Witness to the Fall

Western civilization appears to be on the brink. It is unclear how long the last vestiges can remain, or what exactly might replace it once we exhaust the reservoirs of commitment and belief that once sustained us. Despite all the defensive posturing, it wasn’t foreign invaders who toppled her. Instead, she seems to be collapsing under her own weight.

Incoherence

Jonathan Lear writes about the cultural devastation that Native Americans experienced upon encountering white men in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear talks about Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation. The book focuses on a statement Plenty Coups made late in life where the chief said, “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”¹Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Harvard University Press, 2008. According to Lear’s interpretation, the statement “After this, nothing happened” simply means that nothing comprehensible to the traditional Crow way of life happened. Obviously, events continued to unfold. But for the Crow, excellence and honor revolved around winning battles and hunting. They derived meaning from hunting buffalo and warring with neighboring groups to protect their hunting grounds. This entire worldview was upended with the arrival of the white man. Rod Dreher talks about Plenty Coups on his “Daily Dreher” Substack (pay-wall) and on his TAC blog.²Rod Dreher’s Stubstack post ‘The Radical Hope of Plenty Coups‘ is referenced on The American Conservative blog post ‘Who Is The Plenty Coups Of The Christians?‘ Dreher relates a metaphor Lear used to explain how cataclysmic this was for the Crow. He asked the reader to imagine going to a restaurant and ordering a buffalo burger. It would be shocking enough if you were told that buffalo burgers were no longer on the menu because there are no more buffalo. But it was much worse than that. Lear compares it to attempting to go to a restaurant to order a buffalo burger and discovering that restaurants no longer existed and the process of ‘ordering’ had no meaning. That is closer to what the Crow experienced. Their hunting rituals and war dances made no sense once the hunting and warring ceased. They could carry on with this if they liked, but these activities were now completely disembedded from their original meaning and purpose. The world no longer made sense to them.

I’ve spoken to many people from my parents generation who echo the sentiments of Plenty Coups. They feel out of step with the times. Their children and grandchildren have to explain certain aspects of the culture to them.³Consider the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” It’s a statement that is perfectly comprehensible to most of us today. But to my great-grandfather this would have been just as absurd as saying, “I’m a turtle trapped in a human body.” In a stable society the older generations are esteemed for the wisdom they’ve presumably acquired. Ancestors are revered. But when a society is in upheaval, ancestors are seen as backwards. The elderly become obsolete. Traditions become impediments. Romans in the fourth century experienced this as Christianity began to overtake paganism.

Refashioning Society

I am convinced that we are living at the interface between two worlds. A number of others see this too.⁴See The Upheaval hosted by N.S. Lyons and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Abby of Misrule on Substack as well as the work of Rod Dreher. For the past year we watched as protesters tore down statues of founding fathers across the United States. Some cheered. Many were appalled. Jonathan Pageau explains what it all means. He starts by pointing out that all civilizations partake in iconoclasm. Every civilization tends to diminish what came before it. Christians removed statues of other gods. Pageau relates this to redecorating a new home. If you buy a house and then find that the former owners left portraits of themselves hanging on the walls you are going to remove those pictures. Those pictures are residues of a former world disconnected from your own identity. So, in order to establish your own identity and avoid undue confusion, you are going to remove those pictures. Any new civilization will do the same type of thing. It’s completely natural to want to remove markers that remind us that a space used to belong to someone else. So it’s important to understand that the removal of images will inevitably happen at the transition between two worlds.

What we’re seeing is the new culture asserting a new order. Man no longer sees himself as “created and sustained by a holy and just God who declares on matters of right and wrong.” Instead, man is the “autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he defines as just.”⁵Herbert Schlossberg, ‘Idols for Destruction’ Man is not just free to obey or disobey moral law, but to choose which moral standards he adopts.

