In the declining West
with its twin maladies of political correctness and the kitsch there is a
growing tendency for thinking and sensitive people to look for the Divine and
the cultural in Nature. The Church
seems to have been captured by those forces people of taste reject – I mean a
politically-correct outlook that would replace the reaching out to the sublime
with value-neutral and gender-neutral language.
Of course this is
depressing and cultural decline in the West is a real phenomenon. I have argued before in this blog that
this decline has much to do with the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, with its
attempts to universalise, deny the local and the traditional and move from the
Incarnation to Deism or even atheism.
Nietzsche of course
recognised the decadence of the West and produced a powerful critique in his
writings. He knew that the attempt
to explain all by science was a mistake and thought his emphasis on the aesthetic
and the subjective Ubermensch was the answer. I think he was wrong in the way he laid the blame for
Western decadence at the door of Christianity. The self-loathing of political correctness today has its
roots in the decadence Nietzsche perceived, but it is not an evolution of
Christianity; rather it is a falling away from Christianity. Christ did not teach us there was no
Judgment, only that we were not the judges. Remove God and we are left with a society with no values
(something Nietzsche came to embrace of course).
More perceptive than
Nietzsche in his definition of this Western decay was Charles Baudelaire, that
old sinner. As much as that son of
a Lutheran minister Friedrich Nietzsche probably never committed a significant
carnal sin in his life, Baudelaire in his seedy, garret existence perceived
the Divine still through the murk generated by Western liberal dogma. Rather like the woman washing Christ’s
feet grasping the nature of grace better than Simon the Pharisee, so Baudelaire
saw that it was a falling away from religion, not religion that brought about
decay.
Baudelaire wrote of
the liberal French writer, George Sand:
“Consider George
Sand. She is, first and last, a
prodigious blockhead, but she is possessed. It is the Devil who has persuaded her to trust in her
good-nature and common-sense, that she must persuade all other prodigious
blockheads to trust in their good-nature and common-sense.”
The blogger considers
this to be a devastating definition and categorisation of the liberal
do-gooder. Baudelaire saw that
these liberals, with their non-judgemental and modern outlook were falling away
from Western culture with its concept of sin and redemption. You cannot have the redemption without
the sin.
So the argument of
this blog is that what repulsed Nietzsche was not Christianity, but a partial
picture of Christian values – it was liberalism, spawned by the least
traditionalist and most secularist aspects of Enlightenment thinking. The decent and intelligent man
attracted to Pantheism should not reject Christianity because liberalism casts
pearls before swine. He should
first know exactly what it is he is rejecting! He is not rejecting liberalism, he is rejecting what G K
Chesterton called “The intolerant Truth”, which is “full of grace and truth.”
Pantheism does indeed
identify something very powerful in Nature and the Pantheist is right to feel
awe and perceive something revealed of the divine in Nature, just as Job in his
revelation saw God in Nature. Job
however could tell the difference between the Creator and the creature. The Pantheist has the two
confused. The Pantheist sometimes
caricatures the Christian as Manichean or Gnostic, but the Church always
regarded the hatred of the material world as heresy. Baudelaire pointed out:
“The mystery of
Paganism. Mysticism: the common feature of Paganism and
Christianity.”
This may seem arcane,
but it is surely profound, and the blogger may not have fully understood
Baudelaire’s meaning, but no discussion of Christianity can be complete without
reference to the Incarnation and is not the Incarnation nothing less than the
Divine coming into its creation and thereby sanctifying and redeeming it? So both pagans and Christians see the
mystery in the world around us.
If creation is
imperfect but beautiful, the Incarnation can make it perfect. We must turn to a far more saintly
character than Baudelaire to complete this blog – G K Chesterton. The Roman Catholic Church is currently
investigating whether this rotund Englishman of wit and letters was actually a
saint.
Chesterton
demonstrates in his work, the Everlasting Man that Paganism can only eventually
lead to depravity as evidenced by Roman decline into the Circus and perverted
emperors. This is of course a
reiteration of the first chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In another work, Chesterton defined the
problem of paganism in his book on Saint Francis of Assisi:
“What was the
matter with the whole heathen civilization was that there was nothing for the
mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of
the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. Thus, the effect of treating sex as the
only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became
soaked and sodden with sex.”
Thus the decline of
the classical world. And thus also
the need for a redemption from Nature worship. That redemption came through the Divine entering its own
creation – Nature - from the outside.
Acknowledging the
specific nature of Christ’s incarnation has important practical implications
for today however, because if we take the Incarnation completely seriously, we
realise that the Universal has become local, the general, specific and the
Divine, individual. Thus local
tradition and custom in religion become sanctified because they are specific to
a certain people. If redemption is
achieved by God becoming a real, physical person in a particular place and time
in history, so the way we worship and reach out to the universal, which is
sublime, must be practised in a customary and traditional way.
We meet the Universal
Divine here in this world, in our places of worship with words handed down to
us from previous generations. As T
S Eliot put it in the Four Quartets:
“Here, the intersection
of the timeless moment
Is England and
nowhere. Forever and always.”
The Book of Common
Prayer helps us to reach the sublime because of the beauty of its language and
because it is English tradition.
New and transitory language is a step away from the Incarnation and
towards Deism. It will refer to
the Incarnation in words, but the underlying assumption is that the words
should be detached from local context and tradition, they should be “modernised”
– this is a major intellectual concession to Deism I believe.
And so the belief or
rather faith in the Incarnation achieves what both Pantheism and Deism fail to
do: it brings us into touch with
the Divine where we are now in both our personal lives and in our own culture
and traditions. Only the
Incarnation can redeem us.
