Thank you for writing this! It has provided me a better understanding of my own naive/nascent thoughts on this subject. I am very much in line with your thinking on this but hadn't realized how deep and complex this subject is.
A Christian who inveighs against “unnecessarily disrupt[ing] the traditions, the mores and life-ways, of the broad mass of the population” has forgotten the face of his Father. How can such a “Christianity” be compatible with the words and the example of the Lord Jesus, who charged His followers to let the dead bury their own dead and to call no man on Earth “Father,” and who let no human custom stand in the way of serving those whom human mores had cast aside, even unto death on a Cross at the hands of those angered by His disruptions? People like Vermeule and Ahmari, those Grand Inquisitors in every sense of the term, have no interest in the Gospel that puts everything human to the question, that does not cease to disrupt as long as the last are not yet first and the first are not yet last. For them, the Cross of Christ is nothing more than a pole upon which to hoist the Imperial eagle, a coat of thin and chipping paint over the brutal, unjust “stability” of Ancient Rome. What they are pleased to call their “Christianity” is nothing but blasphemy from top to bottom.
The Gospel truth, in the most literal sense, is that human societies are by their nature suffused with sin, built out of suffering and death the way an igloo is built out of snow. How could it be otherwise, when death is the means by which evolution itself works? The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature. If we instead equate God’s Kingdom with the ocean of evil that is a human culture, as we do when we speak of “Christendom,” then we have exchanged the Glory of the Immortal God for the image of a mere naked ape.
"The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature"
This is an adept expression of the extreme Protestant view as seen in, eg, Barth. It's a compelling vision, but ultimately the question becomes: does Christianity affirm that the incarnational world is fundamentally a good thing? If yes, then at some point you have to face the fact that the "all of society's norms and rituals are purely human and thus evil creations" viewpoint really is the old Manichean gnosticism that the early Church Fathers fought against, just in a new form. The difference between this and a more catholic view of the faith is that, for catholics, society can be an organismic icon of the heavenly kingdom, and social rules, norms, and rituals can be inspired by the Holy Spirit and so *not* just lead downward to hell.
I think the catholic vision is the better one, because it lets us acknowledge the pervasiveness of original sin while also accepting that human beings have a nature that was created by God, and that nature is good. Just as a good farmer knows the ways of cows and doesn't try to make them behave like dogs, a good government knows the ways of human beings, that they (we) need the continuity of rituals and mores to make life worth living. A Christianity that works with that nature will always be truer than a Christianity that expects humans to leave everything human behind.
…Which is not to say that I'm onboard with Vermeule's Catholic integralism! I just think he's right to critique those who reject the idea of finding meaning in the continuity of society and its patterns.
“… a good government knows the ways of human beings, that they (we) need the continuity of rituals and mores to make life worth living.”
I cannot put it better than did Our Lord Himself: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into Hell.” If that is Gnosticism, then I suppose I am a Gnostic. Jesus is utterly, crystal clear in His condemnation of those who would place human traditions and mores ahead of the concerns of the oppressed and the requirements of justice. If that conflicts with the comfort that our species takes in ritual and hierarchy, then so much the worse for our comfort. If I may paraphrase something that someone once said in another context, we don’t often tell people that they’re wrong about where they find meaning, but they often are. God demands that we turn aside from our evolved animal instincts in many ways; why not this one, too?
Certainly, though, we need not look far to find many in the Church down the centuries who have found Jesus’ clarity on these matters inconvenient. It avoids so much difficulty for their ideas if they simply pass over His words in silence, and instead offer treatises on, for example, natural law or evolutionary psychology, while pretending that those who point to what Jesus clearly says are being unreasonable, or even heretical. Indeed, if we wish to spread the Holy Gospel of Émile Durkheim, in which the purpose of the Church is just to provide the collective effervescence that binds tribes together, and Jesus Christ is effectively interchangeable with Divus Iulius, then that is just what we must do.
This essay is a beautiful example of why stories are so much more powerful than ideologies.