Aaron Renn describes the shifting perceptions towards traditional Christian norms. He reminds us that it wasn’t all that long ago when Christian values had a positive connotation. Now those same norms are largely viewed in a negative light. Renn illustrates this by pointing out changing perceptions about infidelity. In 1998 Americans learned that their president had an affair with an intern which involved sex acts in the Oval Office. While badly damaged by the scandal, it did not end President Clinton’s career. As recently as 1987 this sort of thing was enough to end a presidential bid by Sen. Gary Hart. By 1998, people no longer saw cheating on one’s spouse as something that would disqualify a person from leading a company or even a nation. Fast forward to 2016 and Donald Trump, “whose entire persona (sexual antics, excess consumption, boastfulness, etc.) is antithetical to traditional Christianity, is elected president. The Access Hollywood tape, for example, had no effect on voter decisions about him.”⁶Aaron Renn, “The Masculinist #13: The Lost World of American Evangelicalism“ Let’s face it, traditional Christian values are no longer regarded the way they once were.⁷There are still lots of things that go against the current dogma and can jeopardize one’s career. But abandoning one’s wife and children is simply not one of them. And progressives now see Christianity as an impediment to progress.

Some are starting to suggest that Christianity needs an update in light of changing attitudes towards sexual differentiation, procreation, marriage, and family. Churches and seminaries are making all sorts of concessions in hopes of staying relevant in the current culture. Just as missionaries look for ways to make the gospel culturally relevant to the people they encounter, churches increasingly see themselves as missionaries in today’s anticulture. It seems like a reasonable strategy. But what if these shifting attitudes are related to something more fundamental? What if the thing we’re witnessing is more of a cosmological shift?

The Christian cosmology is dissipating in the West. Five hundred years ago it was practically impossible to not believe in God. But belief is no longer self-evident. It is not only now possible to imagine not believing in God, but this is now the default position for many people. Belief remains a possibility only as a conscious choice, personally enriching for some, but private and apart from any real deep conviction.⁸We witnessed this during the lock downs for the recent COVID-19 pandemic when worship services were deemed “non-essential”. Receiving the sacraments even became a criminal offense in the previously Catholic nation of Ireland.

The Enlightenment so thoroughly colonized our collective imagination that we now see nature as an entirely self-standing reality. People no longer imagine themselves embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporated in the divine. Society is simply a collection of individuals. We see ourself as a radically autonomous Self. This disembedded Self is “insulated within an interior ‘mind,’ no longer vulnerable to the transcendent or the demonic.”⁹James K.A. Smith explaining Charles Taylor’s description of the disembedded, buffered, individualist self in How (Not) to be Secular This buffered individualist Self is no longer susceptible to grace or possession. Meaning, significance, and fullness are sought within a completely enclosed, self-standing, naturalistic universe without any reference to transcendence. God becomes superfluous. And so it becomes possible to discard the supernatural altogether, something more or less unthinkable prior to the Enlightenment.

The irony is that the Enlightenment itself was only possible by way of belief in the divine. The Enlightenment idea that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights only makes sense in the context of a Divine Being. The very ideas held sacred in modern Western societies presume a God of the universe. It is not clear how long this sacred order can last now that the foundation has eroded. We certainly know more about the natural world today by thinking about it in purely naturalistic terms. But what have we lost by thinking about it only in those terms? We would do well to heed Iain McGilchrist’s advice and “revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.”¹⁰Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Upheaval

N.S. Lyons discusses cyclical patterns involving the Church identified by Phyllis Tickle.¹¹N.S. Lyons, The Upheaval, “Are we in a 500 Year Religious Revolution?“ Tickle suggested that every five hundred years or so the Church goes through a period of upheaval.¹²Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence This process follows a pattern of structural and spiritual dissolution and turmoil followed by re-formation. It all started in the first century with the emergence of Christianity.¹³Christ’s apostles were the de facto authority in the Church. In time, the Church grew from a small fraction of heavily persecuted believers to become the official religion of the empire. Five hundred years later the apostolic authority of the Church was tested by the so-called Nestorian heresy, which involved a controversy over the nature of Christ.¹⁴The Oriental Church spun off after this faction was excommunicated at the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. By the end of the 6th century Europe was in shambles. With no Empire left to govern, the Roman Senate disbanded. The Church persevered as Pope Gregory I (590-604), building on the work of St. Benedict (480-547), guided the Church into a form of monasticism that would protect and preserve the Church for the next five centuries while the laity practiced more of a mystical form Christian animism. The next major upheaval came by way of a rift between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in what’s known as the Great Schism.¹⁵This event was the culmination of disagreements over theological and political authority. In 1054 the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome, Pope Leo IX, effectively excommunicated each other. Two brands of Christianity emerged with the Latin Church recognizing the Pope’s authority and the Byzantine Church following their patriarchs, or bishops. This happened to closely coincide with the the rise of Islam pushing into Europe with the first crusade following in 1096. Another five hundred years later, decadence and corruption within the Latin Church culminated with Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church in A.D. 1517 setting off the Reformation.¹⁶This event was preceded by a breakdown of papal authority as rival popes claimed divine authority between 1378 and 1418. By 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople and continued to push into Europe. Luther’s attempt to reform the Church exploded into a firestorm as a flood of refugees from the East and Gutenberg’s re-purposed wine press fanned the flames. A hundred and thirty years of violence erupted and the Church emerged deeply fractured. The new Protestant form of Christianity embraced sola scriptura which held scripture as the sole source of authority for Christian faith. Fast forward another five hundred years and that brings us to today. Could it be there is another radical transformation underway? Is the Church in the throes of another upheaval?

