At the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., Senator Josh Hawley gave a speech. He reflected on the eschatology implied by transhumanist optimism about technology. It presumes limitless progress, an ascent of time-limited, embodied human existence toward something limitless, something that transcends our bodies. Transgenderism participates in this eschatology as well. Our material bodies can be transcended as we search for our “true” identities.

Although Hawley did not mention him, Pierre ­Teilhard de Chardin gave powerful theological expression to the modern conviction that progress entails limitless ascent. He was a French Jesuit, trained in ­p­aleontology. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Teilhard was part of the scientific team that discovered Peking Man, the fossil remains of a forebear of Homo sapiens. 

As a man of deep faith, Teilhard was concerned to understand human evolution as part of a larger divine plan. His solution was to imbue creation with an implacable desire for consummation. The title of his masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, conveys the thesis. God is “the ultimate point upon which all realities converge,” and therefore all things possess a capacity for spiritualization. The Christian vocation, Teilhard teaches, is to shepherd creation toward convergence with the divine. Here is how he puts it: “The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it strength to escape from it.” Our task, the deepest meaning of the Great Commission, is to assist in the spiritual evolution of the universe toward pure spirit.

There is a profound Christological dimension to ­Teilhard’s vison of final consummation. But that very same vision transcends the embodied particularity of Jesus on the cross, who seems to vanish into the ­Omega point (one of Teilhard’s terms for our final end). But I do not wish to tangle over the interpretation of ­Teilhard’s theology. Instead, I want to highlight ­Teilhard’s role as the spiritual custodian of a very modern belief in ­progress. 

He was prohibited from publishing his theological writings in his lifetime. (He died in 1955). But after the Second Vatican Council, they were published, and ­Teilhard’s influence became immense. This is not surprising. The exploration of space, the progress in defense of human rights around the world, the rise of computing, the discovery of DNA, the great hopes for the United Nations, and more: The 1960s seemed to put the dark era of tyranny and ignorance in the rearview mirror. The future seemed bright—if we would but put our shoulders to the wheel of progress. And doing so involved more than material progress. We would make moral progress and spiritual progress as well. In this way, the spirit of that time was Teilhardian. It preached an eschatology of unending upward movement.

As Hawley was speaking at the conference and I was remembering my long-ago readings of Teilhard de Chardin, a thought struck me. In this issue of First Things, we are publishing “Voyages to the End of the World” by Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe. The essay portrays an agonistic view of end times rather than the smooth, beneficent ascent characteristic of modern eschatology. In their readings of four literary works, Thiel and Wolfe depict technological progress as real—who can dispute that we possess new and unprecedented powers? Yet they evoke the unhappy possibility that this progress tends toward dehumanization rather than the bright, spiritualizing future Teilhard thought was woven into the golden fabric of reality.

An agōn is a contest, a conflict, a struggle. The Book of Revelation is clearly agonistic. The world’s future is sealed in Christ’s triumph over Satan. This eschatology implicates us in the final struggle. We are confronted with the agony of choice, the necessity to decide whom we shall serve and obey. Eliot captures this pressing necessity:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The once discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre–
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Thiel and Wolfe are asking an important question: What is the role of the Antichrist in an age that believes in an ever-ascending, always trustworthy progress? He comes not as a vile beast, but as a savior, a peacemaker and healer. The Antichrist is “on the right side of history.” He often dons the disguise of “inevitable trends.” He leads research teams that promise us that we need not cultivate virtue to rule well. Technocratic expertise will provide scientific management—best practices! We need not prepare our souls for death; we can trust in science to deliver us. Here, then, is the temptation of the Great Seducer: We need not choose whom to serve and obey.

Image by Sailko, license via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post Agonistic End Times appeared first on First Things.

Writing in his regular column for the Wall Street Journal, Greg Ip makes a simple observation. “Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude excel in locating, synthesizing and connecting knowledge. They don’t add to the stock of knowledge.” Put differently, LLMs are not curious. They lack the capacity for wonder. For this reason, the architecture of AI is not set up—cannot be set up—to discover new knowledge.

To use Iain McGilchrist’s terms, AI is pure left brain. It is calculative and reductive, treating the world as a giant data set. The results can be powerful, providing us with technological leverage over existing things. But the left brain is incapable of analogy, imagination, and emotionally colored thinking. 

I recall a seminar more than a decade ago during which the computer scientist David Gelernter observed that true artificial intelligence would require a mood dial, one that could shift the silicon thinking from hyper-awake concentration to dreamy, half-asleep musing. The same dial would need to induce in AI the state of concentration on an irrelevant enterprise, a condition of the mind that often unlocks creative insight. James Watson reported that it was while he was playing tennis that the double helix popped into his mind, the crucial insight into the structure of DNA.

Ip reports the opinion of University of Toronto economist Joshua Gans, who thinks that AI can be an invaluable assistant, allowing scholars to focus on adventuresome research. To use McGilchrist’s terms once again, AI can serve as an emissary to its proper master, the right brain and its capacity for insight, creativity, and analogy.

As Ip recognizes, this outcome is unlikely. “Reliance on AI can cause critical thinking to atrophy, just as reliance on GPS weakens spatial memory.” Ip cites a recent study showing that cognitive function in humans declines in direct proportion to reliance on AI and internet search functions. Educators don’t need studies to know this fact. They see diminished attention spans, poor critical skills, and incuriosity in their classrooms daily.

I share Ip’s concerns. AI will certainly bring advances in some areas. But over the long term, the most likely outcome will be scientific stagnation. We may see a refinement of current knowledge and accelerated exploitation of its technological potential, but there will be less and less new knowledge.

AI will also accelerate the dumbing down of culture. Two years ago, Ben Lerner published an essay in Harpers, “The Hofmann Wobble.”  He details the way in which he secured status as an editor of crowd-sourced Wikipedia pages and then used his credentials to introduce deliberately slanted information into the trusted source of supposedly objective information. LLMs invite similar efforts at a much larger scale.

For example, here’s the first sentence of ­Google ­Gemini’s report on Matthew Shepard: “Matthew ­Shepard was a gay college student who was brutally beaten and left to die in a hate-motivated murder in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.” Careful investigation has shown that his murder was not “hate motivated.” But that’s exactly how pro-gay propaganda portrayed Shepard’s murder for years after his death. In view of the sheer volume of text published by gay activists, their allies, and those duped by the propaganda, the LLMs will invariably scoop up and regurgitate this widespread but false narrative. 

I’m not the only person to notice this phenomenon. I guarantee that well-funded movements (and foreign governments) will supercharge their efforts to flood the web with ideologically motivated material in order to shape the results of LLMs, which will report their preferred “truth” as settled fact.

We should worry about ideological capture, but the more profound danger will be the pollution of data as massive quantities of AI-generated text designed to influence AI results flood the internet. The upshot will be a degradation of cultural knowledge that will make us nostalgic for the far less damaging dumbing-down caused by TV and social media. 

I do not wish to be understood as denying the transformative potential of AI. It will have significant effects. My point is this: Change is not always progress. More precisely, technological progress is not necessarily linked to an increase in scientific knowledge or cultural sophistication. Historians may look back and define modernity as the era in which all three were woven together. It is not written in the stars that this should remain always so. The strands can come apart. Perhaps they already have.

The post The Mediocrity of AI appeared first on First Things.

We read old hagiographies and find that, yes, the saints have fired the imaginations of Christians through the ages. Yet the notion of Christian heroism seems suspect in our time. According to Nietzsche, Judaism and Christianity destroyed the possibility of heroism. Biblical religion sponsored a “slave revolt” in morality, he asserted, an elevation of the meek and mediocre. In his account, Christianity champions life-denying weakness and servile submission, while treating life-­affirming strength, self-assertion, and accomplishment as evil.

On its face, Nietzsche’s claim seems plausible. The words of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane express the Christian ideal of turning oneself over entirely to God: “Not my will, but thine, be done.” John the Baptist says, “He must increase; I must decrease.” In Life of ­Anthony, Athanasius is keen to remind his readers that the Christian hero owes everything to God. “It was clear,” he writes of the desert monk’s glorious achievements, “that it was not he who did this, but the Lord bringing his benevolence to effect through Anthony.” 

Or compare Achilles with Abraham. The swift-­footed Greek warrior is a man of action. His supreme excellence on the battlefield controls events. By contrast, the desert nomad is the paradigm of faithful obedience, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his beloved son. True heroes magnify themselves, Nietzsche argues. They exert a will to power. Biblical religion encourages the opposite. It tells us that we should embrace self-sacrifice and self-denial for the sake of Christ.

But appearances can deceive. Heroic action and devoted obedience are not at cross-purposes. Rather, heroism, Christian or otherwise, arises from the spirit of love and devotion. (For the theologically minded, the mistaken opposition between heroism and obedience echoes the false opposition between grace and free will, but this is not the place to digress into that longstanding error.)

Let’s look more closely at Achilles. The dramatic action of the Iliad turns on the great warrior’s wounded honor, which occasions his petulant decision to retire from the battlefield. Agamemnon offers to make amends, piling wealth upon honors, promising to do more than compensate for any wrong. But appeals to Achilles’s self-interest, and even to his duties to his fellow Argives, do not avail. It is the death of Patroclus, his beloved friend, that rouses the soul of Achilles to heroic deeds. The Greek hero does not seek greatness or power or domination—he desires to avenge his friend’s death. And note well, this powerful desire is one of love’s demands.

I do not commend revenge. Our natural loves must be purified. My point is this: Contrary to the impression given by Nietzsche, strength and mastery are not self-generating qualities. Nobility of soul does not emerge out of innate potential, like an oak tree from an acorn. In the Song of Roland, the hero does not think, “Ah, I wish to do great deeds,” and then determine that a courageous stand against the Saracen infidels is just the ticket. Roland sacrifices himself in the great blast of his horn, but not to become a hero. Rather, he is a hero because he was a faithful servant to the end. 

I do not dispute that some are motivated by the desire to dominate others. Being on top feeds the ego. And I do not dispute that some seek power for its own sake and others pursue wealth. But self-serving goals are not the supreme motives of the human heart. If they were, they would have kept Achilles on the battlefield, and the Gordon Gekkos of the world would be remembered as founders of great nations and movers of history. Without love, ambition and talent are impotent. Heroism requires transcendence. And the engine of transcendence is love, because love seeks to serve. 

In medieval tradition, the knight errant is the paradigmatic hero. He leaves the comfort of his circle of comrades to do brave deeds. He rejects “safetyism.” But the heroic knight does not face danger in order to “prove himself” or win celebrity. In some poems, he seeks to bring honor to the noble lady whose love he hopes to be worthy of. In other poems, he is on a dangerous quest for an elusive and transcendent goal such as the Holy Grail. 

In his wry and ironical commentary on the poetry of knights errant, Cervantes has Don Quixote pronounce, “A true knight must have a mistress.” The exploits of the deluded nobleman are comical, but his statement is correct. The hero must have a love interest. He must desire something, seek something, serve something. Without the pull of love, a strong and gifted man cannot escape the gravitational force of worldly calculations; he cannot overcome the instinct of self-preservation. Love incites risk-taking; it overthrows common sense. And the greater love’s passion, the more extreme are the measures we will take to serve the beloved. The man bewitched by the thought of colonizing Mars is far more likely to expend every resource to attain his goal than the man who calculates that such a deed will make him rich and famous. There are easier ways to gain renown.

Allow me to restate this truth in a different way. One mark of heroism is achievement. That word comes from the Latin phrase ad caput, “to bring to a head,” to bring to completion and fulfillment. The greatest achievements are remote and difficult, and if our motives are self-serving, we’ll arrive at a point at which the necessary sacrifices will begin to seem too much, too extreme, and too dangerous. The voice of me-centered thinking will whisper, “It’s not worth it.” 

Love is otherwise: It is reckless. If the object of our love is great and the desire to serve its purposes is strong, then we will transcend calculations of self-interest. Love ignores today’s counsel to find a healthy “work-life balance.” Love drives us to test our limits. Love inflames. Its fire burns away the impulse to think first of ourselves. It can drive us to the rim of the world, as we reach toward something beyond the ordinary run of human achievement.

Enslaved by love’s desire, we court the possibility of failure. Many heroes in poetry and literature meet tragic ends. They do not find the Holy Grail. But we admire them for their ambition, and we see greatness in their having aimed so high. This view of greatness, as evident even in failure, is the deeper meaning of Tennyson’s famous line: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”

And so, I return to St. Anthony and Christian ­heroism. Is there a love more ambitious than love of God? Can one aim higher than at sanctity? Far from undermining a culture of greatness, Christianity encourages heroism.

I want to come at this argument for Christian heroism in a different way, this time by returning to ­Nietzsche’s own words. Nietzsche worried that modern Western culture discouraged life-affirming heroism, and he was right to do so. Here is Nietzsche’s summary of our anti-heroic atmosphere: “We suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent. . . .”

I share Nietzsche’s suspicion. But what, I ask, has made our culture thinner? What has eliminated the transcendent horizon? Whence comes the view that we are merely utility-maximizing animals, or that the noble ideals of our tradition are nothing more than masks for patriarchy, racial supremacy, and cultural ­imperialism? I will allow that we can debate the causes, but I daresay it would be absurd to assert that the flat and metaphysically vacant worldview of the twenty-­first century has arisen because men have gone to monasteries to devote themselves to ascetic purification and ceaseless prayer.

And what about the devolution of life to prudent self-protection, careful calculation of risks, and the pursuit of mere comfort? In the worship of the Catholic Church, believers recite litanies of saints, nearly all of whom were martyred for their faith. Consumed by wild beasts in a Roman arena, SS. Perpetua and Felicity bear witness to a heroic disdain for safety. Moreover, modern objections to Christianity turn on one or another concern that the life of faith is too extreme and “irresponsible.” Belief in miracles—that’s unwarranted. A strict sexual ethic—that’s unrealistic. Wanton ­charity—that’s imprudent.

We live in an age of small men because a great deal of modern education counsels intellectual safetyism. Our classrooms are devoted to perpetual “critique” that warns us against believing too much and too ardently. Not surprisingly, Christianity is rejected. It is dangerous and authoritarian—unsafe!  

And then there’s Nietzsche’s final anathema—­indifference. How can we have a culture that encourages heroism when we are catechized to believe that “You have your truth and I have mine”? Today’s soft relativism promises to keep us safe: If nothing is worth sacrificing for, then no one will be bothered to sacrifice. The skeptical tenor promotes quiet self-acceptance. If nothing is worth striving for, then we need do no more than cultivate our private gardens. Again, Christianity is many things, but it is not a party to indifference. To the contrary, liberals and progressives lament Christian intransigence, the Christian refusal to be on the “right side of history.”

I credit Nietzsche with an apt criticism of the drab and dispirited character of modern life. But his animus against Christianity blinded him to the causes of our decidedly unheroic culture. He did not recognize that the enemies of love, especially the enemies of a supernatural love of God, are the enemies of heroism. Worse, Nietzsche’s reductive and anti-metaphysical doctrine of the will to power has become one of the most powerful enemies of love. His prose gains its energy from contempt, the sharp-edged but world-weary emotion he cultivated as a poor surrogate for love, which unlike disdain reaches for great things on the power of wanton affirmation. Truth be told, for all his bluster, Nietzsche was a leading father of the Last Man.

Let me end with a recent experience. I was with a Dominican friar. As always, he was wearing his white habit. It’s an odd outfit. But in Greenwich Village, where we were walking, people often look odder still: men in halter tops and skirts, women in leather fem-dom outfits, people adorned with tattoos and laden with piercings. This strange array is hardly noticed, but the friar’s white habit attracts stares. Passersby recognize that his distinctive garb represents something other than self-expression or a display of identity. It betokens a remarkable commitment and suggests an arduous adventure—spiritual heroism.

You can certainly think that Christianity is false. But it seems far-fetched to claim that Christianity does anything other than inspire heroic ambition. 

The post Christian Heroism appeared first on First Things.

Yet there is something strange in the book’s adoption by an ascendant right. For Raspail was above all a man of lost causes, an instinctive romantic. He was drawn not to populist leaders who seek and win the love of the crowd, but to lonely figures who are regarded with indifference or contempt by an unworthy society. The most troubling suggestion of The Camp of the Saints is not that the West is losing its identity, but that it deserves to die.

This idea appears in The Camp of the Saints, when an eccentric band comes together to oppose the new regime created by migrant arrivals. “Mind if I play along with you?” asks one character as he joins their company. He understands that their actions, though earnest, are not ­really serious. The problem is not just that the resisters have no chance of success; it is that they have nothing left to fight for. France—the France they believe in and would like to defend—­disappeared long ago. What has arisen in its place is something that Raspail’s heroes would rather oppose than defend. “The real enemy is always behind the lines, at your back, never in front of you,” says a colonel sent to stop the migrants.

Raspail’s description of a society succumbing to an invading force was informed by his childhood experience of World War II, when he cycled home from boarding school amid the chaos of Germany’s invasion of France. He recalled this period in Blue Island, a novel about a charismatic child who convinces his playmates to resist the Germans. “We’re at war, aren’t we?” he says. “But nothing and no one is worthy of it. Everything is so ugly.”

Raspail believed that Europe had lost contact with the traditions that gave it dignity, and he admired peoples who continued to live in accord with their inherited ways. In Who Will Remember the People…, he ­praises the Alacaluf Indians, who cling to their mode of life on the southern tip of South America as modernity comes rushing in. In his first novel, Welcome Honorable Visitors, he ­praises the postwar Japanese who preserve their dignity amidst defeat.

The words Raspail applies to one character in that novel could be applied to him as well: “Throughout the world, he hunted out the picturesque and the unusual, the exotic or the mysterious.” In Blue Island, an old writer, a stand-in for Raspail, encounters a woman he once knew. “You celebrate noble sentiments, lost causes, sublimation,” she tells him, before adding the deflating ­remark: “You amuse me.”

Today this self-deprecating writer is being taken very ­seriously. The Camp of the Saints is embraced for its unapologetic assertion that immigration involves conflict. Raspail is a writer keenly aware of the history of ­colonization—and decolonization. He believes that if one group is gaining confidence and projecting power, another must be losing its inheritance. This view is gaining broader acceptance across the West.

Yet some elements of the book seem less than prophetic. Raspail’s depiction of a Europe unwilling and unable to turn back migrants is belied by current developments. Mette Frederiksen, the left-wing leader of Denmark, has pursued a crackdown on migrants and joined with ­Giorgia Meloni in criticizing the European Court of Human Rights for making it too difficult to repel and expel them. Even more strikingly, Donald Tusk, the Polish leader beloved of Atlanticist liberals, has suspended the right of migrants to apply for asylum.

If The Camp of the Saints is of limited usefulness as a political tract, what are its merits as a novel? ­Raspail depicts the migrants as a teeming, inhuman mass—­wretchedness incarnate. They are, in his words, an “antiworld,” a nemesis sent to punish the West for its folly. Whatever one makes of this in moral terms (and it is certainly intended to provoke), it is dramatically inert. Because the migrants are presented as utterly alien, there is no point of contact between them and the novel’s central characters, no subterranean sympathies or uneasy recognitions to set off the tale of conflict.

Contrast this with Septentrion, which Raspail wrote six years after The Camp of the Saints. It, too, depicts a band of resisters defying an inhuman horde. But it is a richer, subtler book. The undifferentiated mass is made up not of foreigners but of neighbors, family members, and friends who have succumbed to “auto-persuasion by contagion”—a kind of mass-culture conformity. And whenever a resister finally has a fatal encounter with a member of the horde, he discovers that the member is himself, a double, a doppelgänger. The conflict is internal. What the characters fear in the enemy, they find in themselves.

