With Holy Week, Easter and Bright Week (not to mention moving to a new apartment!) I have had little time to devote to the internet lately. I do, however have a free evening and some stuff I’d like to say.
Over at his “Crunchy Con” blog, Rod Dreher wrote today about “the necessity of Christian culture”. Whether or not this culture is an ur-culture (like those of the Medieval West or the Byzantine Empire) or a sub-culture is irrelevant: religion informs and creates a culture and is in turn supported by it. Babies and bathwater are rarely good metaphors, because we typically use them to describe instances where the babies are inseperable from the bathwater. Thus, the great cultural disconnect that began when the Reformation unhitched Christianity from the culture it had supported and been supported by for over 1,000 years. The “bathwater” were minor issues, but the Reformation (in order, anyhow, to become worthy of a capital-r) had to move beyond those, and it did.
However, there is a–kind-of–bathwater and baby incident in Dreher’s post. He tells the story of two Russian immigrant women who come to his parish at 3am on Easter to have their Pascha Baskets blessed; they don’t want to go into the church during the service, but they do want the baskets blessed. At the end of Dreher’s post, he thinks we need more of this, not less; incidents like this indicate a remnant of the old Christian world, when acts like this were not merely traditions, but caught up in a whole religious culture. However, unlike pious attitudes towards icons and such (which I have observed from otherwise nonreligious persons from an “Orthodox ethnicity”), it is more likely that getting the basket blessed was just “what you do at Pascha” rather than evidence of a folk Orthodoxy. This might sound cynical, but few non-Orthodox realize the extent to which Orthodoxy (by virtue of being a “non-Western” Christianity) can become a part of ethnic heritage rather than a religion; the situation is not dissimilar to that of Judaism, it’s just that Orthodoxy lacks (thank God) a Reform movement that makes the breach clear for everyone.
Today, I picked up at the post office a copy of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I had recently ordered. The book will likely remain unread for a while, but Taylor’s core subject matter involving the role and practice of faith in “a secular age” should be of key interest to us all.
My own conversion to the understanding of the role of culture in Christianity came during my freshman year of college, when I read T.S. Eliot’s essays on the subject collected under the title Christianity and Culture. Freshly baptized and confirmed in small continuing Anglican church, I had always considered Christianity primarily in its counter-cultural, rather than cultural mode. Was not the message of Christ one of a stance parallel to culture*? The message was radical to me, and it appealed to my reactionary sensibilities, but it’s not the whole story.
It’s easy for traditional Christians–who have a tendency to look back with some uncritical fondness (I’m guilty of this, myself)–to overstate the importance of winning back the ur-culture for Christ. While there is much to admire (and we should all mourn the loss) in the grand old medieval Christian cultures (for there really were two, not one), we can’t imagine that the confusion of Christianity with culture was wholly beneficial to both. Christianity is not a religion wed to a single culture like Islam. Nor is it like many pagan cults, which can go across cultural boundaries, but are then identified with native cults. (Obviously, this hasn’t stopped people from trying to identify Christ with Mohamed with Buddha, etc.) It is a religion which infuses and transforms cultures, but not one that necessarily must replace them with a “Christian culture”.
Dreher is fond of mentioning the “Benedict option” of Alasdair MacIntyre in his blog. For those who aren’t familiar, MacIntyre’s After Virtue posits that we live in a world where the shared understandings of virtue and value that made moral philosophy possible are gone. Instead, we live in a sort of age of rising barbarism; the current pope has spoke of this barbarism as “the dictatorship of relativism”. At the end of the book, MacIntyre writes: “We are not waiting for Godot, but for another–and doubtless very different–St. Benedict.”
The influx of barbarian peoples had been an established fact for centuries, the rise of and importance of the monasteries (West and East) was largely in terms of their reactions to the victory of Christianity over the political and social orders of Late Paganism. It was not the world fast slipping into metaphysical darkness that scared the monks, it was Christianity fast slipping into the ur-culture. The extent to which this becomes dangerous–to the Christian–is the extent to which it is possible to live an outwardly Christian life without encountering the more existential qualities of faith, hope and love. This doesn’t mean the Christian cultures were evil, but it does mean that they posed their own challenges to believers.