There is a common thread Tickle identified in each previous upheaval. She connected these events to the simultaneous breakdown of the shared history that unites believers and in the way people imagine how the world works. Without this common understanding of the world and a unifying picture of their place in it, fault lines open up. A crisis of authority ensues. Without question, our understanding of how the world works has been drastically altered since Luther’s time.¹⁷Gutenberg’s printing press is eclipsed by the digital age. This has radically altered our perception distance and time and our place in the world. Fallout from the Reformation made the possibility of a shared history practically impossible. Sola scriptura, which held scripture as the sole authority for Christian faith, is now being challenged.

Martyrdom

A Christian cosmology can adjust to changing patterns. This happens all the time. But when it encounters a competing cosmology that’s something altogether different. A Catholic priest commenting on Rod Dreher’s Substack makes a distinction between secular culture and secular cosmology. The way Christians are to respond to these is quite different. The priest comments, “If we are asked to adapt to living as a marginalized group within a secularized culture, that can be done. If asked to adopt a secular cosmology, we can’t… ideological secularism denies any relation of creation and humanity to God. Once that happens, questions of meaning have no answer outside individual or perhaps a culturally imposed narrative. If either becomes the Creed, Christians can only follow the pattern of the martyrs.”¹⁸Rod Dreher’s Stubstack post ‘The Radical Hope of Plenty Coups‘ is referenced on his TAC blog ‘Cosmos & Chickadee‘

As I wrote in the introduction to this space, we must consider whether the changes occurring today with regard to sexual differentiation, procreation, marriage, and family have roots in a cosmology, or are merely customs we have to adapt to. Rod Dreher sees it unambiguously as the former. He writes, “In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation.”¹⁹Rod Dreher, Sex After Christianity Marriage, like other Christian rites, may persist without a Christian cosmology, much like the like the Crow continue on with the Sun Dance. But it is likely to be entirely disembedded from its true meaning. It becomes practically unrecognizable. And few of its participants know what it is they are performing.

Paul Kingsnorth absolutely nails it:

This is what Nietszche knew, and what today’s liberal humanists will too often deny: if you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma – whether they know it or not. Whether you’re a Christian, a Muslim, a Heathen or an atheist, it should be obvious that no culture can just shrug off, or rationalise away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name – if that.

…It seems to me that we are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been – often literally – torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

…the dethroning of the sovereign – Christ – who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led – via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler – to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.²⁰Paul Kingsnorth, ‘The Dream of the Rood’, Who sits on the empty throne?

Christians, of all people, should understand the totalizing nature of competing cosmologies. When Christianity came on the scene, pagans rightly saw it as a threat to their old pagan ways. There was no reconciling paganism with Christianity. In the end Christianity so thoroughly vanquished the old pagan gods that even now when people try to return to paganism they find there is nothing to return to. We cannot simply go out the same way we entered.²¹C.S. Lewis delivered a radio adaptation of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature given at Cambridge on November 29, 1954. In it Lewis discussed “the false idea that the historical process allows simple reversal, that Europe can come out of Christianity by the same doors she went in, and find herself back where she was. That isn’t the sort of thing that happens. A post-Christian man is not a pagan. You might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the pagan past.” And so we plod forward with blind faith in the myth of progress.