Modernity’s Black Magic and the Sophianic Vision of Christian Theosis
The Professor’s Bookshelf #6: How do we escape the ideological prison to live in God’s reality?
One of the most important and powerful manuscripts I’ve ever read is Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. Indeed, that was the reason I had to publish it! To say that it has the potential to shift one’s worldview is to put it lightly. For those who are already skeptics about modernity and its empty promises, Morello brings the entire set of problems into the sharpest focus, while also placing it on a genuinely supernatural foundation—the only vantage from which one might begin to discern a proper response, beginning with one’s own heart. This book stirred up a lot of controversy online but sadly most of it really seemed to miss the point, as the excellent discussion between Dr. Morello and Dr. Minerd showed. In keeping with the purpose of “The Professor’s Bookshelf,” I have gathered some of my favorite passages below for those who have not yet read the book and would like to get a taste of it, or, for those who have, as a welcome refresher. —PAK
Obstinate traditionalism
In the struggle to survive our civilisation’s rapid unravelling, we will have to contend with the rise of goetia—that is, of sorcery—among those intent on enslaving us. Certainly, from its inception, modernity has been satanical, but, as C. S. Lewis famously noted in his Screwtape Letters, not always overtly so. More recently, however, our epoch has become openly and visibly demonic in its music, fashions, moral commitments, bodily mutilations, and paraliturgies. My personal response, perhaps more through disgust at what I observe than by any chosen decision on my part, has been to double-down on my obstinate traditionalism in all things: in religion, in aesthetics, in culture, in morals, and in everything else. (xviii-xix)
Traditionalists receive a hard time in the institutional Church partly because her acceptance of modernity has meant that she has grown alien to herself. (xx)
Zombie apocalypse vs. Christian theurgy
Modernity, I have come to see, is ultimately a conjuring of black magic by which the mind is hexed with abstractionism, rationalism, scientism, mechanisation, and all the various ways we are rendered sightless by the blinding of the mind’s eye. The universe, in turn, has ceased to be a meeting place of God and man, and has become lifeless stuff to be utilised—for what ultimate end we do not know, and nor do we trouble ourselves with such a question. We have, consequently, become a people without wisdom, and given that wisdom is the lifeblood of the mind and the animator of the heart, we are rightly judged dead. As many have pointed out in recent years, that is likely why the only mythos that late modernity has been able to produce (and reproduce in a thousand different ways) is that of the “zombie apocalypse,” for such a mythos cathartically and allegorically presents to us our current condition.
The antithesis of seeing the world with the eyes of a zombie—that is, with the eyes of a soulless consumer who mindlessly devours all life he encounters—is that of apprehending the world as living, as God’s own theophanic self-communication, and as the primordial cosmic liturgy. This “sophianic vision”—though I did not put it like that at the time—is what I discovered Aquinas’s ontology to entail, what the Christian humanists of the Northern Renaissance knew the Protestant revolt would eclipse, and what the counter-revolutionaries of the eighteenth century understood the rise of ideology in modernity would finally eradicate—sweeping away Christendom with it.
Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. (3-4)
Pre-eminence of mystical life
It is this conception of the world as a realm that, when known properly, reveals itself to be a cathedral, that I repeatedly attempt to defend throughout this book. Again, creation is the emanation of the Godhead—a true source of revelation—and as such, at the most fundamental level, the cosmos is inherently and intrinsically personal. To realise that the cosmos is God’s iconography is to be in right relation with it, which is the first step on the path to right relationality with its Source, Who, like Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, is ever pursuing us through its arboreal ways.7 Then, one enters the joy of contemplation wherein is encountered the “transfigured face.” And this life of the embodied soul is, I suppose, the primary object of deliberation throughout this volume.
The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery.
Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” The repackaging of what should denote the transformation of our nature by the supernatural love of the Incarnate Logos as another rationalistic modernism strikes me as nothing other than blasphemous. (10-11)
Breaking the spell
The Lord walks among us. To see Him, we have only to break the spell that blinds the eyes of the spirit. When, like Tobit, through our communion with angels, the excrement of our epoch falls from our eyes, and we behold creation as it is, as a wondrous cathedral wherein the great cosmic liturgy of God’s emanated goodness unfolds, we can do nothing other than praise Him. The Christian life, understood as absorption into the cosmic liturgy of the created order, reflected and redeemed by the bridal liturgy of the Church, through which the whole world calls out to its Maker in nuptial love, is the way it was lived in the Church’s monastic genius. The ebbing of the role of monasticism over the centuries is in large part to blame for the lamentable condition in which the Church finds itself today. (12)
Hildegard: “The devil detests . . . precious stones; for he remembers that their beauty was manifest on his own spiritual body before he fell from the glory that God had given him. (14)
As I suggest, the priest on whom I mercilessly pick is under the Cartesian spell. This shouldn’t shock us, for it is obvious that this spell is one that has hexed the whole Church. It is unfortunate that the priest’s status as an exorcist persuades the faithful that he holds an oracular position among them, thereby perpetuating the spell. But again, that should not surprise us, for once we lose—on account of Cartesian dualism—a sense of God’s declaration of Himself in the created world to which we are all privy as its rational part, the need for gurus with elite knowledge becomes paramount. Indeed, that is why the primacy of the didactic—rather than liturgical—role of the pastor follows so seamlessly from the view found in Protestantism that the world is so utterly corrupted by the Fall that it cannot itself be a species of revelation, and why since the Catholic Church adopted Cartesianism as its dominant worldview, Catholics have by necessity taken on the likeness of Protestants. (15)
From God’s cosmos to the inner self
The fact that substances, by existing as the things they are, disclose themselves, reveals that they necessarily find their fulfilment in mind. Given that things are inherently intelligible in this way, and thus convey their intelligibility, according to the ancients they must be emanations of mind, Divine Mind, and by virtue of that intelligibility they disclose themselves to our created minds. Hence, at least in the premodern worldview, the cosmos is divine communication, and like any communication, it is an interpersonal declaration that achieves its finality in the realm of intellect, by which in turn the realm of intellect is brought to perfection. (16)
If the arts fail to bear witness to beauty, politics to justice, medical practice to human health, cultivation to conservation, or education to truth—that is to say, if a given civilisation were to become characterised by ugliness, injustice, medical malpractice, the pollution of the earth, and the dissemination of error—then this should be understood as symptomatic of epistemic alienation from being itself, indeed as the divorce of mind itself from reality. (Lucky, then, that there’s no indication of that happening around us!) (16-17)
Ignatius’s order is widely credited with leading the charge against the Protestant revolution, and no doubt it did. But fascinatingly, the anthropology of the so-called reformers, namely that of the “inner self” making a personal religious commitment—rather than the integral, relational person being sanctified by induction into a visible and liturgical community—is reflected precisely in the anthropology and consequent spirituality of Ignatius and his followers. … (18)
I am merely noting that this shift, from incarnational and communal religiosity to that of the inner self was one tacitly adopted by the Church’s most influential order in the modern age, and that this is relevant for understanding how we arrived at where we are. (19) [And with it, the possibility of totally upending the liturgy and throwing out any and every custom.—PK]
By the time the Second Vatican Council was convened in the 1960s, Cartesian conceptions concerning our nature and how true religion works in relation to our nature were not even defended by the fashionable theologians of the day; they were simply taken for granted, and deemed uncontroversial assumptions to be presupposed by all Catholic theology. The Scottish Dominican friar, Fergus Kerr, in his highly commendable work entitled Theology After Wittgenstein, has done a remarkable job of compiling many examples of such Cartesianism prevalent among the leading advisers of that unhappy Council. He demonstrates that Cartesian dualism was indeed the house anthropology of the nouvelle théologie, and in turn was uncritically woven into the modern theology from which the Council developed its texts. (21)
Besides the moral complexities that easily arise from a commitment to Cartesian dualism, to which I have just alluded, there are other grave consequences to thinking of ourselves as “minds.” One upshot of such a view is, as I’ve noted, that of attributing a causal power to ideas that they do not possess. Combine that with a privileging of the mechanistic metaphor that predominates in modernity, and ecclesiastical leadership ceases to look like shepherding or gardening—the classic metaphors for ecclesiastical leadership—and it starts to look a lot more like engineering. The engineering conception of ecclesiastical leadership found itself on steroids during the Second Vatican Council, during which a new manual for the Church’s existence was developed in the form of non-dogmatic documents that were meant to lead to a new Pentecost for a new Church altogether. Out of ideas, a reality was meant to just spring to life—after all, apparently, we’re all just minds, so why wouldn’t things work like that? In that Council we have a clear example of what I have been describing: ideas are privileged, the entity in question—in this case, the Church herself—is analysed under the mechanistic metaphor, a manual is issued, and we’ve been toiling under ecclesiastical engineers ever since. (26)
Sacred places and blessings