Something similar is true of Who Will Remember the ­People…, Raspail’s novel about an Indian tribe holding to its old ways amidst the European onslaught. The most moving scene involves a British commodore who was once rescued by the natives and now has returned in command of his ships. He welcomes the unwashed natives aboard with honor, shocking his crew. But when he sees them face-to-face, he recoils. They smell, act grossly, and are half-dressed. At this moment, Raspail says, “he denies himself,” as Peter denied Christ. The commodore’s inability to recognize the other as his fellow amounts to a denial of the image of God in ­himself—a theological term that Raspail, a Catholic, uses elsewhere in the book.

Another striking episode in Who Will Remember the People… concerns a man with scholarly pretensions whose reports on the natives earn him membership in a learned ­society. Back home in France, he is horrified to find that the natives he had met are being exhibited as cannibals at the Paris Universal Exposition. He is dismayed by their exploitation. But he realizes that his writing likewise held them up for uncomprehending mockery in a way he had failed to recognize. “Behind a glib screen of words he had engendered contempt, hardness of heart, derision.”

It’s an interesting sentence, because it captures what many feel, not without reason, about ­Raspail’s description of the migrants in The Camp of the Saints. The story ­Raspail tells in Who Will Remember the People… is a complex one, from which no political lesson can be easily drawn. Without trying to absolve Raspail of his sins against tolerance, it seems fair to say that he did not believe the crucial distinction was between white or black, colonizer or colonized, but between people who conform with his romantic ideas of what it means to live nobly, and those who do not.

Such people can be hard to find. Perhaps that is why Raspail devoted himself to the Kingdom of Patagonia, a nonexistent polity on behalf of which he sought to claim territory, going so far as to plant its blue, white, and green flag on the tiny British isle of Les Minquiers. Sam Francis, the paleoconservative thinker, liked to mock more liberal conservatives as “beautiful losers.” He meant that phrase as an insult, but for Raspail it would be a high term of praise. There is a great ­distance between Raspail’s ­eccentric, despairing vision and that of a ­contemporary right that seeks to wield power in the here and now.

The post The Romanticism of Jean Raspail appeared first on First Things.

Autumn also meant Halloween—and my birthday. My parents would throw me costume parties every October 26. The seriousness of growing older was always married to the playful freedom of Halloween. Trick-or-treating mattered less for sweets than for the opportunity to gallivant around the neighborhood with friends, reveling in the feeling that we could get away with anything, at least for one night. Halloween was for pranks, for terrorizing the girls at our elementary school dance. On one occasion, I ran transparent fishing line through the dark gymnasium, zig-zagging among clusters of sock-hopping girls. I fastened a mink pelt to one end of the line. (I had cut it from my mother’s stole.) Hiding behind a door, I reeled the line in, making the mink race like a huge rat around the girls’ feet. How they howled!

I have never experienced the real Halloween, though. The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence.

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off,’” writes Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence. 

It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted. . . . Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.

This “falling off” is unmistakable throughout our cultural institutions. They have lost their animating force: the spirit of play.

In his celebrated study Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” In play, “real” life, the realm of the serious, is suspended, and we participate in realms that are altogether other. In doing so, we are changed. Set against ordinary life, play is non-serious, but in its own worlds it often achieves, even requires, high seriousness. For Huizinga, play is the genesis of myth and ritual and all that flows from them. Without the play-impulse, there would be no culture, no civilization, no language. 

If we agree with Plato that we “should live out our lives playing,” then the life of diminished play must be ignoble, something less than fully human. Today, Western civilization is dying because we no longer “play” at culture; lacking the generative powers of play, cultural forms and institutions are capable only of decadent repetition. We possess neither the playfulness proper to us as humans nor the reverence proper to us as creatures made in God’s image. As incapable of true play as of true seriousness, we are less than bestial, for even ­animals play.

Halloween originated in the Christian feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’. In the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day commemorates the Church Triumphant, all those baptized believers who have obtained perfect union with God in heaven, with a special emphasis placed on those canonized by the Church. The observance of All Saints’ Day on November 1 can be traced to the mid-eighth century, when Pope Gregory III shifted the date from May 13. In Eastern traditions it is still observed in the spring, after Pentecost. 

The linked feast of All Souls’ Day commemorates the baptized souls in purgatory, the Church Penitent. Though both days were opportunities for remembering departed loved ones, All Souls’ Day featured intercessory prayer for those being refined in purgatory. Rituals of intercession underlie a few recognizable contemporary Halloween practices.

All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, known ­together in England as “Hallowtide,” were among the most important dates in the liturgical year by the end of the Middle Ages. Hallowtide was a period during which the faithful expected an increase of supernatural activity—both the evil and the benevolent kind. Church bells, believed to drive away demons, tolled all night. Many people anticipated visitations of the ghosts of loved ones and set extra ­places at the dinner table, or left food and drink out at night, a tradition that lives on in the ofrendas of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos celebration.

Because All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days reinforced the debt the living owed the dead, Hallowtide was a means of preserving a community’s historical consciousness. These festivals reminded people that they were a people, that they were connected as kin to others materially, through time and space, and spiritually, in the Mystical Body of Christ. 

This quality—of historical continuity, of duty to one’s ancestors and descendants—was essential to Halloween for most of its existence. But during the last century or so, Halloween has been robbed of this virtue.

A common but mistaken narrative presents Halloween as a Christianization of the ancient pagan festival of Samhain. Though there is little evidence of a cynical campaign by the Church to appropriate Samhain, after the dates of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days were moved to November 1 and 2, elements of both traditions naturally merged, and today echoes of Samhain are easily discerned in Halloween. 

A Celtic harvest festival observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Samhain marked the beginning of preparations for winter. Livestock were slaughtered in anticipation of the lean months, and ritual bonfires were lit in the belief that they would effect cleansing and confer protection. There is literary and archeological evidence that in pre-Christian times Samhain featured human sacrifice, a practice not uncommon among Celts and the tribes of northern Europe. ­Julius Caesar describes a particularly gruesome form of Druidic sacrifice in his Commentaries on the Gallic War: “Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame.” The image was put to unforgettable use in the British horror film The Wicker Man. 

Celebrated between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, Samhain was a “liminal festival” in which the fabric of reality grew thin and the Otherworld drew nearer to this world. The Celtic Otherworld was both the paradisal realm of faëries and the land of the dead—and certainly perilous to humans. It was believed that on Samhain the féth fíada, the magic fog that made the faëries (or elves) invisible to human eyes, lifted. “On that night in Ireland all the fairy hills are thrown wide open and the fairies swarm forth,” James Frazer writes in The Golden Bough. “Any man who is bold enough may then peep into the open green hills and see the treasures hidden in them. Worse than that, the cave of Cruachan in Connaught, known as the ‘Hell gate of Ireland,’ is unbarred on Samhain Eve or Hallowe’en, and a host of horrible fiends and goblins used to rush forth.” During Samhain, people would propitiate whatever faëries and spirits might be abroad by leaving out food and drink at night in hopes of a blessing for the coming winter.

The bonfires were used in divination rites, as were certain nuts and apples (thought to have a strong connection to the Otherworld). “Mummery” (pantomime) and “guising” (costuming) became common practices from the sixteenth century on. Youths, especially young men, would go from house to house costumed as denizens of the Otherworld, seeking payouts in exchange for blessings—a practice analogous to the “souling” and “doling” of Hallowtide, and a precursor to trick-or-treating.

Halloween in the British Isles was also characterized by a spirit of play, but unlike Samhain, it emphasized social inversion unique to the Christian imagination. In country parishes, community leaders would designate a “Lord of Misrule”—who reigned from Halloween to Candlemas—to spearhead the mischief. Revelers would parade around town and solicit contributions to keep the party going. Neighbors who refused were mocked and harassed. The Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs provides a colorful polemic against the revelry in Anatomie of Abuses (1583): The Lord of Misrule marched his “heathen company towards the Church and Church-yard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the route.” Frazer saw in this activity an extension of the ancient Roman tradition of crowning a mock king during Saturnalia, usually a slave who would be sacrificed at the festival’s end. The Christian festival, of course, embraces the joys of social inversion while dispensing with ritual murder. 

Amidst the tomfoolery, the dead were honored. All Souls’ Day, writes historian Nicholas Rogers in Halloween, featured “midnight vigils at gravesites and, until the eighteenth century, domestic offerings of food and clothing for the recently departed. As late as a century ago in Catholic Ireland, it was commonly believed that the dead would return on All Hallow Eve or on the days thereafter.” In certain English towns, the ghosts of those who would die in the coming year were believed to appear. The denizens of Faërie and the land of the dead, memorably depicted in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, experience time differently than we do.

Key to understanding the sociological function of Halloween is the idea of the carnivalesque, famously explored by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in books on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais. Medieval carnivals were festivals that preceded important moments in the liturgical calendar, such as Lent, featured parades and raucous street parties, and gave a general license to mischief. More than that, carnival involved its own worldview and was in many ways a world unto itself. 

As Bakhtin explains, “Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect.” As in all true play, the norms and laws of regular life are shelved. “People who in life are separated by impenetrable ­hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square.” Carnival is a great leveler, joining “the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

In practices central to carnival, such as “the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king,” the community embraces “the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.” Carnival was cathartic, an opportunity to vent the steam of conflict that naturally builds within communities. 

Sanctioned transgression of the normative order has always been a feature of Halloween. The practice of divination, for example, was tolerated as a traditional custom during Halloween, whereas at other times of the year it would have been proscribed, especially among Protestants. In the 1960s, the transgressive element of Halloween was eagerly embraced by gay culture in American cities, where homosexual behavior was outlawed. Halloween became the quintessential gay holiday in San Francisco, the only night of the year when crossdressing and public indecency didn’t run the risk of arrest. The trend in San Francisco soon spread to Greenwich Village and other gay neighborhoods.

But as homosexuality was normalized in the late twentieth century, the importance of Halloween to gay culture faded. The sexual revolution made carnivalesque transgression part of the normative order. As far as sex goes, every day is Halloween.

In an act of politically imposed disenchantment, royal authorities in England implemented changes to Hallowtide practices reflective of Protestants’ hostility to Catholicism, especially the doctrine of purgatory. Edward VI banned bell ringing in 1548, and by 1559, during the reign of Elizabeth I, prayers for the dead were excised from the Anglican Litany. The state church soon ceased celebrating Hallowmass altogether, and in 1647 Parliament banned all festivals that smacked of Catholic influence. (The ban lasted until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.) There were Catholic holdouts, of course, who kept alive such practices as hilltop bonfires on All Saints’ Night.

More pervasive than fire rituals was the pre-­Reformation tradition of “souling,” which prefigured both trick-or-treating and jack-o’-lanterns. Supplicants walked about their towns carrying lanterns made from hollowed turnips, the candle representing a soul in purgatory, and solicited “soul cakes” from neighbors in exchange for praying for the souls of their loved ones. As Catholic influence waned, souling took on a more secular character. 

Though All Hallows’ and All Souls’ had lost much of their Catholic religious character by the mid-seventeenth century, they preserved their distinction as a time of supernatural activity. In Lancashire, candles and torches were wielded to repel witches and evil spirits. The liminal, supernatural character of Hallowtide survived the Reformation, but the theological import of practices such as souling and doling was lost, with dire consequences for the festival’s play-element. Huizinga writes that in play, “‘representation’ is really identification, the mystic repetition or re-presentation of the event.” By representing a soul in purgatory, a turnip lantern made purgatory real to the person carrying it. The loss of theological referents meant that the festival was becoming less a world unto itself and thus less animated by a spirit of play.

The distinctiveness of Halloween was further diminished by the popularity of the Fifth of ­November. On Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, often alongside the pope and other disfavored public figures. Many of the customs of Halloween were practiced on Guy Fawkes Night, among them souling and turnip lanterns. 

In Scotland, by contrast, Halloween retained its popularity. Over the centuries, its celebration became an opportunity for preserving the national character. Catholic Ireland likewise preferred Halloween to Bonfire Night, and many of the latter’s customs were transferred to the former, reversing the direction of appropriation in England.

Because Reformation disenchantment held less sway in Scotland and Ireland, space existed for the revival of certain older pagan customs. Nicholas Rogers notes that in the Scottish Highlands, “many of these customs recalled the fire rituals of Samhain that were to be found in the first Celtic sagas.” The link to Samhain was even stronger in Ireland, thanks to the preservation of Celtic oral traditions. The Catholic and pagan traditions were in tension, but not mutually exclusive. “The wandering spirits associated with ancient Samhain and the wandering souls of purgatory could be acknowledged at the same time, even by priests.” Such syncretism could also be observed in Scottish practice.

Though associations with Samhain lingered, the connection of Halloween to All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days grew attenuated. By the eighteenth century, Halloween was more an occasion for courtship and merrymaking than for solicitude for the baptized dead. 

Nonetheless, Halloween courtship rituals exuded an irrepressible spirit of play. Robert Burns preserves these rituals in his poem “Halloween,” which depicts young people engaging in a variety of divination practices to learn the identities and qualities of their future spouses and even their marriages’ fates. The rituals range from simple (saying a spell and looking into a mirror to scry the face of your spouse) to elaborate (hanging a wet shirtsleeve to dry near a fire and waiting until midnight, when an apparition of your lover would appear and turn the sleeve over to dry the other side). Some even involve consulting the Devil. The youths believe in the efficacy of these rituals, and they practice them with delight and not a little fear. For them Halloween is a time out of time, a world unto itself, possessing its own rules and ethos, permitting behaviors proscribed in “ordinary life.”

Because the Puritans despised Halloween for its connection to Catholicism and its pagan spiritualism, the holiday wasn’t observed in North America until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was introduced by Irish and Scottish immigrants. Consequently, Halloween was a marker of ethnic identity during the first decades of its observance. The promotion of the holiday by ethnic organizations, such as the Caledonian Society in Canada, emphasized its public, rather than its familial, character. Masquerades and street festivities were celebrated, increasingly to the exclusion of traditional fireside rituals.

This trend was exacerbated by urbanization. Wage-labor markets afforded a novel independence from family and community, deregulating courtship. Old traditions, especially roasting nuts to divine the success of romantic pairings, were still practiced, but as self-conscious performances of ethnic identity. Play’s quality as a world unto itself was diminished.

Merchants were quick to seize on the commercial opportunities afforded by the holiday, and one could buy Halloween masks in stores as early as 1874. Grocers promoted the sale of a variety of nuts suited to traditional practices, and by 1897 candy manufacturers were marketing to Halloween shoppers. Commercialization no doubt hastened the death of traditional Halloween practices, just as it had previously those of Christmas. As early as 1876, the New York Times could moan, “The glory of this once popular festival has departed. Its triumphs and rough jollities, festivals and strange rites are a matter of history, and live only in the immortal verse of Burns and traditional lore.”

While customs of home and hearth faded, other traditions were expanded, if also altered. Halloween had always had its gendered expressions, with girls more interested in romantic divination and boys more apt to venture outdoors in costume and roughhouse, and this distinction largely remained. But in more densely populated cities, the opportunities for mischief-making were endless, and pranking increasingly characterized the holiday. As had been the case in the British Isles, authorities customarily looked the other way. Pranking typically involved light vandalism, such as placing wagons on rooftops, but could get as ambitious as the greasing of streetcar tracks.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Halloween rowdiness had become so problematic in some places that one newspaper counseled readers to “load their muskets or cannon with rock, salt or bird shot and when the trespasses invade your premises at unseemly hours . . . pepper them good or proper.”

In the early twentieth century, college students became especially known for nefarious activity on Halloween, belying the idea that misbehavior was the domain of the lower classes. The Chicago Daily Tribune records a rather gruesome prank pulled by medical students at the University of Michigan on Halloween of 1900. “When the attendant whose office it is to open University Hall arrived to perform his duty, he was confronted by a hideous sight. Propped against the folding doors of the building and facing outward stood the headless corpse of a woman still swathed in the antiseptic bandages of the laboratory.” Because of its timing early in the fall semester, Halloween provided an opportunity for hazing freshmen, which included the common practice of marching downtown in costume and “rushing” theaters. Local populations grew weary of these collegiate shenanigans, and by the 1920s university administrators put an end to the rushes. When schools moved the start of ­classes to earlier in the fall, Halloween ceased to be a rite of passage. 

Throughout the twentieth century, the carnival inversion with the most staying power was the perceived license Halloween gave to destructive, often criminal, impulses. The 1934 Chicago World’s Fair concluded with a Halloween riot involving upwards of 370,000 people, many in costume. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on November 2: “As the evening wore on roistering groups began a mad hunt for souvenirs. Signs were ripped off of buildings and carried away. Then, as the lack of adequate police protection was realized, the souvenir hunting became vandalism. . . . Soon the general scene was one of wreckage.”

Halloween riots could be considerably more ­violent and destructive, and the 1930s and ’40s saw everything from race riots to arson sprees. The ­violence prompted efforts to “tame” the holiday. In 1950, for example, Harry Truman (unsuccessfully) directed the Senate to repurpose Halloween as a “Youth Honor Day.” Though “Youth Honor Day” sounds irredeemably hokey, it was just one part of a largely successful campaign across the ­United States and Canada to redirect youthful energy into pro-social activities, such as high school Halloween dances and other efforts to distract young men from jackassery.

Trick-or-treating, which gained popularity in the 1950s, was especially useful for defanging the holiday. In earlier generations, door-to-door doling carried the threat of recriminatory action if social obligations were unfulfilled. But, explains Rogers, the new “trick-or-treating sought to marginalize adolescent pranking and to defuse the antagonism inherent in the festive tribute, transforming the exchange into a rite of consumption.” 

Candy manufacturers began advertising their products in connection with door-to-door soliciting, and costumers promoted Halloween as an opportunity for conspicuous consumption. Gone were the homemade costumes of the interwar years; beginning in the 1950s, children bought their masks and outfits from retailers. Commercialization helped to infantilize Halloween by compromising its internal unity as play. “Not ­being ‘ordinary’ life,” writes Huizinga, “[play] stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process.” But when commercial interests are imposed upon it, play ceases to be a world unto itself and is robbed of its generative power. By the 1960s, Halloween had lost much of its former anarchy (and not a little of its charm). The spirit of carnival was replaced by spirits bought in liquor stores.

Less than a decade later, a new threat emerged. In the late 1960s, rumors of drug-tainted candy and razor blades in apples became commonplace. The accounts of “Halloween sadism” were almost entirely baseless, but they had a profound effect on the social imagination. Even venerable news outlets fanned the flames of moral panic. In 1970, for example, the New York State Health Commissioner warned New York Times readers: “Children should not eat any of their collected goodies until they have been carefully examined by an adult. In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison have appeared in the treats gathered by Children across New York State.” The claim was simply false.

The 1970s also saw the reemergence of Halloween rioting and large-scale destruction of property in urban centers. Detroit experienced the worst of it, with young men setting fires to abandoned houses, of which the city had no small supply. The arson reached its peak in 1983, when nearly a thousand fires were set during the three days surrounding “Devil’s Night.” As play ceases to be play, and as transgression is normalized across society, it would seem that carnivalesque transgression must be intensified to deliver a frisson.

Trick-or-treating survived the chaos of inner-city violence and threats of Halloween sadism, though its popularity waned considerably in the 1980s. Compared to its practice in the ’50s, when thick, homogenous communities meant that children could roam without supervision, it was much diminished, hemmed in by parental vigilance. And as Halloween was further hollowed out by social decay, consumerism continued to fill the vacuum. (Last year, Americans spent $11.6 billion on the holiday, $700 million of which was for pet costumes.)

