Christendom

Volume Four Released

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The fourth and final volume of Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was, has recently been released by my publisher Ancient Faith Publishing.

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars tells the story of how our civilization and its supporting culture, which once oriented the West toward a heavenly transformation of the world, reached a point of despair through secularization.

Continuing the narrative of The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, the new book describes the “specter of nihilism” which appeared in the West at the end of the nineteenth century, the very moment secularism seemed triumphant. Part one reflects on the way nihilism became manifested in the music of Richard Wagner (composer of the famous “Wedding March” and “Ride of the Valkyries”), the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (author of the claim that “God is dead”), the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (with its degrading theory of the “Oedipus Complex”), and the painting of Pablo Picasso (which both documented and promoted the disintegration of the human image). It also presents the literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky (author of The Brothers Karamazov) as a powerful warning against secularization, though this warning was largely ignored until the specter of nihilism overwhelmed the West in the First World War.

Part two of the book tells the story of how three secular ideologies arose to exorcise the specter of nihilism, and how each ultimately failed to restore the linkage of heaven and earth once found in traditional Christianity. First Communism, then Nazism, and finally liberalism all tried once again to transform the world, but as ideologies they were counterfeits of true cosmological transcendence. Along the way, tens of millions of people in the West were killed through forced starvation (Communism), genocide (Nazism), and abortion (liberalism). Ideological world-building proved to be even more nihilistic than the secular humanism it tried to replace.

Part three reviews the failure of ideological world-building, focusing especially on liberal democracy in the West since the collapse of Communism (though an account of how the Soviet Union fell is also offered). As utopia became dystopia, existentialists, hippies, neopagans, and culture warriors all sought in vain to restore the dignity of humanity in a desecrated world. The narrative ends with the tragic outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

A conclusion to the book series offers a reflection on the fundamental tragedy of the rise and fall of what the West once was: That after the Great Division of the eleventh century, our civilization and its supporting culture progressively lost the capacity of repentance and the virtue of humility on which a healthy culture depends. The great counterfeit of paradise, utopia, became inevitable when heaven was removed from earth and mankind directed toward a merely promethean transformation of the world.

The book can be purchased through Amazon here. The entire four-volume series can be purchased at a discount here.

When Charles Darwin Meets Mrs. Gumdrop

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The Darwinian revolution in biology opened the way for a new conviction that man is an animal deserving the title Homo sapiens. The path was an exciting one, following the pioneering efforts of secularists like the eighteenth-century philosophes to establish a utopia in which man would, having vainly sought paradise for centuries, finally find fulfillment in a spiritually untransformed and godless cosmos. By the time Darwin died in 1882, man as imago Dei–the “image of God”–seemed irrecoverable.

Yet by discarding a divinely transcendent vision of man, the West stumbled into the greatest anthropological morass of its history.

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Christendom’s Anthropological Baseline

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The claim that a human being is nothing more than a highly evolved animal, known collectively by the genus-species designation Homo sapiens, represented a turning point in the history of the West. Man, once dignified by the image and likeness of his Creator, became one with a spiritually untransformed world.

The claim did not come suddenly, of course. It was the outcome of centuries of reflections and assertions about the nature of man. It was a consequence of what in The Age of Utopia I call the “desecration of the world,” the progressive de-sanctification of a cosmos once filled with heavenly immanence. Beginning with the Renaissance, intellectuals proclaimed man’s autonomy in relationship to heaven. Instead of being the the image of a transcendent God, man was reconceived as Prometheus, after the mythical pagan figure symbolizing liberation from divinity. To this end, eighteenth-century secularists like Rousseau came to celebrate freedom from a distant “watchmaker god,” just as Voltaire envisioned, in his novel Candide, a humanity that could “cultivate the garden” of the earth without divine interference.

Man as Homo sapiens seemed to secure for the nineteenth century a hard-won autonomy. Yet in the end, the new anthropology not only subverted man’s dignity but the very autonomy it sought to secure. To understand this, it is necessary to consider what might be called Christendom’s anthropological baseline, the conviction that man is imago Dei and not Homo sapiens–nor even Prometheus.