In truth, there is no such thing as sacred space, only sacred places. For a space is a measurable, quantifiable area, interchangeable with any area of the same measurability. A space is an abstraction that exists only in a Cartesian world. Whereas sacrality is a quality, and by this quality a space becomes this space, and hence not a space but a place. A place is particular, and once a given place has been sanctified, it is no longer transferable or interchangeable with any other equivalent space—for no such space can exist. A sacred place is in the most extreme sense a place, which can be reverenced, but cannot be replaced without being desecrated. (31)
Acceptance of the Cartesian error is now found throughout the Church’s official praxis. Consider the curiously-named Book of Blessings, which replaced the Roman Ritual following the Second Vatican Council. On opening it, one discovers that the Church’s official book of blessings is no longer in fact a book of blessings. The so-called blessings therein quickly reveal the underlying assumption of the revised text, namely that the world out there does not need to be sanctified, apparently, for only selves can be holy. Let me offer you one example from the Book of Blessings, the prayer for house blessings, literally a blessing to make a particular place sacred and still one of the most-used blessings among practicing Catholics:
Lord, be close to your servants who move into this home and ask for your blessing. Be their shelter when they are at home, their companion when they are away, and their welcome guest when they return. And at last receive them into the dwelling place you have prepared for them in your Father’s house, where you live for ever and ever. Amen.
Note that in the new blessing for homes, no home is blessed. This example is so typical of the entire text that a friend of mine who was involved in publishing the Book of Blessings refers to it as “the Book of Prayers for People in the Presence of Stuff.” (Intriguingly, such a view—that neither things nor bodies nor places can be blessed, but only interior spirits—is not unprecedented; in the thirteenth-century text entitled The Summa on the Cathars by the ex-Cathar and Dominican, Brother Rainerius, it is stated that this belief was an explicitly declared tenet of the Albigensian, Manichaean heresy.) (32-33)
Fr [Pierre] Antoine considers it a spiritual—even, he says, mystical—exercise, actively to desacralize anywhere that may be deemed sacred to the faithful. (34)
Christianity…is not a disembodied religion. In fact, it teaches that grace can be received when in some places and not in others, and also by putting onto or into one’s body some substances and not others. The Christian religion is embodied in the extreme, and holds that redemption incorporates material reality—including the body and all its passions—which will be fully realised at the final resurrection and the unification of heaven and earth at the Eschaton. In short, for Christians, there is no such thing as stuff.
Hitherto, what I have been attempting to convey is that, for complex reasons, the Church, over time, changed its conception of itself, from an institution whose mission was that of seizing literal earthly regions of Satan’s principality and placing them in Christ’s Kingdom, to one whose mission is the imparting of ideas and sentiments to inner selves. Thus, the Church went from a visible, liturgical, social reality to an option among ideological competitors. Indeed, Catholicism could never have degenerated into an internet genre—which is almost solely what it appears to be today—had this change of ecclesiastical self-understanding not taken place. (36-37)
The institutional Church has become possessed by a spirit perfectly antithetical to its existence. Are there any solutions to the problem that I have been sketching? I certainly do not have any ideas, programmes, or schemas for undoing what I have described. And felicitously so, given that any such proposals would perpetuate the problem, not solve it. For it is not to ideas that we ought to look for solutions, but to practices and places. Happily, the traditional movement of the Catholic Church is doing precisely this, quite intuitively. (37)
I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. (38-39)
Loss of institutional authority
Since the late nineteenth century, the faithful have been subjected to ever more regular, and ever longer, papal encyclicals and exhortations. Under the pontificate of Pope Francis, these have taken the form of very long essays, mostly comprising observations and occasional hints at the revolutionary direction behind their authorship. It is almost as if Pope Francis is begging to be taken seriously by the faithful for a moment, as he feigns speaking to them on an equal footing. This, though, is not at all how he has actually governed the Church, bypassing canon law and settled theology as he pleases, and persecuting those members of the faithful who won’t, so to speak, get with the programme. This, of course, is exactly what belongs to the psychology of an abusive man: he oscillates from begging to be loved and listened to, to throwing his fists around. A central reason why abusive people behave in this way is because they have lost authority. They can no longer be believed or trusted, and so they resort to begging, sentimental gestures, and then violence. (46)
In the so-called age of ecclesiastical collegiality, there is zero collegiality. The whole thing is a smokescreening exercise. Attempting to make sense of this situation, the faithful have increasingly fallen back on the sensus fidelium to “tap into,” so to speak, the true faith of the ages that is being covered up with recurrent acts of clerical voluntarism. The Church’s government knows that this is what has happened, and thus diabolically sought to imitate the sensus fidelium through Francis’s “synodal process,” so that it appeared that the “sense of the faithful” conveniently affirmed the revolutionary direction of the governing clergy. (51)
This crisis has moved the Church into a new mode of existence: the Church’s government has lost its authority, and the faithful should not only expect an intensification of mistreatment by arbitrary power from the hierarchy, as the hierarchy fails to come to terms with this reality, but the faithful will also need to work out what it practically means to be a faithful Christian in this new epoch.