If there’s one feature we have come to expect, it’s the close association of Hollywood horror films with Halloween. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1978 release of John Carpenter’s Halloween—the first film to use the word in its title—that this relationship crystalized. The slasher films that proliferated in the 1980s often timed their release to coincide with the Halloween season, and increasingly people’s costumes reflected the impact of film. 

About the same time that Halloween and Hollywood horror became entwined, the phenomenon of “haunted houses” got off the ground. Elaborately staged haunted houses offered a controlled environment in which to let off steam and indulge morbid curiosities. They were also another opportunity for entrepreneurs to cash in on the season, as anyone who has been to Knott’s Scary Farm or Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights can attest. But such big-budget productions were inspired by “home haunts” staged by enthusiasts for their local communities. These bootstrap productions fostered community bonding, hearkening back to the earlier social function of Halloween. Inside the haunted house, play is renewed: One submits to its rules, suspends ordinary norms, and takes joy in the tension of alternately surrendering to and resisting the scares. But, like so many other localist enterprises, home haunts were largely wiped out by zoning laws and that most frightening of specters: the liability lawsuit.

Halloween’s transformations since the late nineteenth century exemplify the fate of institutions under “liquid ­modernity,” Zygmunt Bauman’s term for “the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’—now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.” 

We can apply this observation to Halloween by means of an analogy: Some of the physical buildings that make up Harvard University are quite old, but the people, courses, ideologies, and identities that inhabit them change with increasing frequency. Much of the old form is still in place, but its content is in radical flux. A similar thing has happened over time with Halloween. The “forms” or tropes of Halloween have been emptied of their traditional content by the processes of secularization and commercialization. Costumes no longer gesture to genuine belief in faëries or spirits. The practices of “souling” and “doling” (now trick-or-treating) no longer bear any connection to belief in the afterlife, or to veneration of lost loved ones, or even to norms of mutuality. Jack-o’-lanterns no longer call to mind the souls wandering in purgatory, but refer only to themselves. Romantic games remain but no longer have marriage in view. For most people, Halloween is neither a reminder of the claims the dead have on the living, nor an anticipation of new life, futurity. We are left with only the eternal now of the market. The lingering customs and artifacts have been stripped of their referents; they are vacuums waiting to be filled and emptied and filled again, until we abandon them out of sheer boredom.

Josef Pieper writes: “In all religions, the meaning of a feast has always been the same, the affirmation of man’s fundamental accord with the world.” The wrinkle is that “there is no such thing as a feast ‘without Gods.’” Compared to the practices of living communities of faith, all our efforts to celebrate new feast days on grounds other than divine worship have been abortive. The same is true of our attempts to secularize the feast days of old.

Halloween’s carnival function barely survives, if at all. Though elements of inversion are still recognizable, they are less and less potent. Because ethical norms are now “liquid”—which is another way of saying that they are not really norms—there is scarcely anything left to invert.

If Halloween is to mean anything more than boozing and philandering, it will do so only in smaller contexts, where communities both acknowledge their normative orders and sanction inversions of those orders. The carnivalesque might still be possible in a place like Mormon Utah, which has done comparatively well at preserving traditional cultural norms. But even there, the porous, interconnected nature of our world threatens to rob social inversion of its catharsis. Carnivalesque play may be irretrievable for our time.

This is a shame. The laughter of carnival is powerful medicine—powerful precisely because it is shared, and shared within play’s transformation of reality. Humans are the only animals that laugh; we are Aristotle’s Homo ridens as much as Homo sapiens or Homo ludens. And, given our country’s current pathologies, we are in need of powerful medicine, medicine that transforms, ­re-humanizes. As ­Huizinga observes of politics, “it is the decay of humour that kills.”

“It was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man,” writes Bakhtin. That victory reaches its zenith in Christian culture. Faith in Christ allows us to truly laugh in the face of death. “Where, O Death, is thy victory? Where, O Hades, is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). Others may laugh at death—mockingly, nervously, nihilistically—but theirs is at bottom a laugh of despair. The Christian laughs in joy. When Christ was resurrected, surely the first sound to issue from his lips was joyous laughter. If Halloween is to retain any value for Christians, we must learn again to play in the laughter of Christ.

The post The Death of Halloween appeared first on First Things.

The litany addresses every facet of human need: prayers for forgiveness of and deliverance from all kinds of sins; from the depredations of evil men and rulers, heresy, and religious indifference; from civil injustice and violence; and from various natural disasters, the suffering of illness, unprepared death, and final judgment. It pleads for mercy for the weak and orphaned, prisoners and captives; for the protection of women, mothers, and children, and those who labor or work in dangerous settings. It asks for renewal of faith, conversion of heart, love for enemies. And in all this, the Great Litany proclaims the truth and grace of the Trinity and of the incarnate life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. 

The ambition of this upsurge of prayer is to evoke all of God: creating, ordering, judging, and redeeming human life—my own and my neighbor’s. Taken as an expression of faith, the Great Litany represents Anglicanism’s rich, communal, and detailed sense of Christian existence. If I were to use academic jargon here in hopes of conjuring a sense of objective observation, I would say that Anglicanism in its sixteenth-century origins had a “thick ecclesial imaginary,” a shared and complex way of making sense of the world within the Church.  

That thick ecclesial imaginary is mostly vanishing, not least because so few now recite the Great Litany. I observe this diminution with a certain sadness, though with little religious fear. I have never thought that membership numbers indicate anything about God’s promises. After all, at the end of time, “few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14). I dare to hope that God will save all he has created. But this hope is hardly certain, and indeed there is little evidence in the world that things are going that way. So, as I watch my own Anglican tradition seemingly falter, the observations I’d like to relate are mostly without theological evaluation. Still, we should be aware of the signs.

Western Anglicanism has developed an extraordinarily thin ecclesial imaginary, both in its stated ideal and in its practice. ­Anglicanism’s self-conception is a stunted creedal fundamentalism: Nothing but the creed counts in Christian belief. This seems a firm ideal, but it entails the conclusion that everything else is optional. Not surprisingly, this thin conception too easily slides toward a plain creedal indifference.  

Either way, Christian reality touches little of a person’s experienced world. With parents, children, male-female marriage, and the shape of human bodies all a matter of, at best, secondary religious interest for Western Anglicans, little else is left to snag us in our lives with God. A host of other activities rush in to swallow up the ever-unmet passions of human desire: sex, politics, money, cannabis, sports, TV, do-gooding. The lives of most ­Anglicans in the West are indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. The thin ideal dovetails with thin practice.  

Some may object: Anglican liturgical life is traditionally quite thick! But rounds of prayer like the Daily Offices, Sunday catechesis and expository preaching, moral preparation for Communion, and private scriptural and meditative devotion have withered in parish practice and priestly example. Congregations are mostly interested in activities that, however ethically elevated they may be, do little to shape a life. That baptisms, confirmations, and marriages have plummeted in Western Anglicanism—in short, steady erosion of membership—is but the thin icing on a cake that has ceased to rise.

There are exceptions, and some quite notable. The split from the Episcopal Church in the United States that led to the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)—and parallel splits elsewhere in the West—promised a retrieval of some of the doctrinal and devotional thickness of the Anglican bequest. That has happened in places. But busyness is not itself a sign of thickness, particularly in our contemporary culture of desperate pastimes. The adoption by many Anglican churches of commercial evangelicalism—with its thin musical practice, digitized media, routinized politics, and morally superficial polemics and preaching—has hobbled the attempted renewal. Rather than recovering the thick ecclesial imaginary, the Church drifts along in the standard flow of America’s current cultural polarizations. 

The attenuation of the Anglican inheritance in supposedly “conservative” circles has been ongoing. The sober and rich commitments of more traditional Anglican evangelicalism—of the kind that made heroes like William Wilberforce and many of the now-forgotten early Church Missionary Society missionaries so perseverant and fruitful, true “confessors”—were rotted away by the infiltration of American pop evangelicalism into the British church in the 1980s.  

Alas, it has now contaminated whole swaths of African Anglicanism as well. To be sure, the African church remains the ballast of thick Anglicanism within the Anglican communion. There are—to maintain my sociological inflection—good reasons for that. The Prayer Book evangelicalism (and later the more catholic-oriented spirit) of the first Anglican missionaries in Africa encountered peoples well attuned to the fullness of something like the Great Litany’s faith. (The prayer remains in many of the Prayer Books in use in Africa). Birth, parents, family, siblings, toil, harvest, marriage, war, famine, storm, brigands, enemies, authorities, elders, children, illness, generations, death: All these human realities were ready to be captured by the prayers and divine concern of Scripture and the Church, bound up in the incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. One can speculate about the doctrinal head-knowledge of African Anglicans in the decades following their conversion to Christianity. But the phenomenon is plain to see: Their hearts were snared on a daily basis, touching the fullness of their existence. When the East African Revival took place in the 1920s and ’30s, it led to an indigenization of the penitential and cross-centered faith (very medieval from a European point of view) that lay at the heart of Anglican piety. The revival embraced communal realities, and so transformed local cultures that became integral Christian societies. Later, Pentecostal aspects of Christian piety, with their emotionally and expressive articulations, fused with Anglican worship and order. The combination proved to be one of the more vigorous thickenings of ecclesial life in the history of the church.  

But this achievement has been diluted by the spread of commercial evangelicalism, with its ready-made, slickly executed, externally produced, hollowed-out substance and devotion. The drive to engage “young people” caught up in the allurements of the internet (a way of escaping the dreariness of economic deprivation with images of a fantasized and moneyed Christian culture) is even stronger in places like Africa than in America, though the motives are similar. ­However, the drag of the real world remains powerful. Spotty wireless service, dysfunctional and incomplete electrical grids, and unreliable internet connections happily foil the reaching grasp of America’s commercial Christian tentacles. Reality also asserts its venerable limitations on human striving. African Anglicans continue to hit against the walls of social and human inadequacies—think of miserable healthcare services and constant insecurity. Thus they are forced still to reckon with the whole of their lives, and not just discrete and optional portions of it, as God’s own field of working and revealing. For this reason, African Anglicanism, for all its missteps, retains a vitality that far outstrips that of its ­Anglo-American ­elders.  

Catholicism is definitionally thick. Its seven sacraments—including marriage, penance, and the anointing of the sick or last rites—bind the believer to the whole range of human existence, from birth to death, much more than the Protestant limitation of sacramental life to the two “dominical” sacraments. For a long time, Anglicanism avoided the attenuating effect with a Prayer Book that followed the medieval sacramental practice in all but name. Moreover, Protestant scripturalism can have a thickening effect. Personal and extensive Bible reading—a tradition that after the Reformation turned Britain from among the least literate to the most literate of nations in Europe within a few decades—provides a daily discipline that encourages us to comprehend the breadth of human existence in Christian terms. But these thick practices, sacramental and scriptural, have been diminished, chipped away bit by bit as devotional practice becomes optional. (Do we really need it? There’s so much else to do, and we’re free to do it!) The thick ecclesial imaginary has melted into thinner and thinner puddles—­global ecclesial warming.

I tend to think that only a catastrophe of vast proportions will re-thicken Anglican and other ecclesial imaginaries. Something that pushes us back against the cliff walls of life, something that drives us to wake up from our narcosis of plenty so that we can see, again, that all is in God’s hands, to dispose, withhold, and judge as he sees fit. That was the urgent sense behind the Great ­Litany, and—here I move from the sociological to the ­theological—it is a sense we ought rightly to ­apprehend ­anew. For it is true. 

The post Anglican Imaginary appeared first on First Things.

America is awash in rights talk. Rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness permeate our Founding documents and our culture. Rights are in the air we breathe. But, traditionally, Orthodox Christianity hasn’t used that vocabulary. Rather, Orthodoxy ­emphasizes the need to deny ourselves and crucify our fallen wills and desires. A. G. Roeber wants to change that emphasis. Tracing rights talk back to the late Middle Ages, he argues that Orthodox Christians can and should reason about rights as other Americans do.

Roeber’s case is impressionistic, not systematic. Modern rights talk, he notes, is grounded in the imago Dei. And of course that concept is central to Orthodoxy: the understanding from Genesis 1:26–27 that God made each of us “in His own image” and “after [His] likeness.” That’s the unshakable ground of our human dignity and infinite worth. But Orthodox Christians have long regarded “individual rights” as an alien vocabulary that could sunder our oneness in the body of Christ. Analogously, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon famously warned that rights talk has flattened our moral discourse.

Roeber, however, is far more sanguine. We Orthodox Christians find ourselves in pluralistic societies with no established church. We cannot pretend that we still live in the Byzantine Empire. Our nation is founded on protecting men’s God-given inalienable rights, including freedoms of speech and religion. Rights talk, he suggests, could bring the Church up to date and into our context. As we confront modern concerns ranging from the laity’s role in church governance to gender and sexuality, we could engage in dialogue about competing rights. The error, he argues, is not in rights talk per se, but in divorcing rights from correlative duties. And as we learn more from critical biblical scholars and scientists about homosexuality and gender dysphoria, we could open our minds to new ways of seeing these questions.

Unfortunately, Roeber’s book cannot decide what kind of history to do: social, intellectual, or theological. And in waffling between descriptive and normative, traditional and modern, he puts the mind of the world level with or even above the mind of the Church.

Roeber’s book is part of a broader agenda. It appears in a series published by Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center. As the book’s frontispiece proclaims, the series comprises books “that seek to bring Orthodox Christianity into an engagement with contemporary forms of thought.” That means applying “contemporary modes of thought” to update “Orthodox self-understandings” and apply these fresh perspectives to “cultural, political, economic, and ethical concerns.” The Fordham Center also publishes Public Orthodoxy, a progressive website that advocates liberalizing the Church’s approaches to same-sex relationships, transgenderism, and the roles of women in the church. In short, the Center is a progressive project seeking to assimilate the Church to the world, rather than other way around. 

This book is no exception. Although it purports to be descriptive, its subtext is normative, portraying traditionalists as stuck in the past, dangerously “retreat[ing] from dialogue and honest engagement with the realities of a society.” Bishops, too, come in for plenty of criticism, because they have refused to defer to scientists and “expert[s] in subject matters ranging from birth and beginning of life to dietary restrictions to social justice.”

George Bernanos wrote: “The worst, the most ­corrupting lies are problems poorly stated.” Roeber begins from the wrong starting point, follows the wrong map, and so goes down the wrong path. His is not a ­theological history, so there is no standard of truth against which to judge progress. The result is a book that adopts the mindset of the world, not the phronema (mindset, worldview) of the Church Fathers.

For instance, chapter 5 strongly implies that the church’s governance has been too “magisterial and autocratic.” The ­hierarchy, ­Roeber suggests, should follow “constitutional and legal procedures” to protect seminary professors’ academic freedom. He portrays the Greek Archdiocese’s top hierarch as paranoid about “infect[ion] by American values he identified with Protestantism.” Instead of insisting on obedience, Roeber seems to ­argue, the hierarchy should embrace dialogue.

Here as elsewhere, Roeber’s starting point is neither the Holy Scriptures nor the Church Fathers, but a farrago of ­predominantly secular and heterodox sources smushed together. He discusses shockingly few primary ­sources from the Biblical and Patristic eras. For instance, one would have ­expected him to anchor a ­discussion of the beginning of life in the Patristic tradition, stretching all the way back to the Didache’s teaching against abortion in the late first century. Instead, chapter 6 gives us nearly twenty pages on Roe v. Wade, Dobbs, Obergefell, ­Mormon polygamy, and suffragettes, before a quick social history of Orthodox women over the last two ­centuries—but no Church Fathers.In short, ­Roeber takes the Enlightenment as a given and so uses the language of rights, social contract, and ­democracy, importing a Western, libertarian, individualist epistemology. ­Roeber’s idea of “dialogue” is less witness than infiltration.

Accepting the American view of rights leads Roeber to see “dilemmas of values versus rights” everywhere. For example, in discussing the sexes in chapter 7, Roeber starts off with a couple of pages reviewing the scriptural basis for recognizing humans as created male and female, not mutable or socially constructed. But he quickly puts up for grabs the traditional understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He wants “discussion of the questions of sex and gender that question any aspect of received teaching.” Likewise, he asks Orthodox Chrisstians to view the struggle with gender dysphoria as like the struggle to walk the path toward theosis, “‘becoming’ the increasing likeness to God.” Glib analogies like these yield the Church’s firm foundation to the zeitgeist.

Roeber does not see how shades of terminology convey important conceptual differences. As he notes, the Orthodox Church has traditionally reasoned in terms of authority, prerogative, seniority, and conciliarity. Those terms make sense within the church’s hierarchical structure. “Rights,” by contrast, bring us into alien individualist soil. As Wesley Hohfeld has written, they denote correlative legal duties between individuals. But the Orthodox Church views us not as atomized individuals, but as persons in relationship. Rights talk often distracts from or even interferes with those relations. Plus, rights claims are insatiable. As Roeber concedes,people incessantly make “elastic and increasingly broad claims” of rights. But he fails to see that giving ground or meeting them halfway is no answer, especially when new rights claimants keep moving the goalposts further from the faith. One needs a normative framework, grounded in Scripture and tradition, to reject many novel claims and limit many others.

Roeber’s appeal to democracy misses the point. In resisting the hierarchy, American laity have asserted their rights to influence church government and control parish property, linking rights to democratic input. And Roeber praises such contemporary dialogue as protected free speech. But the Church is the body of Christ, much more a family than a democracy. The laity are not voters, and the people lack the charism of their bishop. True, one can vaguely analogize Orthodox concepts to rights and democracy, but those analogies obscure more than they reveal. For instance, the laity do play an important conciliar role in the Church, but not the one implied by secular concepts like democracy. It is the bishop who, in selecting and ordaining a man, proclaims him worthy—even if the ordination is complete only when the laity likewise respond that he is worthy. The laity can veto an ordination but cannot force it.

Rights talk is natural to Americans. And it may be simpatico with many varieties of Protestantism, given their epistemological individualism. But both Orthodox and Catholic Churches predate the Enlightenment and need to start from their own foundations. Starting there, we see the dangers of going down the rights road.

The foundation of the Church is not a social contract among atomized individuals but the body of Christ. We are ontologically ­brothers and sisters in Christ, parts of the same body, children of the same God. We were made to live in unity and brotherly love with one another and with all Creation. ­Only Adam and Eve’s disobedience and self-will distanced us from God, the giver of life, introducing sickness, sin, and death into the world.

Our wills are fallen away from God. The Fall clouds our minds with selfish desires. That ­individualism is diseased; we are called to ­heal our fallen human wills. It is by losing ourselves that we find our true selves. By bearing one another’s burdens, we fulfill the law of Christ, the law of love.

Notice how far that account is from Enlightenment individualism. The Enlightenment, microeconomics, and rights talk all rest on a Hobbesian or Lockean anthropology. The highest good is autonomy, choosing as consumers what we imagine will satisfy our fallen desires. Within that framework, it is odd to say that someone has a right to something, then to critique how he exercises that right. Who am I to judge how a rich man fails to help the poor? What could possibly be wrong with suicide?

By contrast, Christ ­teaches us to quell our self-will. We may not play God. Spiritual autonomy, far from the supreme good, is spiritually harmful. In the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Thy will be done.” And in the Garden of Gethsemane, our Savior stands as an example to us all: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” The consumerist will that hesitates and chooses, St. Maximos the Confessor teaches, is an artifact of the Fall. To heal our wills, we must train ourselves to obey—hardly a fashionable virtue. Roeber never ­touches on any of this.