Thank you for writing this! It has provided me a better understanding of my own naive/nascent thoughts on this subject. I am very much in line with your thinking on this but hadn't realized how deep and complex this subject is.
Thanks, Clayton. It's a really big cave, so there's lots of spelunking to do in posts to come! So to speak.
This is very similar to the approach I support when I talk with my pastor friends.
A Christian who inveighs against “unnecessarily disrupt[ing] the traditions, the mores and life-ways, of the broad mass of the population” has forgotten the face of his Father. How can such a “Christianity” be compatible with the words and the example of the Lord Jesus, who charged His followers to let the dead bury their own dead and to call no man on Earth “Father,” and who let no human custom stand in the way of serving those whom human mores had cast aside, even unto death on a Cross at the hands of those angered by His disruptions? People like Vermeule and Ahmari, those Grand Inquisitors in every sense of the term, have no interest in the Gospel that puts everything human to the question, that does not cease to disrupt as long as the last are not yet first and the first are not yet last. For them, the Cross of Christ is nothing more than a pole upon which to hoist the Imperial eagle, a coat of thin and chipping paint over the brutal, unjust “stability” of Ancient Rome. What they are pleased to call their “Christianity” is nothing but blasphemy from top to bottom.
The Gospel truth, in the most literal sense, is that human societies are by their nature suffused with sin, built out of suffering and death the way an igloo is built out of snow. How could it be otherwise, when death is the means by which evolution itself works? The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature. If we instead equate God’s Kingdom with the ocean of evil that is a human culture, as we do when we speak of “Christendom,” then we have exchanged the Glory of the Immortal God for the image of a mere naked ape.
"The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature"
This is an adept expression of the extreme Protestant view as seen in, eg, Barth. It's a compelling vision, but ultimately the question becomes: does Christianity affirm that the incarnational world is fundamentally a good thing? If yes, then at some point you have to face the fact that the "all of society's norms and rituals are purely human and thus evil creations" viewpoint really is the old Manichean gnosticism that the early Church Fathers fought against, just in a new form. The difference between this and a more catholic view of the faith is that, for catholics, society can be an organismic icon of the heavenly kingdom, and social rules, norms, and rituals can be inspired by the Holy Spirit and so *not* just lead downward to hell.
I think the catholic vision is the better one, because it lets us acknowledge the pervasiveness of original sin while also accepting that human beings have a nature that was created by God, and that nature is good. Just as a good farmer knows the ways of cows and doesn't try to make them behave like dogs, a good government knows the ways of human beings, that they (we) need the continuity of rituals and mores to make life worth living. A Christianity that works with that nature will always be truer than a Christianity that expects humans to leave everything human behind.
…Which is not to say that I'm onboard with Vermeule's Catholic integralism! I just think he's right to critique those who reject the idea of finding meaning in the continuity of society and its patterns.
“… a good government knows the ways of human beings, that they (we) need the continuity of rituals and mores to make life worth living.”
I cannot put it better than did Our Lord Himself: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into Hell.” If that is Gnosticism, then I suppose I am a Gnostic. Jesus is utterly, crystal clear in His condemnation of those who would place human traditions and mores ahead of the concerns of the oppressed and the requirements of justice. If that conflicts with the comfort that our species takes in ritual and hierarchy, then so much the worse for our comfort. If I may paraphrase something that someone once said in another context, we don’t often tell people that they’re wrong about where they find meaning, but they often are. God demands that we turn aside from our evolved animal instincts in many ways; why not this one, too?
Certainly, though, we need not look far to find many in the Church down the centuries who have found Jesus’ clarity on these matters inconvenient. It avoids so much difficulty for their ideas if they simply pass over His words in silence, and instead offer treatises on, for example, natural law or evolutionary psychology, while pretending that those who point to what Jesus clearly says are being unreasonable, or even heretical. Indeed, if we wish to spread the Holy Gospel of Émile Durkheim, in which the purpose of the Church is just to provide the collective effervescence that binds tribes together, and Jesus Christ is effectively interchangeable with Divus Iulius, then that is just what we must do.