Many today, looking around at the spiritual wasteland that is the West, seek to satiate their deepest religious thirsts by turning to romantic ideas of pre-Christian paganism, nature-worship, and New Age spirituality. Otherwise, they look east to the mysticisms of Asia, especially those of Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which have the added advantage of easily accommodating the individualism, solipsism, and anthropological dualism which have colonised the Western mind since the so-called Enlightenment. I threw myself into all these spiritualities, in fact—a sequence that culminated in my conversion to Catholic Christianity on the south coast of India in early adulthood, and I’m certain that God drew me out of the West that I might encounter His Church beyond its visibly corrupt and decadent occidental condition. (53-54)
Breaking free from rationalism
In the current situation, it seems that the remaining Church’s faithful will persevere by opting to double down on the devotional life. This is exactly what all the committed Christians I know are doing. They’re taking stock of the collapse of our civilization and the utter sterility of the institutional Church in the face of it, and in response they’re deepening their spiritual lives and clinging to Christ. The reason for which the Church exists is the union of its members with the Triune God. And when the hierarchy’s members forget this in their pursuit of worldly ambitions, God’s people must consider what lies within their own spiritual repertoire and mine those resources to cultivate as far as possible the richest interpersonal relationship with Jesus Christ that they can; or better, that He can cultivate in them.
It seems to me that the paradigm of rationalism—with all its chaotic relationships, ugly architecture, shallow sentimentalism, fetishization of abstractions, legal positivism, and blindness to persons—to which the institutional Church has conceded so much moral territory, must be overcome if we are to recover the primacy of the mystical in the life of the Church. The challenge before us, then, is that of recapturing the theocentrism on which our civilisation was built. The Gospel, which the Church is meant to proclaim, is the means by which to do that, and the sacraments possess the power to effect the transformation that’s needed. Breaking out of the prevailing rationalist paradigm, however, is the fundamental precondition for recovering the theocentric paradigm that is its antithesis. And such a deliverance may mean that we will have to be more open to a broader Western spiritual tradition which has always been bound up with mainstream Christian spirituality, but which cannot be accommodated by the rationalist paradigm and thus has been eclipsed in recent times. (55-56)
At present, what we’re witnessing in the secular West is the frustration of natural religion, unfulfilled by supernatural religion, haemorrhaging within the physicalist paradigm of modernity. The spirit of modern Western man is like a faulty pressure cooker that’s going to explode, and every attempt to fix the problem pushes him further into the false and malignant solutions of individualism, statism, transhumanism, and all the deceitful promises of the technological age that drive an ever-greater wedge between our condition and any reconciliation with God’s creation—and ultimately any meeting with Him. (65)
Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. (66)
Having lost a sense of the supernatural, and having theologically justified this loss by decades of conflating the natural and the supernatural, the Church has lost a sense of its very purpose. What is now left is power, and a craving for power within a petty and dying bureaucracy. The Church’s government has long run on the fumes of its previously held authority, but the engine is now choking and the whole institution is rapidly grinding to a halt. In a feeble attempt to hold onto the last vestiges of authority, the Church’s government has resorted to the habitual exercise of arbitrary power, which, ironically, is further accelerating the erosion of clerical authority. (69)
We reduced all insight, inspiration, understanding, comprehension, contemplation, appreciation, observation, discernment, and awareness to the one quantitative category of “information,” and thereby emptied our minds of all that really matters—and the world we have made around us reflects this cognitive corruption. (83)
Master, a blessing
Having rejected the life of nature, which the life of grace elevates and transforms, people in such unions nevertheless wanted to be blessed by the Church. The Church’s leaders, as we should have anticipated, yielded. But the question remains: what is this strange, intangible thing called a “blessing” that is coveted by those who reject the worldview to which it belongs? And why is it so important that even deviants and secularists desire to receive one?