The implications are severe. Our time, talents, treasures, even our bodies and lives, aren’t truly our own. They belong to God. But rights talk obscures all that. We must live not as individuals, but as persons in community and relationship, not standing on our rights.

It is not enough to counterbalance rights with duties. Buying into modern rights vocabulary cedes too much ground to the will, to autonomy as the highest good. As Mark Movsesian has noted, most secular human rights claims are subjectivist, based on each person’s will—which is not the Orthodox understanding of the imago Dei. That subjectivity slights man’s calling to grow into whom we were made to be by taking up our crosses, denying our fallen wills, and following Christ.

That is not an easy calling, especially in a wealthy, post-Christian world. God’s providence has put us here, and we must be grateful for that as for all things. We must render unto Caesar our taxes, our ­obedience, and our allegiance as far as we can in good conscience. And, fortunately, our country’s ­freedoms of speech and religion and ­protection of private property make it legally easier to live according to conscience. Those are providential gifts.

But our culture often cuts the other way; that is the true danger. My brother is not my competition, but my life. Christianity demands far more of us than noninterference with others according to the Millian harm principle. As Dostoevsky famously argues throughout The Brothers ­Karamazov, I am indeed my brother’s keeper. Only Cain, the first murderer, pretended otherwise. 

Rights talk exacerbates the cultural confusion, tempting us to confuse what is legal with what is morally and religiously right. Traditional Christians should take ­Roeber’s book as a cautionary tale. Our faith requires us to draw clear lines and not confuse secular vocabulary and concepts with the sacred ones that orient us. We can and should be good Americans. But we must be good Christians first.

The post Good Christians First  appeared first on First Things.

Already we have had an array of first-hundred-days analyses of Pope Leo XIV, as though the first American-born pope could be judged like an American president. Yet Robert Prevost of Chicago’s south side is more like an ideal Supreme Court nominee: the able jurist of considerable achievement about whose views not very much is definitively known. 

Cardinal Robert Prevost is a man of achievement and wide experience: an American missionary priest in Peru; traveler to dozens of countries as worldwide superior of the Augustinian order for twelve years; bishop of Chiclayo, Peru for a decade; finally, for two years head of one of the most important Vatican departments, that charged with the appointment of bishops.

In the latter roles, he was entirely a creature of Pope Francis. Such figures often rise in the Church ­hierarchy—men rapidly elevated, made powerful and prominent because of their pontifical patrons. Think of the late cardinals John O’Connor of New York, Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, and Carlo Martini of Milan—all creatures of St. John Paul the Great. 

After the death of Pope Benedict XVI on the last day of 2022, Francis appeared to feel more free. As long as Benedict was alive, Francis always spoke of his abdication in favorable terms, as an act of courage and humility, opening new paths for the papacy. Less than two months after Benedict was buried, Francis declared his view: The papacy is for life. It was gentlemanly of him to save his honest view for after Benedict was dead.

Francis also seemed then to feel more free in his curial ­appointments. In 2023, he placed two of his “creatures” at the pinnacle of the Roman Curia—Prevost as prefect of bishops and Victor Manuel Fernandez as prefect of doctrine—before creating them cardinals later that year. 

Thus, at conclave 2025, both ­Prevost and Fernandez were favored sons, comfortable choices for the cardinal electors who desired someone in the line of Francis. The latter, Fernandez, was a nonstarter as the father of the on-again-off-again-by-region fiasco of blessings for same-sex couples, not to mention his eyebrow-raising published writings about kissing and orgasms. Prevost, in contrast, was evidently acceptable to nearly everyone and was on the loggia of St. Peter’s less than twenty-­four hours after the first ballot.

Part of his wide appeal was that nothing about him raised eyebrows. Growing up in affluent America, he had admirably chosen to serve as a missionary in Peru; he had gained administrative experience while running his religious order; he had the confidence of Pope Francis but was not a partisan.

Consider that, as prefect of bishops, he managed to get through the marathon synods of 2023 and 2024 and the controversy over same-sex blessings without saying anything notable or attracting any attention to himself. He was billed by the Vatican press as the least American of the Americans, given his missionary service in Peru, but more important was that he was the least Francis-like of the Franciscan creatures.

This history poses a challenge for the two Catholic journalists, one conservative and the other liberal, who have published quick biographies of the new Holy Father. 

Both Bunson’s and White’s books are slender, and both fail at an impossible task, that is, telling us what Leo thinks about controverted issues. A man of significant ecclesiastical responsibility who gets to age sixty-­nine without attracting attention to his thinking has made a deliberate choice. It may be that he has largely been an ecclesial administrator. 

As a missionary, he was not Willa Cather’s Jean-Marie Latour, venturing out into the wilderness of the desert Southwest. He was superior of his local Augustinian community, formator of novices, a seminary professor, and a canon lawyer at the diocesan tribunal, while also doing parish work. Later, as Augustinian superior and bishop, he may well have decided—like a great many superiors and bishops—that if it was not necessary to say anything, it was better to say nothing. For those cardinal electors exhausted by the voluble and volatile Francis, his reticence may have been his most attractive trait.

Prevost’s first major stint in Peru was from 1988 to 1998, a time when the country was wracked by ­Alberto Fujimori’s violent crackdown on the Shining Path Marxists. Neither biography tells us anything significant about how Prevost engaged with that issue, dominant though it was in national life. Similarly, neither ­biography gives much insight into how Prevost dealt with liberation theology, still massively influential in the 1980s. When ­Prevost returned to Peru as a bishop (2013–23), ­despite ­serving in senior roles in the Peruvian episcopal conference—a sign of confidence from his confreres—he seemed to pass through political upheavals without revealing himself. Bunson notes that, during Fujimori’s war on the Shining Path, Prevost “criticized the excesses of both sides.”

There is a paucity of material to work with. White solves that problem by devoting the first part of the book to the greatest hits of Pope Francis, the middle part to the “most secretive election on earth”—from which, audaciously, he relates details—and the final part to a superficial account of Leo’s life. 

White’s judgments are often dubious, bordering on comical. May 2025 was the “most important conclave in sixty years.” Pope Benedict XVI “may have been a great professor, but . . . often the classroom was empty, or at least the students were not engaged”—a bizarre characterization of the world’s most widely read theologian before, during, and after his pontificate. White is deeply impressed that “as heads of state arrived at the Vatican, Francis would give each one a copy of the Paris [­Climate] Agreement,” but he does not recognize that the Supreme Pontiff’s offering UN documents is an ultramundane approach to the office. It is, perhaps, what one should expect from an author who lists ­Austen ­Ivereigh and Robert Mickens as “comrades and co-conspirators.” 

Bunson’s telling of the story is much better. He offers a searching account of Prevost’s early life in a chapter titled “Witness to Decline.” ­Prevost was born in 1955, in the middle of the American century and at the height of the Catholic institutional ascendancy. He was baptized in a church built in 1953, where he served the early daily Mass as a boy. In 1969, at age fourteen, he left home for a seminary boarding school. By the time he was ordained a priest, the seminary had closed. By the time he was ordained a bishop, his boyhood parish was shuttered. 

His life as an Augustinian ­friar coincided with the dramatic shrinking of religious life in the United States. Sociologically and in terms of cultural influence, Prevost was born at a peak of American Catholicism, and he has witnessed seven decades of decline. When he travels to the United States, there will be no heartwarming visits to his baptismal font in Chicago or his seminary chapel in Michigan.

Like his predecessors, he speaks of a missionary Church and the new evangelization; but unlike them, he has experienced the collapse of Catholic institutional life. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, he saw what Catholic immigration to the United States could ­accomplish—and how the lack of deep adherence, interior conversion, and evangelization led it to unravel in only a few generations. 

Every pope is the product, even the prisoner, of his ­biography. As a young adult, John Paul was inspired by the heroic martyred priesthood of Nazi and communist Poland. Benedict was, by his thirties, conversant in the German-speaking world of Guardini, Balthasar, and the biblical scholars, and familiar with the renewal of mid-century theology. Francis lived his adult life amid, and suffered from, a divided and declining religious community, a dysfunctional local Church, and a country whose leaders have, over successive generations, brought tyranny, violence, corruption, and pauperization to what was once—when the Bergoglio family chose to immigrate there—a peaceful and prosperous land. It should not have been a shock that his pontificate was marked by authoritarian divisiveness. It was the Argentine way.

The key question of Leo’s pontificate is what he learned from his two dominant life experiences: first, as a witness to ecclesial decline at home; second, as a missionary in Peru.

There are, broadly speaking, two missionary dispositions, though an admixture of the two is possible in any particular missionary. One type sees the mission land as lacking and in need of help from abroad. This type shows a willingness to criticize and to present an alternative path. The shadows in the history of the missions are usually examples of this disposition, imposing “civilization” on the “savages.” 

The second type is, in part, a reaction to the first, and was probably dominant in the 1980s when ­Prevost first went to Peru. This kind of missionary believes he has much to learn from the mission land, and that the critiques from abroad are not only unwise but often unjust. 

What does Leo think? It is not known. He has produced no major texts interpreting his missionary experience. He evidently loves the Peruvian people, but does he want a different future for them? 

Latin America has had a rough century. Even the most elderly Latin Americans would be hard pressed to recall two consecutive decades of peace, order, and good government, with stable economic growth, low unemployment, and low inflation. Many have memories only of lurching from one crisis to another. That is an embarrassment for a Catholic continent. The Catholic Church in Latin America is not ­flourishing—to the point that it is simply assumed that Peru needs missionaries, five hundred years after the faith arrived from Europe. Why? 

The great lacuna of the Francis pontificate is that he had little guidance to offer his declining Jesuit order, his declining local Church, and his declining country—one of the few countries that repeatedly defaults on its sovereign debt. Has Leo made ­different ­diagnoses? Is he able to offer better remedies?

It is not only a matter of astute application of the Church’s social doctrine. Leo chose his regnal name in honor of Pope Leo XIII, father of Catholic reflection on the questions of culture, politics, and economics. It is also a matter of direct governance. 

The archdiocese of Lima is a mess. In 2019, with the combative partisanship that corrodes Latin American politics, secular and ecclesial, Pope Francis replaced ­Cardinal Luis ­Cipriani Thorne with ­Carlos ­Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio—c­reated a cardinal in 2024—a professor whom Cipriani, as archbishop, had once forbidden to teach Catholic theology due to accusations of heterodoxy and dissent. Cipriani’s retirement came amid sexual misconduct allegations, and already serious allegations of financial and sexual misconduct have emerged at the seminary under Castillo. 

Prevost watched all this unfold while a bishop in Peru and as prefect of bishops in Rome. What lessons did he learn from a deeply divided, dysfunctional Church in the Peruvian capital? Castillo is now past retirement age. What Leo does with Lima might be the clearest indication of where his pontificate is headed.

In his first summer, Leo was careful to prolong the season of goodwill and unity that followed his election. He quotes Francis, ­dresses like ­Benedict, and, like John Paul, tells young people to “be not afraid.” He met with ­Cardinal Raymond Burke and James Martin, S.J., publishing those audiences in his official calendar, stroking both his right and left wings. The flying has been smooth thus far, and it seems that Leo is the sort of pilot who can handle turbulence. It is the direction he wishes to fly that remains ­unknown.

Image by Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post Two Takes on Pope Leo  appeared first on First Things.

Many factors help explain why modern man lives as if God did not exist. Some are technological: The acceleration of mastery over nature during the modern era can create the illusion that we are the ones in charge, not God. Some factors are cultural: Many took the eighteenth-century ideal of “enlightenment” as justification to cast off religious authority. But there are theological reasons that have led, paradoxically, to the eclipse of theology. One key cause of our penchant for living etsi Deus non daretur is the simplicity of God—or the way we have come to view it. Our theological traditions in the West have made God so remote and inaccessible that belief in him and worship of him feel incongruous: We may affirm doctrine, but experiential life through fellowship with God is lacking. 

Let me state upfront that I do believe that God is simple. Any Christian theology true to biblical revelation must refuse the notion of God as the sum total of many parts. A god made up of multiple parts is akin to the mythological divinities of the Greek and Roman pantheons or the idols worshiped by the nations surrounding ancient Israel. These celestial beings were devised after the image of man. Their worshipers could pin them down and make them part of their conceptions of reality because these gods had strengths, foibles, and adventures in time and in space—much like us. The many and various deities were infinitely superior beings perhaps, but beings all the same. Made up of parts, they lacked transcendence and were subject to the grasp and gaze of human ­comprehension.

To say that God is simple is to acknowledge that he is beyond our ken. God does not have parts that we can describe or analyze. We cannot say that God is part this and part that. He is not even the sum of all qualities, powers, and attributes that we might deem worthy of honor. True, God is every one of those qualities, but he is also utterly beyond them. The simplicity of God forces us, therefore, to turn our eyes away from him: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). We must confess that God is simple, for this confession is an acknowledgement of the otherness of God.

Modernity’s problems are nonetheless tied up with the simplicity of God. Again, don’t get me wrong: We need simplicity, and we need transcendence. But in a certain understanding of God as simple, we end up with a God who is not just simple and transcendent, but also beyond all human contact: Transcendence without immanence. If God is only purely simple, how can we relate to him? How can we see and know him? Does prayer make sense with such a conception of simplicity? A purely simple God would seem forever far away. It is because God stoops down and takes on shape and form and multiplicity that transcendence and immanence go hand in hand. Simplicity, wrongly viewed, does little to promote the life of Christian piety and may tempt us, instead, to live etsi Deus non daretur.

Andrew Radde-Gallwitz pinpoints the theological problem in his book Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity. He refers to what he calls the “identity thesis”: the claim that all of God’s attributes are identical to each other and to the divine essence. From our human point of view, so the thesis goes, we may distinguish numerous characteristics or attributes in God—wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on. But that is merely our perspective; in God himself, they are one, as demanded by the notion of divine simplicity. Hence, the identity thesis claims that all of these attributes are identical both to each other and to God’s ­essence: God is his wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on—in his very essence. St. Augustine understood divine simplicity through the lens of the identity thesis, and most Western theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, adopted his perspective.

The upshot is a gap between the simplicity of God and the multiplicity of creation, and that gap is hard to bridge. The identity thesis separates a purely simple God from the multiplicity of ­created things, the one from the many. Such separation does pay dividends: We won’t be tempted to confuse the creator with the creature; we won’t lapse into idolatry or pantheism. But the cost outweighs the benefits. The modern conception of reality excludes God from everyday concerns, and we end up living etsi Deus non daretur.

Ironically, this same perspective yields a view of the eschaton, the final consummation of all things, that threatens to collapse the difference between creator and creature. This view holds that we will one day see the face of God, interpreted as his very essence. Aquinas’s insistence that, in the hereafter, we will see the essence of God—his understanding of the beatific vision—is remarkable for its boldness. Aquinas comes close to suggesting that creatures will comprehend the creator. To be sure, he tempers this claim by acknowledging that we will comprehend God only in the sense of “attaining” to him—Aquinas using the Latin term attingere (ST I, q. 12, a. 7). Whereas God seems remote, transcendent, and perhaps unreachable in this vale of tears, God in the hereafter overcomes the gap in a way that has made many question whether Aquinas still properly distinguishes the creator from the creature.

Perhaps this criticism is unduly harsh. After all, Aquinas suggested that it is by means of a ­created habit—the so-called light of glory—that we will see God’s essence. In his own way, Aquinas attempts to keep creator and creature distinct, even when we attain to the promised happiness of God. We may perhaps suggest, therefore, that Eastern and Western theologians have different theological toolkits for one and the same purpose: to articulate the divinizing union with God without collapsing the divine and human natures into one. An irenic reading of Aquinas is by no means without warrant.

The Angelic Doctor nonetheless runs into problems, it seems to me. To begin with, it is not clear that distinguishing attaining from comprehending really works. With the identity thesis, God’s essence and his attributes are one and the same. So, we either attain to and comprehend this simple essence, or we do neither, for God’s essence is not spatially mapped out. Traveling south from America, we may at some point say that we have arrived at or attained to Mexico without comprehending it, but we cannot say the same regarding God conceived of in terms of absolute simplicity.

There is a further problem: Aquinas’s commitment to the identity thesis renders his theology of the beatific vision insufficiently Christological, for in his view it is not Christ but the essence of God we will see in the hereafter. True, ­Aquinas maintained that by virtue of our union with Christ, we will, as it were, be in him as the place from which we gaze upon the essence of God. But it remains the case for Aquinas that it is the undivided essence of God—rather than the ­theophany of God in Jesus Christ—that will be the object of the beatific vision. This account unfortunately implies a separation between the triune persons and the divine essence. It seems that a too-rigorous monotheism, guarded by the identity thesis, threatens to overwhelm our creedal commitment to a triune God.

What is the solution? We should think of simplicity not as identity of essence and attributes but as a matter of degree. The identity thesis ends up separating a simple, transcendent God from our everyday world of multiplicity. Simplicity in degrees allows all that exists within the hierarchy of being to participate in God’s simplicity, angels much more marvelously than kingfishers or glasswing butterflies, but all to some degree, in accord with their capacity. In this view, everything has a place within the divine ­hierarchy and thus participates in God’s simplicity in its own unique and limited way. We need hierarchy, therefore, to make sense of divine simplicity and its graded shape.

The third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus made the case for a hierarchy of being that proceeds downward from the One (to hen), by way of Intellect (nous), to Soul (psychē), and so to the sensible world of matter. His Enneads describe the One as utterly aloof from each of the levels of the hierarchy—absolutely simple—while at the same time the One reaches out to Intellect and makes itself wholly present to it. Plotinus, in this way, acknowledged divine transcendence and immanence at the same time.

Plotinus’s hierarchy was a major amplification of Plato’s philosophy of the forms. Plato’s approach had understood particular realities that win our aesthetic admiration as instances or embodiments of the eternal idea or form of beauty, and geometrical proof as an instance or embodiment of truth itself. In this way, Plato allowed that something perfect and thus simple—truth containing only itself, and never error—lends its perfection to complex and imperfect particular things, which in turn participate in a simple and perfect form.

Though Plato had spoken of the Good or the One as, say, a “super-form,” he had not yet systematically developed the hierarchal structuring we encounter in Plotinus. Plotinus thought of the One as “beyond being” (hyperousios), which remains forever out of reach. The second level, that of Intellect or being, is where Plato would have located his ideas or forms. For the ancients, being meant intelligibility and vice versa, and thus it is here, at the level of Intellect, that the human mind grasps the forms or essences (ousiai) of things.

The distinction between the One and Intellect—between beyond being and being—is, in one sense, absolute. Human language cannot in any way describe the One. Its simplicity and transcendence are complete and uncompromising. Neither positive (kataphatic) nor negative (apophatic) discourse can grasp or comprehend the One. Plotinus, so it would seem, was stuck with the same sharp separation between simplicity and multiplicity that bedeviled the identity thesis of the West.

Plotinus, however, relied on Plato’s notion of participation. He insisted that the One—­despite being utterly simple and transcendent—­nonetheless makes itself wholly present within the various levels of the hierarchy. Plotinus explained this perhaps counterintuitive proposal by means of his famous doctrine of double activity. The One’s internal activity or energy (energeia) is its very essence, completely simple, out of reach and therefore beyond being. However, the One also possesses an external energy by which the One reaches out to Intellect. This external energy of the One becomes, in turn, Intellect’s internal energy. And Intellect, too, has an external energy, with which it reaches out below itself to Soul, and so on, down the ladder. The doctrine of double activity allowed Plotinus to claim that each level of the hierarchy of being transcends that which is below, while at the same time being present or immanent within it.