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From Imago Dei to Homo Sapiens

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One of Christendom’s “lost realities” is the conviction that humanity stands in a totally unique category of being, separated from all other forms of life as the “image of God” (imago Dei in Latin; ikon Theou in Greek). This theological conviction long governed the way the West looked on itself and the rest of the world. But in the nineteenth century, as modern biology displaced theology, a rival assertion about human being appeared. The new conviction was that man was simply an animal deserving a taxonomy like any other animal. Accordingly, he is not imago Dei but Homo sapiens. And though he might be superior to the earth’s other animals, he is, in the end, only an animal. This conviction marked the West’s greatest anthropological revolution since Pentecost.

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America’s Ironic Attachment to a Piece of Russian Music

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Americans love national celebrations. All nations do. In our case, the most popular is of course the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. It not only marks our political freedom from Great Britain but also serves as a celebration of our unlikely victory in the war that followed.

The National Mall in Washington, D.C. on July 4

What most Americans do not realize, however, is how dependent we are on other nations in celebrating our independence.

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On the Diminution of Angels

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The reorientation of modern Christendom toward an untransfigured world was, as I indicated in in another post, the central project of the Renaissance. This Renaissance project was inspired by the values of the classical pagan world, but it was also motivated more immediately by the desire to escape the increasingly pessimistic anthropology of medieval western Christendom. Humanists like Mirandola proclaimed a new humanity to their generation, one that possessed free will, one that enjoyed complete autonomy. This was the dream of the Renaissance, and it became over the centuries an inalienable feature of our modern culture. Continue reading →

The Old Christendom Enters a New Millennium

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In two weeks, Orthodox Christians throughout what was once the Soviet Union will be celebrating the memory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of that land (those following the Western calendar in America and elsewhere celebrated the event yesterday). These people were killed for their faith between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of Communism in 1991. Recognized as saints since 1982 by the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, they were eventually canonized in Russia by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 2000. That event itself was a symbolical milestone in the history of Christendom, for it represented the restoration of traditional Christianity to a place of vitality within our culture. Continue reading →

The Age of Division

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The Age of Division, volume two of my history of Christendom, has now been released by Ancient Faith Publishing.

age-of-divison-paradise-and-utopia__10546.1604940730Building on The Age of Paradise, it carries the story of the rise and fall of what the West once was beyond the first millennium. Opening with events surrounding the fateful Great Schism of 1054, it follows efforts by the papacy to impose a thorough-going reform of Western Christendom. In addition to improving the spiritual quality of church life, the Papal Reformation also unleashed other forces including the crusades and, more indirectly but tragically, a penitential piety that slowly eroded the place of paradise within Western culture.

The book also tells the story of Eastern Christendom during this period, when the Fourth Crusade and the Turkish onslaught finally brought Constantinople to its knees. Nevertheless, in Russia the Orthodox Church continued to nurture the culture of the old Christendom, despite growing isolation from the West and the depredations of Ivan the Terrible.

The Age of Division concludes with a reflection on the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, which both continued the process of transformation begun by the papacy in the eleventh century and, in very significant ways, brought it to an end.

For those interested in obtaining a copy, the book can be found at the Ancient Faith Store and Amazon.

A Holiday of Heavenly Immanence

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Almost totally unknown in the West is the Orthodox Church’s commemoration of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River. The holiday is one of twelve annual “great feasts,” and it occurs on January 6. It is known most commonly as Theophany (Greek for “divine appearance”), but also as Epiphany. That is the name for the feast among Roman Catholics and some Protestants. However, in the latter case the event commemorated is not the baptism of Christ but the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. The Orthodox do not discount the Magi (they are actually featured extensively in the hymnography of Christmas). But they attach far more significance to the baptism, seeing in the image of Christ standing in the waters of the Jordan the fulfillment of the Incarnation. What this holiday represents is the heavenly transformation of the cosmos.