Maybe, one might suggest, the desire to receive a blessing stems from nothing more than a basic need for approval. But had the Church merely issued a memo declaring that it approved of—or at least did not condemn—homosexual unions, that would have been widely deemed insufficient. The immediate response would have been to ask, “Then why can’t we receive a blessing?” The fact is, as embarrassing as it might seem, we still believe that special words said with special concentration, perhaps combined with special gestures and special artefacts, can possess a special causal power when aided by special, powerful spirits. That is, we still believe in magic, even the most secularised among us. (92)
Liberalism’s slavery
In the decades immediately following that colossal war of the egregores, the nations of the West embraced the rapid atomisation of the individual, the disunion of the sexes, the erosion of the family, the dissemination of pornography, the murder of the unborn, and the celebration of homosexuality, all aided and fomented with legislative acts. Ancient cities were transformed into colourless, concrete pens. Our musical tradition was discarded in favour of a thudding, torturous background noise. Our clothes were replaced with plastic coverings made by distant child slaves. And all the while, we were told that the name of what we beheld was “freedom.” The war’s veterans were condemned to look on with bewilderment as the lands for which they’d fought were remade into an earthly hell. Even now, all the curses of the egregore of liberalism can hardly be questioned—even by self-identified “conservatives” (who quickly learn to celebrate them anyway)—without receiving a tirade of outrage from those under the spell of “progress.” (94)
Kings & monks vs. bourgeoisie & bureaucrats
The whole mystery of the corporate person of the nation—which is a true person who can be blamed, honoured, and even discipled (Matthew 28:19)—is distilled into the individual person of the monarch. For a sceptred nation, the truth of the national genius is concentrated in the monarch and revered as such. Hence, at the deepest level, monarchy—especially sacral monarchy—by being a truth embodied, achieves the perpetuation of the Mystery of the Incarnation in the temporal arena.
By this mystery of royal theurgy, this incarnate blessing upon a nation, monarchy always stands as a living refutation and practical safeguard against the reign of egregores. If Europe is ever to become Christendom again, it will first need to be freed from the egregores that now control it, and the royal houses will thus have to play a central role in this deliverance. (95)
A major aspect of this development was the class transformation of European society, which in turn changed the class dynamic of the Church. In the Middle Ages, it was landed aristocracy that populated monasteries just as much as the peasantry, two social classes characterised by loyalty to place and locality. But as the bourgeois class swelled down the centuries, its members—who were characterised by their attachment not to place but to commerce, and possessed a managerial mentality rather than one formed by noblesse oblige—began slowly to populate the Church.
In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.
In times of political revolution, typically a bourgeois progressive takes control, calls into question the organicism of the polity, and then claims to create a new nation altogether out of a paper constitution, which he then enforces through a network of similarly bourgeois, servile collaborators. So, too, the same model unfolded in the Church of the 1960s. With the Council that John XXIII had left him, Pope Paul oversaw the creation of a new ecclesiology from new non-dogmatic documents, for a new Church with a new liturgical culture, all born from a “new Pentecost.” Since then, the Church has continued to recruit the most unremarkable, bourgeois managers into its clerical ranks, and by so doing her culture has completely changed—by which I mean nothing complimentary.
Management vs. monasticism
To this day, the monastic and contemplative life is routinely attacked by those at the highest echelons of the Church, and a mediocre episcopal caste of stale administrators oversees decline whilst recurrently insisting that some new catechetical programme will solve the problem of the widespread crisis in faith induction and faith retention. Ideas, always ideas, will get us out of the crisis, so they think. (I am not convinced, of course, that they really see the apostasy of the Church’s members as a crisis at all.)