You might contend that MacIntyre’s analogy is not essentially religious, but about learning and art, which the Benedictines certainly helped to preserve. It is–as his opening metaphor (straight out of A Canticle for Leibowitz) indicates. However, the fact that the Benedictines were working in an era of victory rather than roll-back is not unworthy of note (this is maybe one reason why MacIntyre’s new St. Benedict must be “very different”, I’m not sure). Just as we cannot uncritically reject Christian culture (as the Reformation and Enlightenment did), we can’t uncritically embrace it as it has existed. The role of the Benedictines in preserving culture was largely accidental; nothing in the Rule required it, it was just the ideal place for learning to continue as the initial chaos of the fall of the Western Empire and mass immigrations were sorted out. (It is for this reason that I have a lot of reservations for the idea that any self-conscious new Benedict will succeed.) In Byzantium, where secular learning did not collapse, the monks were often on the side of Christianity against Hellenic culture (though this is easily exaggerated, as another post I’m working on, about St. Gregory Palamas, will discuss). Thus, the monastic communities played regulatory roles ideal to the situations in which they found themselves.
Perhaps I am more open to the possibilities for Christianity in our “secular age” because of my own background. I was not raised in a Christian culture, and my early church experiences are linked to a self-consciously restorationist denomination whose claims I quickly became suspicious of. If anything, my trajectory at seventeen indicated anything but what would have happened by the time I was standing before a baptismal font in an Anglican church at eighteen. However, because of and not in spite of that experience, Christianity has become my pearl of great price (or at least, I pray I treat it as such); Christianity–small or large, cultural or sub-cultural–is a treasure to me, something I found waiting for me when I had exhausted all other avenues.
It is in Christianity that we find the first good look at what conviction looks like in the post-modern age: Kierkegaard on the one hand, and John Henry Newman on the other. (To what extent these points of view are anticipated in traditional Christian apophaticism is another story, though.) Kierkegaard’s example is famous, but Newman’s is a bit more buried; you’ll find it in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, a book which is notoriously less of a joy to read than his Apologia. In it, Newman takes us along a road that diverges from the “certainty” which had colored philosophy and religion for so long. He develops a psychologically realistic portrait of how we assent to ideas, one where probability is the byword.
The multitude of men indeed are not consistent, logical, or thorough; they obey no law in the course of their religious views; and while they cannot reason without premises, and premises demand first principles, and first principles must ultimately be (in one shape or other) assumptions, they do not recognize what this involves…
Newman wrote those words in a note attached to the Essay.
The Essay is imperfect now; Newman didn’t yet have the tools to understand why “certainty” had been assumed by prior generations or the historical perspective to see what an uncritical embrace of likelihood would do–Newman himself never rejected the existence of truth, just (accurately) chartered the difficulty of knowing it. In one of my favorite lines from the Apologia, he compared the relation between logic and thought to that between the barometer and the air pressure. While not totally true, the words are often true.
So much of that agreement that allowed for discussion of morals (like in MacIntyre’s account of the virtues) or theology was because of shared cultural values which had created assumptions. Our assumptions shape more of us than we would like to admit, so plunging into them–perhaps as part of a Socratic quest (as mine was)–in beneficial in and of itself. If only we can be honest enough to admit their existence.
It is a dear–but perhaps vain–hope of mine that Christianity will be reinvigorated by a world in which even its most basic beliefs cannot be taken for granted. It’s surely not an easy time in which to live, as the collapse of shared values created by a Christian culture often leave us alienated and embittered. However, nostalgia is often sinful, and we all (myself first of all, as I’m writing this to myself) should be aware that the Christian culture of the past cannot be recaptured. This side of the eschaton, present and past are incommensurable.
The desire for a new Benedict is not necessarily reactionary (and Dreher’s probably isn’t), and I share it; we should always and at all times pray for new saints to rise up to defend and sustain the Church and the peoples that it exists within and alongside. However, we must be careful not to hope for a mere replay of history or simply see the old Christian cultures as an unqualified good–we must remember that they, too, gave us the Reformation and Enlightenment (and the Eastern culture is not totally without guilt, though it was preserved for other reasons). Down that path lies a form of nostalgia that becomes an exercise in carving idols.
*Answer: I don’t even have any idea what this means, anymore. Maybe I was smarter then?
ezekiel
Basil
This post, however, isn’t a non-theological post. It’s about board games and the Pope at the same time! How could this be, you ask? Well, there’s a board game I like to play (and regularly lose at to my fiancee) called 
Basil on