Covenant, Cultus, Culture: Walking by the Light of Christ
The fundamental law governing Christendom's growth, decay, and rebirth
As we learn in the Epistle to the Hebrews, our Lord Jesus Christ is the Mediator of a new covenant (Heb 9:15, 12:24). This means he is the Mediator of a new cultus, a Latin word referring to the act of worshiping God. And this implies that He is the Mediator of a new culture, for, as Christopher Dawson was famous for saying, every culture is built upon the foundation of divine worship and religious practice.
By a spontaneous and irresistible force, the practice of religion and the worship of God build up around themselves a clothing of fine arts, social conventions, familiar customs; they permeate the political order and spark intellectual endeavors. Indeed, they give a basis, direction, and momentum to all human endeavors.
Wherever Catholic Christianity takes root and flourishes, it gathers around itself, as a magnet gathers iron filings, all that is beautiful in the customs and arts of evangelized peoples, with everything unworthy of that attraction left behind. Eventually, truly great arts are born, as the Middle Ages demonstrate with such awesome grandeur—a grandeur combined with an unprecedented attention to detail.
The converse is no less true: where the influence of Christianity wanes, the quality and perfection of art decline, with accelerating diminishment as one unfaithful generation succeeds another. For a time, people can live off the crumbs of the former culture, but these stale crumbs run out, and people are left empty-handed, malnourished, with a gnawing hunger in their bellies. This leads to feelings of resentment, frustration, and alienation, which erupt in abstractionism, absurdism, nihilism, sensualism, obscenity, and violence.
There is no “quick fix” to the problem of a lost or wayward culture—it cannot be transformed overnight. There is only one way to fix it, and that is to make sure we address the foundation of it: the slow, patient, persistent sequela Christi, the following of Christ. We follow Him by embracing and handing down each and every truth He teaches us in His Church, and all her holy traditions. We follow Him by receiving His goodness in the form of natural goods and supernatural graces, and leading others to share in them. We follow Him by preserving the works of beauty He has inspired over centuries of faith-filled culture, adding new works in harmony with those that came before, to the best of our ability.
By doing these things—which are, when all is said and done, modest things that everyone can do, here and now—we will find out, when the last trump sounds, that we have played our part in the continuation and revitalization of Christian culture. After all, it was in the midst of a dying, decadent, and tyrannical pagan Roman Empire that the infant Church, lacking all political influence and as yet poor in cultural resources, grew up with irrepressible energy to become, in due course, the mighty tree of Christendom under the branches of which all the nations of the earth found shelter. Catholics accomplished this miracle by following with joyful determination Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The arm of the Lord is not shortened (cf. Is. 59:1); He can work wonders anew (cf. Hab. 3:2).
Compelling articulation of the cultus-to-culture progression. The observation that art quality declines with accelerating diminishment across unfaithful generations identifies a temporal dynamic often missed in static cultural analysis—decay isn't linear but exponential once the sacred foundation erodes. What's intriguing is how this mirrors biological systems where homeostatic mechanisms fail gradually then suddenly. The "clothing of fine arts and social conventions" metaphor works becuase it captures both the natural emergence and the protective function of cultural forms around worship. I've seen this pattern in communities attempting cultural revival without addressing the liturgical core.
Thank you Peter, for this enlightening post. I’ve listened about four times and I’m hoping it will sink in. I think I’ll make a print out and put it in my meditation book because I really really want to be a part of this return to Catholic culture and yes, I think the real way is to become a saint. From these comments especially the one on the beatitudes, there is much to meditate on.