What these ecclesiastical managers will certainly not do is acknowledge the signs of life that actually exist in the Church. (109-10)
Indeed, the Orthodox will likely never entertain the prospect of reunification with us Latins until Pope Francis has been personally and publicly condemned by a future pope, and there is also some explicit declaration that papal power cannot be exercised for the destruction of that which it exists to protect (it is astonishing that this even needs to be said). And while I think that—if the Lord does not come in majesty beforehand—such a condemnation and doctrinal clarification probably will eventually take place (given that the alternative is the utter implosion of the Church under the weight of the monstrosity which the papacy has grown into), it likely will not happen any time soon. (114-15)
The desire to maintain the post-Conciliar concordat with the unconverted world and its ideology of liberal progressivism, the inflated managerial power of the episcopacy, and the lack of lay temporal power to keep episcopal toerags in check, has coalesced to create an episcopal class who will seek out and destroy the slightest sign of life in the Church. This problem will not be changed until, with the rejection of the centralisation that it has undergone, episcopal and papal power is reduced to what it ought to be: the authority to teach the Catholic Faith, sanctify the faithful with blessings and sacraments, and govern the Church in accordance with subsidiarity. (116)
The antithesis of the liberal privatisation of religion is the Benedictine consecration of the landscape and its seasons, in which all nature is assumed into the liturgical rhythm of the Church. (118)
Even if the diagnosis of MacIntyre in After Virtue is correct—and I don’t doubt the diagnosis—perhaps we do not need a new and very different St. Benedict. Maybe we need an old and very similar St. Benedict. We need monasteries. We need men and women consecrated to God, to vow to be obedient to their rule, convert their habits from those of modernity to those of grace, and stay put in the place in which they are. In short, we need nothing novel, fresh, innovative, or anything at all consonant with such unpleasant adjectives. We need old-fashioned, traditional Benedictines, and we need them everywhere. Without a stable Christian life, there is no Christian living. That is how the Church of the future will survive the looming dark ages, just as it survived the last dark ages: by the daily prayer and labour of the sons and daughters of St. Benedict. (119)
Overthrowing the elders
The reason why our ancestors in each premodern age could depict themselves, the saints, and the biblical characters standing upon Calvary in contemporary dress is because they saw themselves as belonging to the same civilisation as that whose genesis began on that very hill—and so they did. That is, they held the story given to them in Holy Writ and their own story to be the same story. We moderns, on the other hand, even those who believe in the Christian religion, cannot help but look at the religious deposit that actuated our civilisation as the cult of an alien species.
“Modernity” is merely the term for that time in history that is both intellectually and practically devoted to atheism in its various ideological forms. Modernity is, at the deepest level, a break with everything prior to it, for everything prior to it was intensely religious. Unfortunately, by being thus devoted to atheism, modernity possesses neither meaning nor purpose. In turn, our civilisation is rapidly collapsing and the alienation that modern man experiences—from himself, his neighbour, and his world—is intensifying at a rate that makes the approaching decades look very alarming. And through this process of “biting our chains,” as Edmund Burke put it, we are now drifting into the abyss. Amid such a process of entirely breaking with the past, there is no place for the elder—who is, as it were, the very chain that is being bitten.
As the example of sacred art indicates, the one institution that ought to be able to affirm the role of the elder is the Church. The Church, in fact, lives by reverence for elders. Sacred Scripture is the story of the patriarchs, the apostles, and the disclosing of a Father-God. The Church’s theology is orthodox only insofar as it does not depart from the doctrine of the Church Fathers. The Church, both clerical and lay in its constitution, is, if you like, the society in which the charism of the elder is supernaturalised and rendered sacred and sacrosanct.
Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so-called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question—and redact or even reject altogether—huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form.
The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated, as Valentin Tomberg observed. And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit. (123-24)
Childish or childlike?
