simply an updated version of
Greco-Roman antiquity, but something completely new, about which the most
important and essential fact is the intervention of Christ in history and the
Church he left behind. The problem here
is that Warren would have us believe that Christ erased history, that there is
no (or little) organic connection between the civilization of the Roman Empire
and the Christian civilization that succeeded it. This is simply bad historiography. Certainly
everyone from the Franks and Visigoths crashing across the frontiers, not
intending to destroy so much as to grab their own share of Romanitas, to medieval
monks busily copying Vergil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Odes
in their scriptoria, to the great Catholic poet Dante, whose guide through Hell
and Purgatory in his magnum opus the Commedia is none other
than that same Vergil, to Thomas Aquinas and his successors imbibing and
baptizing the thought of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, to the colonial
American who needed to know Latin and Greek to enter Harvard College – none of
them doubted that they were heirs to the great pre-Christian civilizations of
the West. The Church grew and formed for its first few centuries within the
Roman Empire, and the templates, at least, of all her major institutions were
formed before Alaric swept into Rome. God could certainly have established his
Church in China or in some other culture, but it would have been a very
different Church, and would have authored a very different culture.
That’s
the strictly historical perspective, but I think Warren is missing something
else, something about our understanding of how God intervenes in our
world. The Church that could have
developed out of any “vast, ordered realm” is an abstraction, but both
revelation and our experience is that we don’t have a God who deals in
abstractions; He is a God of particulars.
He chose a particular people to whom he first revealed himself in order
that he might incarnate himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus
of Nazareth; he carefully chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus;
he likewise chose and prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the mission of Jesus. Does it make any sense at all that he would
then leave his Church, the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, to the random
inspiration of whatever vast, ordered realm happened to be at hand? I argue that God would be as careful in
this choice as in the others.
One
might ask, why does it matter? It
matters, first of all, because the truth is important, and we can’t counter the
untruths of some with distortions of our own.
Second, Warren is absolutely correct that the Church is the primary
creator of Western Culture, and that what is has created far transcends
anything that might have developed from Greco-Roman culture in its absence,
which is to say the absence of Christ.
Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). For all
its flaws, the civilization that was nurtured by his Church is new in human
history, and uniquely bears his stamp. It’s
our best resource in the culture war that is raging in this world, which is at
its root a spiritual battle, but one which is fought out in the material world: it can’t be
fought with abstractions. I can’t say it
better than Warren does himself in his own conclusion:
To the “culture of narcissism”
by which we are surrounded, in a Western world that has denied Christ, we must
oppose a counter-culture. And we must
oppose on every level: in our literature, our music, our art, our architecture,
even our science. Whether or not it is
our intention, we cannot plausibly be Catholic Christian without becoming
civilized again.
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