There are several reasons for this. One is historical. In the early Church, the celebration of the Incarnation originally occurred on January 6, not December 25. Epiphany was a liturgical catch-all for a range of events associated with the great turning point in history of the world. Eventually, these were separated from one another to enhance the celebration. The Circumcision of Christ eight days after his birth (January 1); the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple forty days after (February 2); and the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary nine months prior (March 25) all filled in the calendar. Both East and West came to celebrate these events, but in the East January 6 remained the Incarnation’s central liturgical event.

Another reason is biblical. The scriptures present Christ’s appearance at the Jordan as the beginning of his public ministry, and not his birth. While some of their content speaks of the immediate impact of his birth (in addition to Matthew’s account of the Magi there is Luke’s account of the shepherds in the field), that event is in most ways obscured. The Magi themselves come and go without speaking to anyone but Herod. Once they do, the wicked king orders the Massacre of the Innocents in order to destroy Jesus. The short term outcome of the birth is in fact the flight into Egypt and continued hiding in Nazareth after the return. The baptism is the turning point from obscurity to evangelism. Matthew and Luke have almost nothing to say about the first thirty years of Jesus’s life. Mark, for his part, literally locates the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” with the baptism. And all four Gospels make yet another important point. It was only at the baptism that the Holy Trinity was fully revealed as Son of God was immersed, God the Father bore witness to him, and God the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove.

A final reason for the primacy of the Theophany in Orthodox Church is cosmological, and this bears most directly on the holiday’s significance for the culture of Christendom. By immersing himself in the waters of the Jordan, Christ brought the Incarnation to its fulfillment. Having assimilated our humanity to his divinity, he submitted to the consequences of our brokenness, repentance. He was sinless and had no need of repentance, but by undergoing the baptism offered by John he joined the human race in its desperate turn to God for redemption. By doing so he sanctified the cosmos.

Water is the most elemental part of the cosmos and sustains its life. Just as the Son of God assumed a human body, by immersing himself in the waters of baptism he joined himself to a material creation which he himself brought into existence and in which he blessed the human race to live. The result was the transfiguration of the world, revealed in all of its glory on Mount Tabor later in his ministry.

The celebration of Theophany is therefore of great importance in revealing paradise to this world. This is why it has always been so solemnly kept as a holiday of heavenly immanence in the East. One of the Greek fathers, Sophronios of Jerusalem (d. 638), even composed a sacramental rite of water blessing for its celebration. Originally enacted at the Jordan River itself, the rite became standardized throughout the Orthodox Church and continues to be enacted at springs, rivers, lakes, and seas throughout the world today.

The most remarkable thing about this rite is its profoundly theological and poetic reflection on the union of heaven and earth. In addition to its statements about the participation of the material elements in the holy baptism of Christ, it unites the “today” of this world with the eternity of heaven. A brief excerpt from what is a long prayer provides a sense of this. “In the preceding feast we saw thee as a child,” the priest declares, referring to Christmas, “while in the present we behold thee full grown, our God made manifest, perfect God from perfect God.”

For today the time of the feast is at hand for us: the choir of saints assembles with us and angels join with men in keeping festival. Today the grace of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descended upon the waters. Today the Sun that never sets has risen and the world is filled with splendor by the light of the Lord. Today the moon shines upon the world with the brightness of its rays. Today the glittering stars make the inhabited earth fair with the radiance of their shining. Today the clouds drop down upon mankind the dew of righteousness from on high. Today the Uncreated of his own will accepts the laying on of hands from his own creature. Today the Prophet and Forerunner approaches the Master, but stands before him with trembling, seeing the condescension of God towards us. Today the waters of the Jordan are transformed into healing by the coming of the Lord. Today the whole creation is watered by mystical streams. Today the transgressions of men are washed away by the waters of the Jordan. Today paradise has been opened to men and the Sun of Righteousness shines down upon us.

A world so understood, in which the incarnate God is united with man, in which time is joined to eternity, and in which material things are transfigured by the presence of the immaterial–such a world is what Christendom has always sought to be.