Eastern theology has generally adopted ­Plotinus’s hierarchical scheme. In this theological tradition, the divine essence (ousia) is out of reach, radically simple, incomprehensible. Creatures can participate, however, to varying degrees, in God’s being, life, and wisdom, which are denominated as divine “energies.” Without too much difficulty, we can map this essence–energies distinction onto Plotinus’s distinction between the One and Intellect. Essence and energies do not divide God into parts, for the energies are still God himself, just as in Plotinus the One makes itself present as Intellect by way of its external energies.

Those of us trained in the theological traditions of Western Christianity are unfamiliar with the ­essence–energies distinction. We may find it perplexing, even suspicious. Are we to suppose that God has two parts, one characterized by essence, and the other by energies? But questions of this sort merely presuppose the identity thesis as the only way to affirm the metaphysical concept of simplicity, rather than engaging the very different metaphysical concepts that operate in the theological traditions of Eastern Christianity. And note well: If Plotinus’s double activity doctrine seems suspect, think for a moment of the Trinity. Just as God can be both one and three at the same time, so the ­essence–energies distinction need not contradict the oneness of God—divine simplicity.

In short, for the West, God’s essence and attributes (or, in Plotinian terms, the One and Intellect) are one and the same, so that God’s essence is his attributes, and each of his attributes is identical to every other one. The East, while not rejecting divine simplicity, views it as manifesting degrees. The multiplicity of created being participates in the simplicity of God. As a result, God makes himself wholly present to kingfishers and to glasswing ­butterflies—though the peculiar multiplicity of their creaturely being limits their capacity to receive the divine energies of God. They share in God’s being and life, though as non-rational beings they lack creaturely wisdom.

I have struggled with the question of how to conceive of God’s transcendence. In my 2018 book Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, I discussed the beatific vision without recourse to the essence–­energies distinction. I expressed sympathy with what the East tries to do with this distinction, but I worried (unduly perhaps) that such a distinction could not maintain the simplicity of God. Trying to steer between the Scylla of the Eastern essence–­energies distinction and the Charybdis of the Western ­identification of essence and attributes, I advocated a theophanic understanding of the beatific vision in which Christ is the essence of God. Jesus, after all, said to Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). My solution took from the East the conviction that our beatific vision will be a Christological theophany and from the West the notion that we will see the divine essence.

I am no longer convinced that my Christological interpretation of the divine essence will do. Steering between the Eastern and Western viewpoints may seem like an attractive option, but it won’t work. I have come to accept that we need the essence–energies distinction. In other words, we should pattern our theology according to the Eastern appropriation of Plotinus rather than follow the Western revision of his hierarchical scheme.

It is easy to think that I am preoccupied with technical issues, the ethereal matters of speculative theology. After all, my thinking on the matter itself has not changed all that much. I still hold that when we participate in God’s energies, we participate in God himself. And I still believe that when we see Christ, we also see the Father. (I surely should make the latter claim, since its wording is straight from John’s Gospel!) But it is less than helpful to use the language of divine essence when we speak of Jesus Christ.

Why? To begin with, talking about Christ as the essence of God overlooks the fact that the incarnate Christ is a sacrament of God (the Ursakrament, to be sure, the ground of all sacramentality). A sacrament effects that which it signifies, which is to say that it “makes real,” here and now, that toward which it points. As sacrament of God, Christ is truly God. But this is not the same as saying that once we have seen him, we have seen and know the essence of God. After all, even as we participate in Christ’s divinized humanity, paradigmatically by receiving his body and blood in the Eucharist, God remains infinitely beyond us. Maximus the Confessor reminds us, “As much as He became comprehensible through the fact of His birth, by so much more do we now know Him to be incomprehensible precisely because of that birth” (Ambigua 5.5). When we identify Christ with the divine essence, we run the danger of reducing the nature of God to the observable facts of the historical Jesus.

Moreover, essencelanguage is hard-edged. It does not allow for more or less. In the past, I have identified Christ with the divine essence in my theological writing, going on to say that we participate in varying degrees of intensity in the divine essence, just as we may share more or less in Christ’s humility (or some other of Christ’s virtues). But this is to use the language of essencein a highly unusual way. For Aristotle, the essence underlies (to hypokeimenon) an object’s accidental attributes; it is what remains once we have stripped away every one of its attributes. Plotinus held to a similar view: The One’s essence is precisely what distinguishes its transcendent nature from each of the hierarchical levels below it. Only by using the term essence in an idiosyncratic manner can we say that we make progress in it or learn to participate in it more deeply. Only when the transcendent God reveals himself by way of his energies can we reasonably speak of creaturely participation: Only when God manifests himself can we participate in him. 

Think of it this way: Either we see God in his essence, or we don’t. There is no conceptual room for greater or lesser. But we can easily speak (and we often do) of gaining deeper insight into God’s revelation, or of growing in discipleship. What conception of the divine allows us to speak of drawing “closer” to God, of growing in holiness as God himself is holy? I have become convinced that we cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question without something akin to the Eastern concept of divine energies.

Casting one’s lot with the essence–energies distinction is a major theological step. After all, this distinction lies at the root of most other ­differences between East and West. It is precisely the lack of a distinction between essence and energies that made Aquinas shy away from speaking of participation in God: While acknowledging participation in creaturely common being (esse commune), Aquinas was afraid to use the language of participation in God himself (esse ipsum subsistens), because it would mean participation in the divine essence, which in turn would erase the difference between creator and creature. Aquinas rightly recognized that his adoption of the identity thesis required him to avoid the traditional language of participation in God. Aquinas’s view of divine simplicity, the standard view for much of the Western theological tradition, thus seriously attenuated the participatory link between creator and creature.

Absolute divine simplicity, along the lines of the identity thesis, has encouraged the perception of a radical separation between God and the cosmos. Modernity was the inevitable corollary. I fear that we have all become very modern, even if we are baptized believers, for when we think of what creation is, we are inclined to keep any thought of God at bay. By contrast, patristic theologians—Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the ­Confessor—unapologetically assert that creation is not just “out of nothing” (ek tou mē) but also “out of God” (ek theou). Created things, Dionysius says, are “in a sense, projected out from him.” The ­Logos, suggests St. Maximus, “thickens,” “expands,” or “embodies” himself in creation. Such articulations are possible because these theologians believe that the utterly simple God paradoxically renders ­himself present in creation.

We may well be startled, perhaps troubled, by such language. The reason is probably that we fear pantheism. This same fear is what animated Western theologians since the High Middle Ages, when they articulated the identity thesis and began to separate nature from the supernatural ever more sharply. But fear is a poor counselor. Pantheism is by no means the inevitable result of letting go of the simplicity of God as understood by the identity thesis. None of the Eastern Fathers I have mentioned held to such a view of divine simplicity; yet none of them lapsed into pantheism. Instead, they typically distinguished between God’s essence and his energies. Creation is “out of God” only with respect to his energies. God’s essence remains completely simple and unambiguously transcendent.

The danger in the modern West is not ­pantheism but practical atheism. Craig Gay rightly diagnosed the trouble with modernity in the title of his 1998 book The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It Is Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist. Our impediment to a deeper and fuller faith is our ­disenchanted world, which has emerged in part because we have removed our utterly simple God—whose substance is identical to his ­attributes—from the material world of multiplicity. The everyday is merely everyday. We pursue social, political, and economic aspirations without regard for God. Is this surprising? It is hard to imagine that the purely simple God of the identity thesis could in any way be present in or concern himself with the world in which we live.

We need to retrieve the Eastern notion of participation in the divine energies. This theological concept allows us to echo the traditional Christian Platonist vision of God’s theophanic manifestation of himself in a created mode and embodiment of himself in creation—a vision, therefore, of creaturely participation in God. To counter the modern, Western creator–creature divide, we must rethink the metaphysical discourse we use in speaking about God and return to the Christian Platonist understanding in which all things are in God and God is in all things.

Christian panentheism, disciplined by a subtle appropriation of the hierarchical scheme developed by Plotinus, was common among the Eastern Fathers. It was their way of avoiding a sharp and unbridgeable separation of nature from the supernatural, of heaven from earth. When we think of creation as God’s making himself present by means of his energies, living etsi Deus non daretur begins to seem a most peculiar undertaking.

The post Modernity and God-Talk appeared first on First Things.

These were my thoughts, fifteen hours and twenty-four miles into the Chartres pilgrimage. But a pilgrimage is incomprehensible apart from its end. I and twenty thousand other pilgrims were doing something that drew us into another realm, a realm where pretenses are stripped away.

The cathedral at Chartres sits on a hill—a high place, perhaps even a thin place, which was a spiritual site long before the arrival of Christianity. There has been a church there since the fourth century, and the current Gothic cathedral has changed little since its completion in 1252. For a thousand years, pilgrims have venerated the ­Sancta ­Camisa, a piece of the Blessed ­Virgin’s tunic.

The current iteration of the ­pilgrimage takes place each year over Pentecost weekend. The revival began with the French writer Charles Péguy, an unlikely candidate given his struggles with and intermittent practice of the Catholic faith. But when his son fell ill, he pledged to the Virgin that he would make pilgrimage to Chartres if the boy recovered. His son got well, and he completed the pilgrimage ­several times before he was killed on the battlefield in 1914. Interest continued for the next decades as Péguy’s students, friends, and admirers made the trek. In the 1980s, the traditionalist Catholic group Chrétienté-­Solidarité made the pilgrimage a rallying point for the preservation of the Latin Mass, and numbers increased ­dramatically.

Today, the pilgrimage draws thousands of mostly young people from all over the world. The atmosphere is something like Coachella meets a crusade. The pilgrims are arranged in groups called chapters. French scouts in their tweens and teens populate a large number of the chapters. In my chapter, ­hailing from all over the Anglophone world, participants were between the ages of seventeen and forty. The traditional Mass is celebrated each day; the rosary is chanted in Latin; talks are delivered about the precarious state of the pre-1962 rites. Some pilgrims have come because of their deep love of the Church’s old rites, others for the physical challenge. For me, the circumstances simply aligned, or were aligned for me.

I love tradition and beauty as much as the next Catholic Zoomer, but I can’t say that my attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass has been regular. All I’ve ever wanted out of the Mass is for those who celebrate it to act like it is what we say it is. Novus Ordo Catholic that I am, I have a hard time refuting the argument that the old ways are, overall, a more fitting practice of the Catholic faith. Submerged in traditional Catholicism for three days, I remember that I dislike the disputes over these liturgies, not the liturgies themselves.

As I confront the realities of camping that first night, I reflect on the fact that a pilgrimage is out of place in today’s world. Modernity, secularism, popular forms of Protestantism, and diluted ­Catholicism all say that it’s medieval and superstitious to believe that undertaking hardship somehow wins us favor and ­graces from God. And yet here we all are. The soul understands that there is a divine economy, whereby Christ changes our sufferings into grace. And he offers ways for us, in his mercy, to participate in his ­glorious triumph on the cross. During that night, my mat pools with water, and I make a half-­hearted prayer that the pounding rain should stop, but the request is blocked: “You will endure discomfort,” a small voice says. “But you will not be hurt.”

Pentecost morning dawns with a red sun and a fresh sky. Each chapter carries a cross, a banner proclaiming its patron saint, and its national flag. My chapter’s green banner with a gold cross showcases St. ­Joseph, Guardian of Tradition (custos traditionis, distinct from ­Traditionis custodes). Though wet with rain, every flag raises our spirits; we are the Church Militant.

The second day is easier than the first. The walking is broken up by a long, solemn Mass in the middle of a field, with Bishop Athanasius Schneider presiding. I’m sure it is beautiful, though I can’t see a thing from my vantage as I relish the sun and rest. In normal life, Mass can feel like the only time our spiritual muscles are working. But this moment in the heavenly sun seems to anticipate the rest at the end of the journey, the end that the Mass itself provides for us in anticipation of our final rest in him.

The logistics of moving a three-mile-long column dictate a quick, steady pace. When gaps open, you run to close them. It’s best to stay close to the cross that leads the chapter. There is little time to do anything but keep going. A bathroom break can mean falling behind. The urgency of keeping up: What better to remind us of the pleasures and supposed necessities that distract us from the one thing needful?

Pilgrimage highlights our need for companions. I wouldn’t get far without my fellow travelers. Trads sometimes have an odd reputation, but the friends I have met are the very best Catholicism has to offer. They are dedicated, interesting, sociable people, many with fascinating lives both within and beyond the faith. Some are graduate students; others are involved in their churches through music ministry or altar serving. Some of the men are discerning the priesthood.

Protection of the old rite is an element of the Chartres pilgrimage. One of the leaders says that right worship leads to right belief, which leads to right culture. And yet, though everyone here likes the Latin Mass, few are Latin Mass–­exclusive. One man tells me he doesn’t feel it is right to drive an hour and a half to the closest Latin Mass when there is a reverent ­Novus Ordo right down the street.

Near the end of the second day, the twin spires of the cathedral appear on the horizon. We kneel to chant a Salve in thanksgiving. The evening is clear and fair as the French scouts high-five us ­into camp. Now that I have forty-six miles behind me, my feet are sore, but I’m cheerful. Only fourteen miles to go. I have grown to love the journey.

The final day brings a surge of energy. We sing every hymn in our booklet when the line stalls in an open field. We pass around electrolyte packets. The men insist that boxed red wine, poured straight from the bag into their mouths, is a cure-all, but I abstain. We round a corner, and the cathedral emerges from the plain—as startling as the elevation of the host at the Latin Mass. The cathedral grows larger on the horizon, but it teases us by seeming to stay at the same distance as we keep marching. Finally, we are in the suburbs of Chartres, and then at last climbing the hill. We kneel to receive a blessing from the bishop. Seeing our American flags, he tells us to pray that the United States will be a country of peace.

The final Mass is an ordeal in its own right. The pilgrims overflow the cathedral, and most of us have to remain in the square outside. Kneeling on gravel with no shade, I don’t know that I’ve ever participated less in a Mass than I do in this one. But the march of the banners into the cathedral stirs me. The organ sounds the traditional hymn of the pilgrimage: Chartres sonne, Chartres t’appelle (“Chartres is ringing, Chartres is calling you”).

The next morning, my chapter and a few others celebrate one more Mass. In past years, this Mass has occurred in the crypt of the cathedral. Due to conflicts with the bishop over the celebration of the Latin Mass, we have to use a different church in Chartres. After communion, I weep, overcome with the beauty of the liturgy. The Mass is more than beautiful. It is beautiful like the surface of the ocean: just a glimpse of the forces underneath. There is more going on than we see and feel. It’s an opportunity to stop questioning and rest in the mystery. On a simpler note, I am relieved that I—and we—were granted the strength to finish, no worse for wear. The last three days have given new life to Paul’s declaration, “I have finished the race” (2 Tim. 4:7).

But my reflections are inter­rupted: As the final hymn begins, a man starts screaming and groaning, in the throes of a demonic manifestation. My hands go cold. Medical professionals run up to help and are turned away. I keep singing the refrain, calling on the Blessed Virgin to enter “chez nous”—our house. The man’s companions seem unflustered. This sort of thing can happen in such a spiritually charged environment, I suppose. There be dragons yet.

Shortly afterward, I climb the steps of the cathedral on my knees. I venerate the veil of Our Lady and feel her sanctity. I give her the burdens I have been carrying. The cathedral stands for the heavenly Jerusalem, to which we should be on pilgrimage throughout our lives. God willing, I had just completed a miniature version of my life’s course. Christians view the Exodus as a blueprint for the spiritual life: Called out of sin and complacency, we face trials and purgation in the desert of this life, and only then enter into the promised land. This story is repeated in the lives of the patriarchs and prophets, from Abraham to John the Baptist, and culminates in the life of Christ.

It is common, on these journeys, to imagine oneself abandoned just when God is really very close—think of the Israelites worshiping the golden calf as Moses receives the Commandments, or Elijah’s journey in the desert just before the theophany on Mount Horeb. One of my faults is to judge my relationship with God on the basis of my emotions. If I don’t feel comforted, I assume that God is distant. The pilgrimage reminded me that the spiritual life has an objective element. It makes the invisible journey of life visible, the destination and the help along the way present and tangible.

The post The Road to Chartres appeared first on First Things.

As the ad kicks off, a few of its youngest actors—plus the episode’s guest host, comedian Dan Levy—glare suggestively at the camera, removing jackets and inhibitions as smooth background music sets a frisky tone.

“Are you bored?” asks one actor. “Looking for something to spice up your life?” coos another. “You used to want sex,” a third declares, twirling on his unmade bed, “but you’re in your late thirties now . . .” “And sex isn’t really doing it for me anymore,” says another. “You need something new.” “Something exciting!” “I need a new fantasy.”

And that new fantasy, it is soon revealed, is Zillow. The smooth music grows smoother as the actors scroll through America’s most popular real estate website, excitedly muttering sweet nothings, like “an updated colonial with mature landscaping,” as if they are looking at pornography.

Because, in truth, they were: The joke worked because Zillow—which, according to some statistics, enjoys a mind-boggling 227 million monthly users—has become the place many Americans go these days to escape into sordid daydreams of different lives and instant gratifications. And daydreams they mostly are. Although the website was started to help people rent, buy, or sell homes, data suggests that 83 percent of all of Zillow’s users surf the site with no intention of engaging in any transaction whatsoever. All they want to do is gawk at that ranch-style house on 1.3 acres in a good school district with a finished basement and a nice backyard and imagine that maybe they, too, could one day wake up in a place as nice as that. 

What does this real estate obsession mean? Sure, it’s the rare human who wouldn’t gladly trade a small and plain abode for a roomier, prettier one. But spending minutes—or hours—every day thumbing through hundreds of photos of homes you could never afford in towns you would never call home is a curious new phenomenon, one suggesting that the fault isn’t in our studio apartments but in ourselves. We ogle houses because what we want is a home, which is much less about price per square foot and much more about a life worth living. 

Just ask Scott Harris. One of New York City’s most celebrated real estate brokers, he spent more than two decades selling high-end property, the collective value of which surpasses the GDP of some nations. His interactions with Manhattanites desperate for more living space helped him forge an unorthodox—and sorely needed—understanding of what we really talk about when we talk about real estate. 

He collected his insights in a new and deeply moving book, The Pursuit of Home. It’s one part guide for anyone desiring to achieve the American dream of home ownership and one part spiritual meditation on our collective real estate obsession, why we so frequently let it cloud our judgment, and how we can learn and grow not only our square footage, but, more importantly, our souls. 

Real estate is the most concrete (no pun intended) of all industries. It deals with a finite number of units and buildings, not financial products or digital applications or other valuable objects whose earthly presence is more ephemeral. Harris acknowledges, of course, that the industry has its fair share of real-world problems that have little to do with how we feel or think about our homes. Nearly a third of the largest properties in America, he reminds us, are owned (and, alas, underutilized) by empty nesters, while growing families with children compete for fewer and fewer suitable units. Institutional investors, too, are playing their part to turn real estate into a blood sport. They currently own 10 percentof all apartments in America and were snatching up one in four single-family homes in 2023 alone, transforming us from a nation of homeowners rooted in their communities to a gaggle of renters living at the whims of a corporation. 

Rather than tackle these very real issues, however, Harris dives into constraints that are harder to spot in statistics but are much more ruinous when it comes to helping Americans settle into the homes of their dreams. Call it the Zillow mindset. “Just as technology has empowered us,” he writes,

it has further loosened the physical ties that bind us. We work remotely. We resign in droves and fan out across the country, trying out tiny houses or migrating from one short-term rental to the next. It is an odd juxtaposition. We spend more time in virtual fascination with real estate, even as every societal pillar that would support community-building—that is, the same conditions that support neighborhoods and real estate in general—moves in the opposite direction.