In the Lord’s dialogue with Nicodemus (John 3:1–21), two paths are presented to us: the path of forever seeking the return to your mother’s womb, and the path of the Spirit. The former leads you to become spiritually childish, and the latter spiritually childlike. Between those two conditions of soul is the void between hell and heaven. (125)
As happens in every instance of modernity’s break with nature and tradition, we haven’t actually got rid of that from which we have sought to emancipate ourselves, but only replaced it with a degraded version of the same thing. … We threw out liturgical religion and have since largely created the modern world by way of pseudo-liturgical spectacles. Modernity is characterised by the tragic and desperate attempt to emancipate ourselves from that for which we immediately make a rubbish counterfeit. (126)
Whereas in the former example, the therapist is thought to bypass experience and embodied knowledge by way of a qualification, the young priest is thought to do so by way of his ordination. It is thought that, somehow, whatever he has received by supernature isn’t going to transform his nature but circumvent it altogether. This inversion of Christian anthropology, which supposes that some “special grace” can aptly substitute for the unfolding of human experience in time, comes from the kind of abstractionism that is the hallmark of the modern mind. Thus, one can see how what often passes for traditional Christian piety and obedience might be nothing more than the deleterious assumptions of modernity masquerading as true religion. (127)
Corrupt, deranged, and downright evil
The traumatised generation that had suffered the bloodbaths of the twentieth century wanted to free themselves and their children from all the history that had led up to those conflicts, when in fact those wars were the supreme creations of modernity, its final birth pangs. (129)
The modern mind is an observing mind and not a participatory mind. The observing mind is a mind a step removed from reality, rather than in union with it. And it is precisely our proclivity for observing everything, rather than becoming mentally absorbed in reality, that not only makes our observation so blind but ever escalates our modern sense of alienation, from each other and from the world. (132)
The Church, in its human aspect, is eating itself. The Church has become the great Ouroboros which she was established on earth to replace with the Holy Cross. Those who are scandalised out of the Church will, I am sure, receive some mercy in the end. Since I became a Roman Catholic many years ago, and especially during the seven years I worked as a Church official in the UK, in the institutional Church I have met some of the most corrupt, deranged, and even downright evil people I could ever imagine encountering. Were it not for my conviction that all meaning and purpose in this vale of tears flows directly from the heart of Christ, and that outside the maternal care of His Mother there is only the darkness of the diabolical realm, I would have left the Catholic fold a long time ago.
Fortunately, by His grace, I know Him to be the Truth, and so with Him I remain. It is a great source of sorrow to see how the Church has grown so very alien to herself. One autumnal evening, I attended a lecture in London by a retired Harvard Professor of Hindu Studies. It was in fact a lecture on the Rhineland Mystics. I learned more in that hour, in a talk delivered by a Hindu about the mystical tradition of my own religion, than I had from all the homilies I’d heard over the preceding decade and a half. That is truly a scandal. One sometimes feels that it’s only possible to discover authentic Catholicism if one flees the official institution for those corners where people, by virtue of their disassociation with it, are free from the petty power-games and clericalism of the modern Church.
If the hierarchy spent only half the time on disseminating the mystical and liturgical tradition of the Church that it does on destroying our own liturgical inheritance, it could drag us out of the nihilism of the secular age in the flash of a moment. Hence, it surprises me not that people, still longing for a spiritual life and some induction into a living tradition, and seeing that the institutional Church cannot satiate their deepest desires, gravitate towards the works of the perennialists and the modern Sufi scholars. Those people who stumble in the dark and eventually find perennialism and Sufism are themselves orphans, and the Church is the parent that has abandoned them. (143-45)
Not a contract but a covenant
Many—perhaps most—Christians are just as under the spell of modernity as everyone else, having allowed modernity’s prejudices and assumptions to colonise their minds, willingly or not. […] Having accepted the overly rationalistic, reductionist mentality of modernity, we tend to think that Christianity is solely about a contractual agreement with a “Lord and Saviour” in exchange for which we are handed eternal life, or that it’s a mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions, or that it’s a helpful moral framework. Basically, the mystery and the wonder are gone. Worship and miracles—that is, I-You encounter with God through the transformative mystery of His love—has become little more than Christianity’s window dressing. (163)
“If nothing has intrinsic sacramental value,” writes Dreher, “then the best way to measure the value of things is by putting a price tag on them.” And it was only a matter of time, he says, before we applied this view of the world—and how the only meaning the world can possess is that which it derives from the market—to our very own bodies. The sexual revolution and all the unhappiness that has come with it, then, is inseparable from the desecrating process of bleeding the world dry of intrinsic meaning and purpose. […] There is a simple reason why the internet is so dangerous according to Dreher: it “destroys our ability to focus attention.” Poor attention among modern people is a catastrophe, Dreher thinks, because the theocentric, participation-emanation view of the cosmos is only recovered by way of the ability to attend to it and thus really see reality. (164-65)
The internet has allowed us fully to adopt an anthropological dualism that separates self and body as if this conception of human nature were not a controversial hypothesis requiring demonstration but a truth to be assumed. Now, through technology, we are seeking to make the fiction of Descartes’ “self”—that is, the ghostly res cogitans encaged in the fleshly prison of the res extensa—an existential reality…. (166)
Either you see yourself as reality’s author at the centre of everything and thereby land yourself in a meaningless world, or you surrender yourself to something bigger than you in an act of self-renunciation—of kenosis, to use the theological term of art—by virtue of which your life can be flooded with meaning and purpose. (167)