America’s Second Thanksgiving: Mother’s Day

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The secular holiday that Americans along with so many other nations around the world celebrate today is often regarded, by historians, as the product of commercial interests. After Anna Jarvis (d. 1948) succeeded in obtaining Woodrow Wilson’s presidential approval for a national day of honoring mothers in 1914, the story goes, national associations of florists, stationers, and chocolatiers seized on it as an opportunity for expanding their still regionalized and modest early twentieth-century markets. whitman-chocolates-mothers-day-ad-1946-05-06Money was to be made in the commemoration of motherhood, and, as so often happens, capitalists hijacked what otherwise would have been a grassroots effort to honor one of the most altruistic experiences of human life. Indeed, poor Jarvis herself, later in life, appears totally to have lost confidence in the official holiday and became notorious for her interventions in its continued celebration, more than once being arrested for demonstrating publicly against the influence of commercial interests.

Such is the madness of modern Christendom. But what is also interesting in the story of Mother’s Day, celebrated (following the date set by Wilson) in nearly one hundred different countries on the second Sunday of May, is that it perpetuates a feature of pre-capitalist,  pre-industrial, and even pre-secular Christendom. This feature is the organization of time around a calendar rooted not in this world, but the kingdom of heaven. That calendar was originally liturgical, grounded in the experience of man’s relationship with God. It was established over the course of many centuries by the early Christians, who looked on the ancient world’s calendars as powerless to communicate the radically new life they were experiencing. That life, centered upon the incarnation of God, was one of gratitude. And so, an entirely new system of time measurement arose between the first century and the eleventh century that gave thanks to God for the salvation he had delivered to the human race in Jesus Christ.

There came to be innumerable feastdays in this Christian calendar. And some of them remain today in our post-Christian Christendom as reminders of its Christian origins. One of the most prominent is Christmas Day,  which literally commemorates the incarnation (though, as traditional Christians following the ancient calendar will know, the Lord’s Nativity is only one of several incarnational feasts that include Theophany/Epiphany, Meeting of the Lord/Presentation, and the Annunciation).

On a weekly basis, though, much more influential by reason of its frequency is what we call in the English language Sunday, but which most other languages influenced by Christianity name with some variant of “The Lord’s Day.” This was the name for the First Day of the week among ancient Christians, and it caught on over time as faith in Christ’s resurrection on that day spread from one European and non-European people to the next. Hence, Kiriake (Greek), Dominicus (Latin), Dimanche (French), and Domingo (Spanish). Beautifully and uniquely (I do not believe any other tongue on earth does this), the Russians call the day not The Lord’s Day, but The Day of the Resurrection (Voskresene).

As the latter example shows, the Day of the Lord is the day on which early Christians proclaimed that Christ had risen from the dead, and on this day a special celebration of thanksgiving became standardized almost immediately.  So, when many centuries later, in an increasingly secular twentieth-century America, Anna Jarvis and her supporters managed to have a day set apart for the commemoration of mothers, it was natural and providentially appropriate that that day be Sunday. Of course, for many at the time Sunday had ceased to carry its solemn liturgical meaning of Thanksgiving. It was by then simply the day of the week most likely to accommodate family get-togethers and festivities. So it is in our time.

Yet, the echo of human gratitude to God echoes still a bit on Mother’s Day. Apart from the annual celebration of Thanksgiving Day, this secular feast is probably the most gratitude-laden. Jarvis herself had insisted that the day be named in the possessive singular and not in the possessive plural (“Mothers’ Day”) to enhance personal feelings of gratitude and love by individual children for their individual mothers.

And what could be more faithful to the early Church’s vision of the calendar than that? 1414012760267_wps_5_Pic_David_Crump_21_10_14_By the hundreds of millions, on this day people throughout the cosmos assemble to give thanks for what they had no control over: Their origins through the care and love of their mothers. Many mothers fall short, and all who are worthy of their role would be the first to admit that. But few human relationships better incarnate the sacrificial love that Christians have always experienced in their God, a love which, since early times, was built into the very calendar by which they lived their lives.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Photo credits: David Crump Daily Mail.