And that, Harris regrettably declares, is our own darn fault. The internet, he observes, has done to home ownership what pornography has done to human sexuality: take a magical, intricate, and layered pursuit built on trust and presence and long-term relationships and turn it into a frantic and futile search for fast, facile gratification that severely damages our ability to live rewarding lives in the real world.

Which is why the job of the real estate agent—at least, that is, a good one—has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Circa 2000, “real estate agent” was the land shark prowling your neighborhood in search of properties about to go on the market, the go-getter who lived or died by being first to the deal. These days, to hear Harris tell it, the real estate agent is something much closer to a rabbi or a priest, first listening to the buyers’ or renters’ confessions and then helping them work through a thicket of sinful distractions until they find the home they truly want rather than the one they may simply—and erroneously—desire. 

Harris’s book is filled with joyous, almost spiritual conversions: stories of clients who walked into his office asking for one thing only to realize, many conversations and open houses later, that their initial request was the result of some profound personal misalignment, from struggling marriages to crippling competition with professional peers. With each passing year, the people who walked in through his door wanted what Zillow taught them they should want: bigger, newer, and better priced. Harris learned that it was up to him to remind them that the real estate they were about to buy isn’t just a collection of metrics—price per square foot and so forth, the sort that data algorithms so excel at processing and prioritizing. It will be their home, the basecamp of their lives, the place where they would be best served as they strive to love and heal and support each other and their loved ones. The perfect home has to suit not only their budgets but their beliefs. It turns out that in a Zillow-saturated world, this is a big and eye-opening realization for most people.

But educating Americans to become, quite literally, home-makers—people who think about what they truly value and then invest in homes that reflect these virtues—doesn’t just make for happier consumers. (Only half of all Americans, Harris reminds us, are currently satisfied with the homes they have bought; the rest have regrets about their dealings.) Home-making, as opposed to real estate dealing, makes for a happier nation, one made up of citizens who feel empowered, engaged, and tethered to the land and to each other. It makes the nation as a whole into our shared and precious home—not some ephemeral idea we can compare online to other options as we pine for a quick fix to all of our yearnings, but a messy, grounded, beloved, and utterly irreplaceable corner of the world that belongs to us. 

I commend to you Harris’s book. It should be required reading, not only for folks on the market, but for all of us who want to make America great again, one “sold” sign at a time. 

Image by Guy Kilroy, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post Home, Not Real Estate appeared first on First Things.

Shortly after I had a baby, I realized that what I had long understood by “feminism” had little to say about my new reality. Mothering appears in liberal feminism, if it appears at all, mostly as a problem to be solved. For the most part mothering, especially of very little children, comprises routine and repetitive small-scale activities ordered not to individual achievement or some grand project but to the sustenance of everyday life, for those too young to manage such things for themselves. Against this, the operative assumption of contemporary culture is that the “real” business of individual living is everything that happens with such routine labors as a backdrop: agency, ambition, achievement, consumer leisure. It follows that unless women can be freed from the everyday work of care, or those duties more “­equally” distributed, our access to “real” life will always be unfairly curtailed.

My baby is now nine years old. The intensity of her need has lessened. But these days I find myself wryly echoing my own mother’s words. Who does my daughter imagine picks up socks from the bedroom floor or cups from the table—the fairies? Patterns of care change over time, and children learn to contribute, but the invisible substrate of routine work will remain a political problem as long as “real” life is understood to be whatever happens against its backdrop. Even outsourcing it to domestic helpers just displaces the central question. As long as our scale of value weighs routine care and individual agency so asymmetrically, there seems no way to make the fruits of “real” life on these terms available to everyone. Someone will end up with the secondary role: clearing cups, picking up socks, and the mundane rest of it. 

But why does this asymmetry of value exist at all? Why are the fairies invisible? Two recent books, by authors worlds apart, seek to address the “Cinderella” domain. The Dignity of Dependence comes from Catholic writer and policy analyst Leah ­Libresco Sargeant, and The Care Economy from ecological economist and “degrowth” proponent Tim Jackson. 

From these different vantage points, both writers set out to make a case for the importance of dependence and care to human flourishing. Sargeant’s book, subtitled A Feminist Manifesto, tackles this question in the context of women, mothering, and our universal dependence on one another. The Care Economy explores the same question at the level of our larger economies. Both make valuable contributions in the face of an epistemological challenge whose roots lie deep in the past: How can we resolve a crisis that resists naming? But both stop short, for different reasons, of the metaphysics that dare not speak its name. 

Sargeant takes an intimate approach to this elusive subject. The Dignity of Dependence skips any attempt to contextualize either “­dignity” or “dependence” in a historical, cultural, or theological sense. Her argument is human-scale, and her tone conversational. Reading her feels like being drawn into discussion among a circle of warm and thoughtful friends, for whom the broader context is taken for granted. Sargeant blends personal anecdote with policy discussion and cultural commentary. She aims to free “dignity” from its thin modern sense of proud self-reliance, and “dependence” from its connotation of shame (a connotation especially strong in the culture that celebrates the Fourth of July). The resulting book is something akin to a phenomenology of everyday vulnerability and love.

Jackson’s project is more ambitious: wrestling with the question of “care” at scale. The Care Economy is a sequel to the influential Prosperity Without Growth (2009), which argued that we can resolve the ecological crisis only by reorienting our economies away from the mirage of never-ending growth and toward care and creativity. The Care Economy is Jackson’s attempt to go deeper into what such an economy might look like, but it documents Jackson’s own surprise at the difficulty of this conceptual challenge. What even is care? His solution—one I was not expecting in a book with “economy” in the title—is to exit the dry register of the “dismal science” entirely, for a dizzying array of personal stories, historical reference, literature, feminism, political theory, and analogies from cold-water swimming to cholera. One chapter even takes the form of a dream-sequence.

This surprisingly effective if impressionistic method converges on a definition of “care” as comprising all those repeating and homeostatic patterns that sustain normal health, either within an organism or in its relation to its ecological niche. Such patterns can be difficult to apprehend directly; their shaping power is discernible mainly in the traces they leave. Jackson’s allusive approach recalled my own love, as a long-distance runner, of England’s many unpaved and sometimes ancient byways. This landmass has been continuously inhabited for twelve thousand years. Some of its paths are trodden so well that they are known as “hollow ways”: roads of such ancient provenance and use that they are worn yards deep into the surrounding landscape. It is easier to measure the height of their banks than to apprehend the millennia of human and animal footfall, and associated life-patterns, that carved them. In English folklore they are often associated with fairies, a detail that captures at the level of landscape both the invisibility and the elusive magic that (like laundry fairies) hides in the realm of routine.

Jackson’s attempt to evoke this realm resonates with my own experience of mothering’s iterative quality and its fundamentally relational nature. So it is no surprise to find that Sargeant’s book seeks to surface all those ordinary ways in which, as we meet the needs of dependents, we are patterned in relation to others’ needs, never existing only “for” ourselves. In pregnancy, a woman’s very body is essential for her baby’s survival. The baby experiences the most complete dependence, and the mother confronts the ­ambiguity of her physical boundedness. Set against these realities, Sargeant shows, the “lonely individual,” the protagonist of contemporary “real” life, is a lie. Each of us begins and ends life vulnerable and dependent. Adults, too, track the hollow ways carved by dependence and need. 

And yet, as I discovered as a new mom, our social world is ordered to obscure this reality. Women become mothers in a world structurally blind to interdependence, pattern, and ordinary need. As Sargeant shows, the result is a mismatch between what we ­believe reality is and what reality is for women. This mismatch extends all the way from individual efforts to reconcile the embodied relations of pregnancy and breastfeeding with an employment environment that only grudgingly accommodates this ordinary feature of human life to the struggles faced by policymakers in responding to the kaleidoscopic range of social care needs across areas such as health, housing, and welfare. 

And for those feminists who otherwise believe in the supposed interchangeability of men and women, the result has often been, in Sargeant’s words, “helping women be better men”—that is, directing the full force of economic and technological innovation at flattening every last trace of our difference. The Dignity of Dependence is a persuasive tour of all those ways in which the contemporary world relies on our continued willingness to respond to one another’s need, all while treating this (like the sock fairy) as mere backdrop to, or ­fuel for, “real” (which is to say economic) life. Sargeant is at her most gently polemical, and rhetorically moving, in the chapter that shows how the price is ultimately paid by those most dependent of all: unborn babies.

But the price of our lack of care is also, Jackson argues, visible in the ecological crisis now unfolding across our planet. It isn’t merely a matter of economic theory. Our difficulty in thinking through the dimension of care seems bound up in our deepest values, and ­especially in relations between the sexes. It is thus, as Jackson notes, principally feminists who have sought to theorize care. Those feminist authors, though, oppose care to violence and link violence with men. This framing of violence as the antonym of care, whether in “­patriarchal” hierarchies or in extractive relations to the planet, is the most conceptually underdeveloped aspect of the book, for reasons I will return to. But it accurately sketches the association between our blindness to care and the forces that are disordering sex relations and ecologies. 

The Care Economy ultimately fails to name this force beyond the (for progressives) conventional villain “capitalism,” a framing that, to my mind, puts the cart before the horse. But it is a reasonable enough inference when efforts to recoup care so often end up re-ordered to profit. There exist whole libraries of academic work devoted to naming and understanding the forces of nature and the ecological crisis. Care is likewise abundantly theorized, especially by feminists. And yet every time such theories appear, they somehow end up either ignored or turned against their original spirit. My own feminist inquiry, as a new mom, began with puzzlement at the way every feminist challenge to the erasure of dependence somehow seemed to end in policy solutions that promised to “solve” dependence in the name of freedom. Similarly, as Jackson observes, in the field of ecology the result of every warning about the long-term ­consequences of our extractive technological paradigm, and our pursuit of never-­ending growth, ends up as another burst of extractive technological development, which is then hailed as offering both “green” improvements and more economic growth. 

Why? As we have seen, the discursive space of care is riddled with blind spots and omertàs. And we find a path leading into this territory through a topic that is conspicuous in both texts chiefly by its absence: Christianity. It is almost impossible to make sense of two millennia worth of care without acknowledging the role of the Christian Church, and especially Catholicism. But though this path is trodden so deep that it forms a hollow way in our civilization, today its tracks are overgrown with nettles, its signposts torn down or painted over. 

Even so, its patterns shape both books. Jackson formally disavows Christian faith, asserting in his chapter on the spiritual dimension of care both that we need a “sacred canopy” to hold communities of care together and that religion has “failed” to supply this good. We can infer from the fact of his having written The Care ­Economy that secular liberalism and market society have done little better, and it is not clear what secret third thing might provide an alternative to “religion” and “not religion.” Be that as it may, Christianity merits only a handful of references. The only positive one is a passing observation that our concern for the sanctity of human life is about 2,000 years old. No reason for this oddly specific number is supplied. Otherwise the principal context in which the Church appears is a reference to that gender-­studies ­cliché, ­Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting ­manual that Jackson presents as evidence of how Christian doctrine has been deployed to oppress women. Christians might protest that relative to the Roman mores it displaced, the Church has done more to accord women ­personhood than to withhold it from them—though there is no denying that Christian doctrine is sometimes misused in this way. Regardless, it is difficult even to frame this debate without acknowledging its debt to the Christian doctrine of personhood. 

This in turn produces a deep confusion in Jackson’s definition of violence as the antonym of care, where care is understood as the totality of homeostatic, patterned relationality across human and natural worlds. There are, after all, many examples of interactions in the natural world that both fit this description of homeostatic patterns and are inescapably violent. The most obvious example is, of course, predation for food. Is this not care, in the context of a mother tiger feeding her young? What is different about human violence, or indeed male violence against women? Jackson cannot easily unpack this without drawing a distinction between the nature of animals and that of humans, thus inviting further questions about what we mean by “human” and by “nature.” And by this point he would find himself already walking the overgrown and much-maligned Christian hollow way.    

Given the dominance of secular liberalism across academia and environmental activism, it is perhaps understandable that Jackson’s text has white-labeled anything too obviously theological. The almost total absence of overt Christian reference in The Dignity of Dependence is more puzzling, especially given that the author’s other works include Building the Benedict Option and Arriving at Amen. But even as an avowed Christian, Sargeant faces the same constraint as ­Jackson: From the frontispiece to The Dignity of Dependence we learn that the series of which her book forms a part is “Catholic ideas for a secular world.” We can reasonably infer that the text’s confessional coyness reflects the author’s recognition of the same secular-liberal injunctions that apply to Tim Jackson. 

This acknowledged, the careful reader will note that though there are few overt references Catholicism in the book, Sargeant’s bibliography has a distinctive flavor. For example, when she cites big-name liberal feminists such as de Beauvoir or ­Friedan, it is generally only as foil for her counter-argument. By contrast, we find approving quotes of G. K. ­Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and contemporary Catholic feminists such as Angela Franks. 

Jackson attempts to route around Catholic thought, then, while Sargeant is merrily dogwhistling. Had the prevailing culture left the authors freer to engage directly with extant work in this tradition, both would have been well advised to begin with the Catholic priest and social critic Ivan ­Illich, and especially his controversial 1982 work Gender. 

The absence of this text is no slight on either author, as its argument proved so enraging to his hitherto adoring left-wing readership that Illich was abruptly cancelled for writing it, and Gender remains “problematic” to this day. But it sheds crucial light on the epistemological problem at the heart of both Jackson’s and Sargeant’s works by connecting the modern transformation of sex relations with the shift from steady-state economies to modern “market society.”

It is a dense text, but in very brief terms: Illich argued that whereas the premodern world was everywhere irreducibly dual and ordered by “vernacular gender” as distinct worlds of men and of women, the dismantling of this duality was a crucial precondition for our entry into modernity. What Illich characterizes at the intimate level of families as “the destruction of gender” manifests itself, he argues, at the macroeconomic level as modern growth-based market society. Following the destruction of “vernacular gender,” a new, genderless order arose. The protagonist of that order would come to play a central role in Jackson’s academic field, economics: the purportedly unisex homo economicus, first seen in the work of Adam Smith. And yet, Illich points out, humans are never unisex. And as he argued, and Sargeant persuasively shows, this imaginary, unisex, unattached homo economicus is a poor fit for women’s embodied and relational needs. The result is a modern social order that is “both genderless and sexist”: that is, one that both pretends we are all interchangeable and, as a consequence of this falsehood, produces a world in which women are structurally ­disadvantaged. 

In fairness to Jackson, Illich does show up in The Care Economy, though only in the context of his critique of medicine. Jackson’s muddled effort to grapple with the question of care and what he terms “patriarchy” would have benefited from Illich’s analysis of the relation between modernity, growth economics, and “the destruction of gender” in favor of “economic sex.” Sargeant, for her part, does not refer to Illich at all; and yet a great deal of The Dignity of Dependence reads like a descant on Illich’s argument concerning the structural mismatch between the purported unisex homo economicus and the embodied reality of our sexed nature. 

Beyond and behind Illich, though, the hollow way of Catholic thought stretches deeper into the past. Its ancient contours can be discerned in the overall message of The Dignity of Dependence: that we might get further, as feminists and as functioning societies, by ditching the lonely fiction of homo economicus for a more realistic assessment of human nature. But here we run up against another of modernity’s epistemological blind spots. It is almost impossible to assert, in terms digestible within secular liberalism, that humans even have a normative nature—witness Jackson’s unhappily wrestling with the well-documented fact that men and women are normatively different, and men are on average more violent than women. This taboo is so complete, and has so far-reaching a set of political consequences, that I have previously characterized it as a dogma or bigotry: “normophobia” (First Things, April 2024).

The taboo this dogma places on whole fields of epistemology explains the unusual, allusive form of Jackson’s book. He can approach his topic only obliquely, for his project is to make the case for an economy predicated on human nature, without violating the secular liberal convention that human nature does not exist. Resolving this technical challenge takes him some 300 pages. For the premodern world, though, the same terrain might be summed up in two words: the master-concept of “kindly enclyning,” as characterized by C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image. Of these, “kindly” needs the most glossing, for no shift in meaning more vividly captures the gulf between that older world and our own. In its medieval sense, “­kindly” denotes something like “in accordance with its type or nature.” In the modern sense it conveys something far less forceful, along the lines of “benign.” “Enclyning” also conveys an insight alien to modern thought: the notion that things “incline” to characteristic patterns of behavior through qualities innate to their type or “kind.”  

In the era of “vernacular gender,” the technical term for the “kindly” qualities of a thing would have been its “formal cause,” as in the nature that “causes” it to take the form it takes. Its “enclyning” is, properly speaking, its “final cause”: the end to which it is directed. These concepts, first formulated by Aristotle, were most famously elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas, and they played a central role in the premodern account of reality. But this picture of the world, as structured in part by the nature and inner directedness of all things, was bracketed and then discarded by the scientific method. Francis Bacon’s 1620 treatise Novum Organum (“new method”) argued that formal and final cause should be abandoned as insufficiently grounded in empirical reality. Bacon proposed a new way of seeing, one that would limit its inquiry to the remaining two of ­Aristotle’s original four “causes”: the efficient and the material, which is to say, the forces that act upon something, and the stuff of which the something is made. In turn, Bacon argued, humans themselves could learn to understand, master, and finally direct the world’s efficient and material aspects, wresting all of nature from its own “kindly enclynings” and re-ordering it to “the relief of man’s estate.” 

The whole matrix of economic growth and technological development, on which Jackson focuses his critique, developed upon this metaphysical contraction from four to two ­causes. So too, and concurrently, did “the destruction of gender” in favor of “economic sex.” And so, too, does the literary challenge, faced alike by Sargeant and Jackson, of articulating a realm of care whose ­elusiveness and invisibility is one result of this erasure of formal and final causes. 

For this is the blind spot both these fine writers seek to tackle: the nature and directedness of things. As Sargeant shows, humans are not free-spinning atoms. We have normative needs and are relationally directed. Gestation and breastfeeding are only the most obvious, concrete examples of this directedness and its consequence: that some aspects of our life in common cannot be flattened into abstract “equality.” Similarly, The Care Economy argues that in recognition of the patterned nature of all life, our economies should be reoriented so as to prioritize what is valued by pattern: maintenance, care, and interdependence.

But both these cases are exceptionally difficult to make from within what the philosopher Mark Shiffman has called “Baconian civilization.” A worldview that has foreclosed formal and final cause will naturally insist that any defense of pattern, care, and interdependence must first make the case that they exist and have value, which ­i­nvariably leaves little airtime for the concrete suggestions that might follow. Of the two authors, my sense is that Sargeant is most alive to the metaphysical origin of these constraints. The careful reader will catch a Thomistic note in her plea for social relations more truthfully aligned to human nature. It is testament to the ongoing power of the Baconian taboo that for a secular audience, adding metaphysical categories back into an argument would necessitate so lengthy a digression as to render the result unreadable. In consequence, even an avowedly Catholic author must confine herself to a nudge and wink.  

With form and meaning thus silenced, we have forgotten how to see the world in its relational and normative aspects—forgotten how to focus not on the “signal” or exception but the rule; to focus on what usually happens and the habits, kinds, and hollow ways of “enclyning.” Instead we learned to master the world and reorder it to our own desires. But despite its many gifts, this mastery has cost us dearly, as Baconian civilization redefined the world’s normal patterns as “natural resources” for exploitation, leaving them by degrees more depleted, poisoned, and strip-mined. Human sociality is being strip-mined to exhaustion, too, by a culture and economy in which human nature and directedness are treated as though they did not exist—or at other times are treated as if they existed and were endlessly malleable but could nonetheless be expected to endure all these insults unchanged, continuing to serve as backdrop to the “real” business of self-optimization and shopping. The result can be seen in the collapse of family formation, the worsening well-being of both children and adults, and the looming disaster of an aging population facing senescence amid a culture that views dependence as a moral failing. 

In this context, the metaphysic that dare not speak its name is once again speaking—even if only through omission and desperate need. For the methodical expulsion of form and meaning from reality has produced, by degrees, our current sense of social and ecological omni-crisis: a situation now so desperate that even secular liberals are seeking ways to reverse-engineer, or perhaps just rediscover, the hollow ways. The fact that two such thoughtful voices as Sargeant and Jackson have converged from opposite sides of the Atlantic, and of the political aisle, to grapple with this issue speaks to its urgency. 

Both books shy away from policy, but what each calls for is really a precursor to policy as such: a change in how we see. We must relearn to perceive the normative, homeostatic, interdependent dimension of life for what it is: not an illusion to be dispelled by empiricism, an inert stockpile of “natural resources,” or even a hollow way where the fairies sometimes pass, but something real on its own terms. Though obscured, this plane of “kindly enclyning” never really went away, and neither did our real dependence upon it. We need only open our eyes to what is usual.

The post Metaphysics of Care appeared first on First Things.

When I was a first-year doctoral student in England, a venerable Cambridge don whom I will not name called me into his office to offer his opinion on a dissertation topic I had previously mentioned to him, a grand “crisis of modernity” thesis. I had assumed he would love it, since virtually everyone in my cohort had gone to Cambridge to write the next Theology and Social Theory (John Milbank’s frontal assault on secular modernity). Suffice it to say, he was not impressed. “Americans,” he said—to the best of my recollection—“are like electricians. They like to twist the ends of wires together until they’ve created a whole web of connections. But in England, at Cambridge, scholars are like dentists. They drill down deep to the roots.” He advised me to forget about taking on the world. “Find one dead bloke,” he said. “Look into his head and start drilling.” 

Now a dentist is fine, I thought, if you have a toothache. But if you’re living in darkness and you want to see, an electrician is exactly what you need. So, though the lesson must have made an impression on me—I remember it all these years later—I did what any young ­American with more bravado than brains would do. I got another director (and ­eventually another school) and set out to try to write an “electric” dissertation, though to this day I cannot say whether I ever really found the spark. 

Paul Kingsnorth has found it. He has written an electric book, though I am aware of the irony of using such imagery to characterize an author so determined to defend nature from ravagement by a totalitarian regime of artificiality. His concern is nature in the older “­humane” sense, which gave us a world, a home, and a hearth and human artifice produced in a human way and to a human scale—not the debased reductive nature of mere biology or the “environment” untouched by human hands that ultimately imagines human beings as parasites. 

Kingsnorth might not have made much of a dentist, but he is an Englishman, a poet, a novelist, an essayist, a former environmental activist, and seemingly something of a “savage”—in the Huxleyan sense—encamped on the west coast of Ireland. But he is above all a seer, and he has drawn on a dizzying array of thinkers—philosophers, poets, historians, and tech bros—to wire together technocratic social and political order, global capitalism, and the industrial, sexual, and digital revolutions. He casts light on the half-visible circuitry of a “Machine”: his term for the perpetual and automatic revolution which, like other historical revolutions, is engineered by elites in the name of “the people” they disdain and continually police.

Kingsnorth takes the image of the Machine from the poet R. S. Thomas as a summary description of modernity’s defining pathology. He could just as easily have taken it from Hobbes, as a prospective expression of the modern ambition to replace both man and God with artificial facsimiles—an ambition now realized on a technological rather than political plane. The Machine is a rich, multi-faceted image. It refers to the mentality of almost everyone living under the brave new world of technological modernity—the neural circuitry, so to speak, of a technocratic age. It refers to the historical process, now centuries old, by which techno-capitalism systematically uproots and destroys all natural human attachments, in what Kingsnorth calls “The Great Unsettling.” This ­unsettling replaces the “Four P’s” essential to our humanity (“people, place, prayer and the past”) with the “Four S’s” (“sex, science, the self and the screen”). The image of the Machine refers to the material reality of the “Grid”—“a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine, appearing as a pattern across the global landscape”—which is replacing the nation with a “digitally enabled globoculture.” And it refers to the “global digital infrastructure” built on the grid, which “looks unnervingly like the ‘body’ of some manifesting intelligence that we neither understand nor control.” In brief, the Machine refers to the “Total System” under which we have come to live, whose totality and necessity increase with every swipe and click and whose exigencies determine the conditions for our thought and action, leaving the best of us existentially and intellectually incoherent and the worst of us alienated and sociopathic. 

As one might already have gathered, Kingsnorth finds the modern political landscape full of irony and superficial self-contradiction. He has little patience for “conservatives” who defend a system of “oligarchic capitalism” that “strips the world of all the things which they claim to hold dear.” Yet he is perhaps even more critical of progressives, especially those “ecomodernists” or “Machine Greens” who, having sold their souls to technocracy, fetishize “climate change” at the price of “mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution,” and other byproducts of industrial ­society. Climate change is compelling to Machine Greens because it is “a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of Machine culture.” (He could have included in this number those left-Catholics who hailed the arrival of Laudato Si’ while demurring over the Church’s anthropological and sexual teaching, as if a fully human and humane existence were not the object of both.) 

In an age when transnational capital “parrot[s] slogans from a leftist framework,” the left is dominated by the middle classes, and the cultural elite seek technocratic means to police populist movements, it is clear that that the ­technocratic left and global capitalism amount to the same thing: “engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine.” Had Kingsnorth written his book a few months later than he did, he might have seen more clearly that the Machine’s war on reality and its destruction of “customary ways of living” is transforming America into a nation of sociopaths—angry, murderous spirits “liberated” from their bodies and from human attachments and affections. 

The great strength of Against the Machine is also its weakness. At times the dentist in me wanted to say, “Hang on a minute, Paul. Maybe you should slow down and drill a little deeper.” Can you really leap from Augustine and Aquinas to the “­disenchanting” and “dehumanizing” world of Descartes and Francis ­Bacon in the space of a single sentence? There are some differences to observe and distinctions to be drawn. How can you say, “Forget, then, about ‘defending the West’” and “We need a counter-revolution: a restoration” in the same paragraph? Some kind of middle term is missing. How can you call for a renewal of wisdom while saying “Reason, in and of itself, has always been little more than a fiction”? Speeding past neuroscientist Antonio ­Damasio’s Descartes’ Error in support of this conclusion, while ignoring the historical novelty of Cartesian rationalism and the older conceptions of reason that integrated soul and body, intellect and will, makes it appear as if modern rationalism were the high point of reason. In fact, that ­rationalism is the expression of a critical project that sought to ­maximize reason’s power by minimizing its scope, and authorized science, ­philosophy, and humanistic thought to go their separate ways. 

Likewise, one might conclude from Kingsnorth’s hasty invocation of Iain McGilchrist’s subtle “hemisphere thesis” that irreducibly philosophical and historical questions can be resolved by neuroscience and that the Machine can therefore be comprehended by machine intelligence. Science, in such an interpretation, would once again be the final authority over the truth about nature, contradicting McGilchrist’s thesis—and Kingsnorth’s own insistence that there are whole dimensions of reality that a rationalist, materialist culture will not allow itself to see.

These “short-circuits,” though only episodic, make Kingsnorth’s proposals for resisting the Machine less compelling than they might otherwise be, and less complete than they need to be if the Machine and its reign of quantity are genuinely to be resisted. Kingsnorth understands that a culture is “above all a spiritual creation.” He therefore understands that a pervasive and omnivorous anti-culture is above all a spiritual crisis. He repeats Voegelin’s forceful assertion that “no one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society”; one is obliged instead “to avoid the folly and live his life in order.” If the spiritual crisis of our age is an increasingly spiritless world, then the “order” one must seek is an order that treasures and cultivates the things of the spirit: memory; the ability to hold past, present, and future in a unity and thus to have and inhabit a history; and gratitude, the profound recognition that we do not cause our own existence and that a history is therefore not an obstacle to be surpassed but a gift and an unrepayable debt. All of these things are ingredients in the act of love and in the supreme act of love that is prayer.

Kingsnorth ­recognizes that no proposal to rehumanize ourselves can be fully satisfying in a Machine culture that is already a regime beyond our control—and, I would add still more emphatically than he does, beyond the reach of politics. Political order is permanently reactive to the machinations of technological order, whose deeds are scarcely imaginable, often to those responsible for producing them, until they are accomplished fact. (Kingsnorth’s own reflections on AI amply illustrate this.) Law cannot legislate what it cannot ­anticipate. Of course, it must be said that if the Christian vision were ever true and actual, it must also be possible, even if the times compel us to experience the presence of the real in the guise of its apparent absence. Kingsnorth could actually do with a little more nostalgia, which longs not for an impossible return to the past but for that glimpse of eternity shared by previous ages. He voices a widespread frustration when he says:

The reality is that most of us are stuck. . . . I can’t feed my family without writing, I can’t write without using the laptop I am tapping away on now, and I can’t get the words to an audience without the digital platform upon which I first published this series of widely read essays critiquing the Machine. I know that many people would love to leave all of this behind, because I often receive letters from them—letters mostly sent via email. But the world is driving them—us—daily deeper into the maw of the technium.

“There is no getting away from any of this,” he says. All one can really hope to do is “give [the machine] the slip” and loosen its grip by creating “shatter zones” in our homes and in our souls, and perhaps in a “Savage Reservation” benignly neglected by the Machine as the forward march of progress renders the savages themselves obsolete. He counsels what he calls “cooked” and “raw” askesis, and through myth, work, story, ritual, and a redoubled commitment to the four P’s, he aspires to “older ways of seeing” in a new historical key. 

We Western people: we have to learn to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbors. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Beyond ‘the West’ there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.

I concur in all of this. But mythos and logos need each other. And those who would resist the Machine need to be able to contest the truth of the Machine account of the world, even if the Machine is uninterested in truth or measures truth only by ­success. The rediscovery of “older ways of seeing” also surely entails the rediscovery and renewal of older ways of thinking, and indeed of an older conception of intelligence, that have become largely unintelligible to us. “The name intellect,” Aquinas says in his De Veritate, “arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the ­interior and to the essence of a thing.” But where quantity reigns, where there is neither interior essence nor depth of existence, there is nothing to penetrate or read. Intellect, in the traditional sense, ceases to be intelligible or necessary when what is ­technically possible is the measure of what is true. The world cannot be spared from the “reign of quantity” unless reason is rescued from pragmatic and technical reductions and those “dimensions of reality” we are prohibited from seeing are rediscovered and restored. 

This note of caution applies not just to Kingsnorth but to all who seek a ­re-enchantment of the world, or rather deliverance from the demonic “enchantments of mammon,” technology, and the Antichrist. True reason and mysticism­—intellectual communion with that which is infinite, immutable, and eternal—are not opposites. In traditional philosophy and in the beatific vision, the perfect coincidence of reason and love and the paradigm of reason as such are one and the same. To the degree that we concede reason to rationalism, or hint that we should dismiss it altogether, we reveal that we do not yet understand what it is that we are seeking. 

This misstep, however, takes nothing away from Kingsnorth’s vision, which has the great virtue of being true, both in its broad strokes and in the particulars. Neither does it diminish that vision’s scope. Which is to say that the weakness of Against the Machine is also its great strength. The depth of Kingsnorth’s vision is a function of its breadth, which is breathtakingly vast and which one really cannot summarize without omitting something essential or defiling its beauty. Against the Machine is like a poem in this respect; its meaning cannot be separated from its execution. Somehow Kingsnorth manages to wire together the Luddites, the Fen Tigers of East Anglia, the Black Ships of Commodore Perry (which compelled the Japanese to enter the modern world), the internet of things, and the writings of Oswald Spengler, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, René Guénon, ­Patrick Deneen, Eugene ­McCarraher, Augusto Del Noce, Ivan Illich, Carl Trueman, Rudolf Steiner, Klaus Schwab, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, and innumerable others into a vast circuitry that casts light on the thing that is happening to us. In a world that often feels like it’s falling apart, Kingsnorth paints an ominous but compelling and finally hopeful picture of how it all hangs together. 

What is still more amazing, given his dexterity with such a vast range of thinkers and events, is how clear this picture is—indeed not just clear, but generally wise, often beautiful, and always deeply human. One need not be an academic or any kind of specialist to grasp Kingsnorth’s vision, just a reasonably intelligent human being still in possession of his soul. It is difficult to imagine any such person reading Against the Machine and not being deeply moved by it. 

As I proceeded through the book, and as Kingsnorth unfolded his thesis, wiring more and more unexpected circuits together, the “dental” reservations that came to me in the early chapters gave way, as ever, to the electricity. Almost the highest compliment that I can pay this book is that I approached it with wariness and put it down wishing I had written it—though of course I couldn’t have, since it is very much the “spiritual creation” of the singular man who wrote it. (Nor could I have called the final chapter “The Raindance.”) Yet higher still is my hope for the people I care most about—family, friends, and even intellectual adversaries and ideologists fumbling about in the dark, trying to find their way—that they too will read this beautiful, extraordinary book and see the light.

The post Sage Against the Machine  appeared first on First Things.

Of course, cockneys have never regarded themselves in that way. Their self-aggrandizing myth portrays native Londoners as tough, spirited, and blessed with the gift of the gab. Over the centuries, a set of distinctive cultural traditions was born in the capital: a cuisine (pie and mash, pale ale, jellied eels); a costume (the black suits of the “pearly kings and queens,” adorned with shiny white buttons); and the songs of the music hall tradition, some of which will be familiar to Americans (“Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do”).

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of cockney culture is its language—not only h-dropping and glottal stops, but also a complex and esoteric system of rhyming slang (phrases like “I can’t ­Adam and Eve it,” meaning “I can’t believe it”). This is the accent of Michael Caine, Adele, David ­Beckham, and Ray Winstone—the traditional sound of working-class London, still to be heard from the black-cab drivers who now drive to work from well beyond the boundaries of the city. These cabbies will often describe London’s current state in very direct terms. They are not at all happy about it.

You see, the cockneys have mostly left London. Between 2001 and 2021, census records show that the number of “White British” people in London fell from 4.3 million to 3.2 million, at a time when the overall population of the city grew substantially. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann believes that this exodus of nearly a million people was almost entirely made up of cockneys, who have since settled in Essex, Kent, and other surrounding ­counties. It is obvious to anyone who lives in London that the city is now composed almost exclusively of affluent white British people—who earn 50 percent more than those outside of the ­capital—and ethnic minorities, some poor and some very rich. Vestiges of cockney culture continue to circulate in the British mainstream, particularly in film and TV intended for an international audience, but the cockney London of previous centuries is gone. The capital doesn’t have a white working class anymore.

Traditionally, a “true cockney” was born within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheap­side, a church that dates back to 1080 and is celebrated in the English nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons.” In modern London, road and air traffic have increased ambient noise levels so much that there are no longer any maternity units to be found within audible range of “Bow Bells” and therefore no more “true” cockney babies. But in the ­pre-modern era the sound carried for many miles and the cockney kingdom covered a large swathe of London: all of the east, plus parts of the south and north. These were the poorest parts of the city, as they were the most polluted and the closest to the docks, a key source of working-class employment.

You’ll be familiar with cockneys from their fictional representations, most of which were created by outsiders, in large part because the literary world was so hostile to working-class intrusion. The Londoner John Keats, for instance, was referred to by his enemies as one of “the cockney poets,” derided for evidence of ­working-class diction in his rhyming patterns.

Perhaps the greatest writer of cockney London was the partial outsider Charles Dickens, who—unusually among his literary peers—had lived and worked in the slums of the capital as a child, although he was born outside of it. That may be why Dickens’s cockney characters are so richly and sympathetically imagined—many were based on people he knew. 

Much more often, fictional cockneys have been foils to upper-class characters. The pre-eminent example is Eliza Doolittle, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion—portrayed by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady—who is rescued from poverty by a scholar of phonetics who successfully rids her of her burdensome cockney accent. Doolittle’s tragic counterpart is to be found in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End—adapted into a 1992 film of the same name—in which a young cockney man by the name of ­Leonard Bast is taken under the wing of the upper-class characters, with disastrous consequences for him. Bert, the cheerful jack-of-all trades in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books—made into a Disney film in 1964—plays a role similar to that of ­Doolittle and Bast, in that he facilitates the adventures and psychological development of those above him in the class system.

The other favored type of fictional cockney is the villain. In Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, the orcs were given cockney accents—a departure from the books that was justified by Andrew Jack, the series’ dialect coach, on the grounds that the accent sounded “modern,” in contrast to the West Country burr of the Hobbits. And yet “modern” is hardly the right word for what may well have been the accent of Geoffrey Chaucer. What Andrew Jack meant, I think, is that the cockney accent has long carried a sense of urban threat. 

Even before Jack the Ripper’s 1888 murders ­created an indelible connection between violence and cockney London in popular culture, readers of trashy novels would have been familiar with ­Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber of Fleet Street, who first appeared in an 1846 penny dreadful series and was portrayed in 2007 by Johnny Depp. Sometimes the criminal cockney is comical, as in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Sometimes he is a roguish antihero, as in The Italian Job (1969). The director Guy Ritchie keeps the tradition of the cockney gangster alive in his films, although they increasingly look like period pieces—since the predominant accent of working-class London nowadays is not cockney but MLE (Multicultural London English), which incorporates sounds from the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent. Ritchie is making films for an international audience who don’t yet realize that cockney London is a thing of the past. 

For centuries, cockneys were the archetype of urban poverty in the British imagination. As the working-class group most proximate to the intellectual elite of London, they inspired fear, pity, and sentimentalism. They also attracted idealists. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the East End became a focus for sociologists, and the research conducted there formed much of the thinking behind the creation of the post-war welfare state. Working-class areas experienced particular suffering during the Blitz, and London dockers made an outsized contribution to the war effort. Thus the arrival of the welfare state, and particularly the National Health Service, was popularly understood—by cockneys and non-cockneys alike—not as charity, but as ­recompense. 

Charity was a touchy subject in the old East End. The year 1957 saw the publication of Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s highly influential ^­Family and Kinship in East London, a sociological study of cockneys that sought to explain how these people had survived in the era before the welfare state. The East End solution to precarity, the authors observed, was a delicate system of longstanding reciprocal relationships among neighbors and kin, propped up by a doctrine of respectability. Cockneys could expect to receive support from one another only if they cultivated a good local reputation. Social capital could be accumulated through keeping a house clean and tidy, obeying local morality codes (which were not necessarily the same as those of outsiders), and offering aid to others within the network. 

This moral system was particularly apparent in the allocation of social housing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, social reformers began clearing the London slums and replacing them with new dwellings that were managed by charities or local government, a process that accelerated following the destruction of so many old buildings during the Blitz. This subsidized social housing was intended for the upper working class, not the underclass, and would-be tenants were selected on the basis of their local reputations. Social housing was not regarded as a system of charity, but rather as a system of insurance: You paid in through your social capital and were rewarded with a comfortable new place to live. It was in keeping with the morality of the old East End. 

The great turning point for cockney London came in 1977 with the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, a well-intentioned piece of legislation that upended the old process of social housing allocation, forcing local governments to prioritize the most needy, rather than those who had “paid in” to the local community. 

In the East End, this new law had a particularly dramatic effect on the fortunes of a small community of Bangladeshi men that had been established in the Tower Hamlets area since the end of the Second World War. Most of them were working in the textile and restaurant industries and living cheek-by-jowl in cramped private accommodation. As ­Michael Young and his colleagues Kate Gavron and Geoff Dench described in their 2006 book The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, the 1977 Housing Act gave these men the opportunity to bypass the old system of local reputation and gain access to social housing for their wives and children, who promptly started arriving from Bangladesh to join their menfolk.

Some cockneys responded with hostility, even violence. But the economic pull factors were sufficiently strong that Bangladeshi families continued to come, despite local attempts to deter them. A process of white flight took effect, and by the end of the century just over one-third of the population of Tower Hamlets was categorized as “Asian” in census data. In 2021, that proportion had risen to almost half.

This little-known 1977 change in the allocation of social housing goes most of the way toward explaining the current socioeconomic and ethnic composition of London. A 2021 report from the Greater London Authority notes that 74 percent of households moving into “general needs” social housing “were headed by someone of Black, Asian or other minority ethnicity,” and that this disparity is a consequence of the fact that “social housing is allocated on the basis of need.” Ethnic minorities with high rates of unemployment, household overcrowding, single motherhood, and other kinds of dysfunction, along with those who have arrived in London as refugees, will always end up at the front of the queue for this heavily subsidized housing when prioritization is based on need. Cockneys, being comparatively high-functioning, just don’t cut it. 

Mostly as a consequence of the Blitz, London contains an amazing amount of social ­housing—40 percent of units in Southwark, 33 percent in Camden, and 28 percent in Westminster—and nearly half of the households occupying this housing stock are now headed by someone who was born abroad. The remaining housing has become so expensive, following the property boom that began in the late 1990s, that working-class people without access to social housing cannot afford to live in the capital. 

This is why London has seen such dramatic demographic change within my lifetime. When I was born in West London in 1992, the city was 71 percent white British; when my youngest son was born last year (in the very same hospital), that figure had fallen to 36.8 percent. “I can think of no other major city,” said Paul Collier, now professor of economics at the University of Oxford, in an interview with The Economist magazine, “[in which] the indigenous population has more than halved in half a century.” 

There are two stories you’ll commonly hear about why so many cockneys left London. The first is a story of aspiration: Sick of their poky old houses and with new employment opportunities available to them, the cockneys opted for leafier and more spacious surrounds. The second narrative is more antagonistic: that the cockneys were forced out by a combination of mass immigration and hostile housing policy, all engineered by the governing class. 

Both of these explanations are true. I don’t believe that British policymakers of the 1970s deliberately set out to remove the native working class from London. It’s more that they didn’t mind especially when they looked up and noticed that the cockneys were gone, largely thanks to their efforts. Centuries of fiction reveal that wealthy Londoners have tended to take either a condescending or a fearful attitude toward their poorer neighbors, and it still does not occur to most of them that a working-class culture rooted in the place that birthed it might be valuable in some intangible way. In fact, in a recent comment on the rapid ethnic transformation of London, ­Labour Party activist John McTernan—formerly Tony Blair’s political secretary—wrote simply: “A better London has been ­created.” Progressives like McTernan now regard the loss of cockney London as a good thing.

This longstanding antipathy toward cockneys is aggravated by the fact that the British elite likes to imagine that our history is more American than it really is. The phrase “a nation of immigrants,” borrowed from the United States, entered political discourse at the beginning of this century and has since become a popular cliche, even though Britain was in fact remarkably ethnically homogeneous right up until the 1950s. The idea of a centuries-old working-class subculture cannot be ­accommodated within this worldview because such cultures just don’t exist in most of America, a country in which nearly everyone has been affected by immigration—both newcomers from the Old World and indigenous peoples whose ways of life were violently interrupted. 

When confronted with the reality of the cockney exodus, members of the British elite will claim that London has always been a “melting pot” (another American phrase), with vague references to the French Huguenots, who in 1700 formed 5 percent of the city’s population (and whose presence frequently contributed to rioting), as well as to London’s Jews, who at a peak in 1901 formed 2 percent of the population. If pre-war London was “built by migrants”—as Mayor Sadiq Khan likes to claim—they were overwhelmingly migrants from other parts of the British Isles. Of course, as an ­urban subculture, cockneys were never genetically or culturally isolated from the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. But that does not mean, as the “melting pot” narrative implies, that the existence of a distinctive cockney culture is a racist fairytale. This people really did exist, and they really were displaced. 

Which is not to say that they have suffered materially. Poppy Coburn of London’s Telegraph newspaper, who comes from a long line of cockneys, tells me that they’re doing just fine in Essex, Kent, and the other counties that absorbed all these Londoners, most of whom are quite happy to be living lives far more luxurious than those of their grandparents. As sociolinguist Amanda Cole has pointed out, the cockney accent “hasn’t died—she’s just called ‘Essex’ now.” This is a story of cultural transplantation, not extinction. 

But Coburn identifies a profound wariness among the ex-Londoners she grew up around. Newly cockney parts of the country take every opportunity to signal their opposition to further mass immigration, voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and now supporting Reform. The cockneys left London without much fuss, but now their backs are to the sea. 

In July of this year, a hotel in the Essex town of Epping became the focus of a series of protests that turned violent. The catalytic event was the arrest and charge of an asylum seeker accused of ­sexual assault. Hadush Kebatu, from Ethiopia, has since been convicted of sexually assaulting a local fourteen-­year-old girl and a woman, just a week after arriving in Britain illegally. Upon arrival, he had been housed in the seventy-nine-room Bell Hotel, alongside other male asylum seekers. 

The protests quickly spread to hotels in ­Canary Wharf in London and Diss in Norfolk, where ­illegal migrants are also being housed. The crowds at all of these protests were full of cockney accents, which is not surprising given recent migration patterns: Epping is an affluent town full of ­ex-cockneys who still commute into the capital, many of them working in Canary Wharf, and the area around Diss is home to a large community of cockneys who moved out to Norfolk in the second half of the twentieth century. 

The protests soon progressed to a new and richly symbolic form of civil disobedience that is being popularly referred to as “Operation Raise the Colours” or as “flagging”—that is, the adornment of lampposts and other street furniture with British and English flags, as well as occasional graffiti. Nowhere were the flagging efforts more energetic than in the East End, where groups of white men with cockney accents—often masked—defied the efforts of Tower Hamlets council to remove their flags. This council is held by Aspire, an independent party that has only ever fielded candidates of Bangladeshi heritage, and the rise of flagging in the East End must be understood as a (currently peaceful) territorial contest between two different ethnic groups. Former deputy Prime Minister Angela ­Rayner has warned that the country may well be facing more riots. Professor David Betz, professor of war studies at King’s College London, has warned that the country may well be on the brink of civil war. Conflict over the ownership of London risks tearing the country apart. 

There’s a speech that’s often circulated by British nativists on social media, including those who cheered on this summer’s disorder. There are various edits of it available on YouTube, all with hundreds of thousands of views. The speech is taken, curiously enough, from a BBC drama first aired in 2001 and now impossible to get hold of. From what I can gather, the character who delivers it was written as a villain, the head of a shadowy far-right organization responsible for a string of violent crimes. Here is our old cockney villain again—a fictional character we all know so well. 

It’s odd, then, that the speech is so poignant. The character—Laurence—describes his family tree, going back centuries in Bermondsey, an area of cockney London adjacent to the Thames. A family of Georges, Edwards, and Victorias, all based in the same area and working in the fish trade. “I stand here, in front of you, as a representative of all of them,” he says, speaking for a family 

who understand well their own country. Who understand even better their own capital, London town, as we used to call her. As we strolled in her parks, as we marvelled at her palaces, as we did business in the city, went west for a dance, took a boat on the river. The pale ale and eel pie of old London. The London of my family for as many generations as I know.

Put these words in the mouth of any other indigenous character, and that character would immediately be understood by a BBC audience as tragic. A new audience of online nativists has chosen to read this piece of fiction against the grain, I think because George expresses their complaint with unusual clarity. 

As the speech details, cockney animosity is mostly not directed at immigrants. These newcomers are understood as instruments of a class warfare waged by the British elites, a view that was frequently voiced by the cockneys interviewed in The New East End. Those cockneys spoke bitterly of the “middle-class do-gooders” who had provoked communal tensions by favoring immigrants over natives and then labelling as racist anyone who resisted the new regime. The crowds in Epping, ­Canary Wharf, and Diss keep telling journalists much the same thing. 

One could respond to this interpretation by pointing out that cockneys are materially better off now than they were in the past, which is surely true. One could also point out that modernity itself is at odds with any project of cultural preservation: People move, things change, “all that is solid melts into air.” Should we care if cockney culture melts away, too? 

I say that we should. Fourteen miles from the center of London, in the town of Epsom, eighty-seven-year-old George Major has built The Cockney Museum in a large outbuilding behind a residential street. “This is his life’s work,” his daughter told me when I visited the museum this summer. Major has filled every foot of wall space with photographs, captions, and artifacts that foreground not just the suffering of London’s cockneys, but also their creativity and resilience. “All the cockneys have moved out of London,” Major told the BBC, when asked why he hadn’t built the museum there. Intentionally or not, the place feels elegiac. 

As I walked around George Major’s museum, I thought of my cockney great-­grandfather, who spent much of his childhood living in the pub that his family ran, roughly a mile from Bow Bells. Like so many Britons of the twentieth century, he immigrated to Australia as a young adult but held on to the culture of his youth. (My mother remembers him singing music hall songs to her.) 

Australian culture may have absorbed many cockney elements—not least the pronunciation of certain vowels—but my great-grandfather’s descendants are not cockneys. Although my brother and I ended up back in London, by the time we returned to the city the process of cultural transmission had been disrupted. That’s what migration does, and my great-grandfather must have realized that when he made the choice to leave. 

When they immigrated to Australia, my ancestors (perhaps unwittingly) contributed to the displacement of the people indigenous to that country. After two centuries of violence and disease brought to them by Europeans, the indigenous population is now actually slightly larger than it was at the time of first contact, with longer life expectancies and access to the various comforts and delights offered by Western technology. But it is absurd to say that, since they are now materially better off, there was no wrong done to indigenous Australians. Of course they were wronged, and grievously. 

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes that violence is not the only way in which such peoples can be harmed. It affirms—among much else—“the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such.” In other words, the UN insists that cultural particularity is valuable in and of itself, and that governments should not try to erase it. 

The British government has belatedly recognized that harm was done to the people subjected to its colonial adventures. Even if in the long term they were made richer, or healthier, or better educated, the anti-colonial position is that indigenous peoples should not have their lands ­taken from them. It is provocative to use the word “­indigenous” to describe cockneys, because doing so suggests that the British government has not yet shaken off its disregard for “the right of all peoples to be different.” I have chosen to use the word because that is exactly what I am suggesting: that the colonial instinct has turned inward and has been directed in particular at working-class people who were never much liked by the people who governed them. Many cockneys realize what has been ­done to them and is still being done to them. They realize that many people in government believe that London has been (in John McTernan’s words) made “better” by the absence of the people who built it. They realize, too, that this colonial instinct is still trained on them and has no qualms about permanently destroying what remains of cockney culture in places like Essex and Kent. They realize that this is just the latest iteration of the same class war that has been waged for centuries on these islands against people like them. And they are not at all happy about it.

The post Indigenous London appeared first on First Things.

I now know that my experience was representative of the murky conflict within the Church over liberalization—for liberalization has occurred primarily not through changes to the doctrines on sin, but through the deemphasizing of sin and of the institutions for its control, such as confession. My RCIA experience was not atypical; some parishes are more explicit on these points, but many are not. I’ve also encountered younger Catholics who say that, despite growing up in the Church and attending CCD through confirmation, they were never taught about sin or the necessity and mechanics of confession. I’m doubly on the flashpoint, because remarriage is currently the next frontier of liberalization.

Proponents of this settlement wish to make the faith more welcoming to people with modern values or in difficult life situations. I am a blue-stater and sex-positive child of the sexual revolution, and a struggling mother of teenagers, living post–civil divorce. My religious conversion experience strongly suggested to me that this church was the one I should turn to, but to approach Catholicism was to override a lifetime’s opposition to many of the Church’s positions. If I’d understood more clearly what those positions were, I would have opposed them even more strongly. In this sense, there was wisdom in my RCIA priest’s welcoming, intellectual approach, which discussed love, friendship, the Trinity, religious art, and the role of the Church in the world, and didn’t tackle controversial topics. Had I been presented with a harsh and incomprehensible list of sins upon first meeting, it is possible (perhaps, if we discount God’s agency in the matter) that I would have shrugged and looked elsewhere.

But I didn’t, not even when I learned that my Catholicism was about to enter mortal conflict with my heart’s other great desire, which was to form a new romantic partnership. And since my conversion, unfortunately for my heart’s desire, the most rewarding, intellectual, generative, and faith-deepening parts of my Catholic experience have involved engagement with dogmatic teaching on sin and the practice of confession—the strict Church, not the tolerant one. It has been lovely to meet the members of my RCIA group and to make church friends. The spiritual feeling of attending Mass is enjoyable. But these have been only small parts of the offering. Without sin and the relationship between the Eucharist and confession, I’m not sure what I would have been doing all this time or how I would have grown.

So what happens when a person with secular liberal values concerning sexuality—this, mostly, is the controversial part—has a good-faith encounter with modern Catholicism? First, it’s very difficult to get information about what the Church actually teaches and requires. When I first discovered the prohibition on remarriage, I made an appointment to discuss it with my priest, a wonderful man who has greatly ­influenced me and had already become a friend. Before the meeting, I observed that this restriction contradicted what I saw all around me. We had openly cohabiting unmarried couples in RCIA. I knew remarried people who’d seemingly been devout Catholics all their lives. Everyone at Mass on Sunday seemed to shuffle up front, and surely they weren’t all without sin. I expected my priest to confirm that the rule was a technicality, or a matter of personal conscience, but I found him ­unexpectedly firm, which landed me in delicate territory. What had seemed an obvious point—that no one was really doing this—suddenly became taboo.

I asked a few questions about this restriction—such as “But what about unmarried couples with children?”—and received unworldly, incomprehensible answers, such as that they might live together “like brother and sister.” This seemed like the old, sex-fearing, woman-fearing Catholic Church we know from the newspapers, but I didn’t want to say that to my priest, nor did I want to insist on the value of physical intimacy to a celibate man. Women are in an especially uncomfortable position in such conversations. I left confused, plagued by wild speculations. Could I have regrettable casual sex, a sin that could be honestly confessed, forever, and still take the Eucharist, but not form a stable partnership? What kind of system was that? I also felt some indignation. The Church proposes to regulate our sex lives but won’t create the conditions in which to talk about it?

For me, the uncertainty led to a search for more answers. By an incredible coincidence spanning the Vatican City and rural Vermont (or by divine intervention, if you wish), I made a new friend, a militant young priest whose challenging preaching about sin made it seem possible to challenge him in return. He provided me with an old-fashioned examination of conscience and explained the theory of “unitive and generative” sexuality. This was another excruciatingly awkward conversation, and it revealed concepts even more outrageous in view of my former value system, but we got it done. Again I went away horrified, but this time I had a lot to think about, and more importantly, I had something to do. I would have to look at the list, understand it, and then blow it off or not, confess or not, take the Eucharist or not. My conscience was engaged, no longer in the misty way wherein I hoped for opportunities to love my neighbor or make charity a greater part of my life, but in a daily struggle with questions on much more than sexuality. Was I really supposed to pray every day? And keep Sundays free of heavy labor? Such practices didn’t fit modern reality and seemed weirdly legalistic and too small to be relevant—­gardening on a Sunday is a sin? This is dumb. Yet there it was, on the list.

I started going to confession (a saga of its own in a big, busy city with few available hours and a crazy-­quilt of procedures). I couldn’t not, once I knew it was required of me. I had an inner voice, and I listened to it. I more or less confessed to the sins on the list, and when I didn’t really think they were sins, I confessed to doubting the word of the Church, too. Slowly I began praying for something my rational mind did not want, which was to actually believe this stuff. I can’t pray to be single forever; it goes too deeply against my heart. But I can pray to do Christ’s will instead of my own, so I pray for that. I didn’t take the whole list seriously all at once, nor did I always recognize all of the sins as sins, and I probably still don’t, but over time I’ve understood more. And I started modifying my behavior, not because I was fully convinced, but because I wanted to take the Eucharist, and it was inconvenient to have to confess.

None of this has been easy, morally or logistically. I’m free of mortal sin and able to take the Eucharist around once every six weeks—not a great record. But it has been profoundly, almost comically rewarding. People with active prayer lives know the way prayers are answered, and the way answered prayers provide new signposts toward the good. I would likely never have learned this if I hadn’t been prompted to daily prayer by the examination of conscience. And people who make some attempt to keep their Sundays free for God know the lovely Sabbath feeling of a clean house and a waiting heart on Saturday night (or the pleasant, lazy feeling of blowing off all work till Monday). In fact, every time I’ve overcome my own will and prejudices to try one of the list’s impossible demands, revelation has followed, offering deeper faith, spiritual insight, and often bizarre and unexpected real-world rewards. 

The Church’s restrictions on sexuality have been the most difficult teachings for me to ­consider—they’re such a radical departure from my former standards. To tell people what to do with their own bodies, and then to police them on it, feels like a violation of human dignity from a sex-positive perspective. I was taught as a child that what the Church calls “self-abuse” is an act of self-respect and self-care, the foundation of a healthy sexuality. And for my whole life, the free expression of one’s sexuality has been both an impassioned cause and a human right. It’s the restraint words that seem grotesque to me: modesty, chastity, celibacy. I have been to sex parties and seen endless pornography, and would discuss either with glee in the right company, but in most social situations I’d be actually ashamed to talk about sexual restraint.

Yet the more I’ve considered the “unitive and generative” approach, the more it seems to solve many of our vast social problems by drawing a clear line in the only place where it can reasonably be drawn. And it conflicts less than expected with the deeper underpinnings of my former beliefs. As a secular person, I was sex-positive because I thought sex was very, very important, perhaps even a window onto the sacred. Reordering one’s vision of sex around a utopian ideal, as the Church demands, isn’t really such an outrage, especially in a world where so many people seem unhappy, damaged, and isolated in their sexuality, and where the results of liberalization have become increasingly toxic. Moreover, when I learned the hidden truth about the Church’s restrictions for all people, it made what had seemed like a double standard for gay people much more palatable. The half-measures in communication are underselling a beautiful doctrine.

As for the painful issue of remarriage, so far I’ve made the uneasy compromise of occasionally dating while also beginning proceedings for a hoped-for annulment. I pray that someday God will bring me a man with whom I can have a legal union from the Church’s perspective. Even this is a huge change from my previous plans—I used to joke that I’d be a serial monogamist forever—but I’m trying, however imperfectly, to submit my will to Christ’s. Like my other attempts, it has been beneficial. Reorienting my thoughts toward remarriage has had a wonderfully clarifying effect on my romantic encounters and has revealed just how ­carelessly I’ve treated other people, and myself, in the past. To me it seems that these onerous rules, when taken ­seriously, force us into an inner alignment with things we, in our deepest hearts, already knew. We resist. We insist on our own will and that we know what’s good for us, which is a breathtaking assertion, really, when you consider how much pain most of us bear. And so often we’re wrong.

It is this Church, and only this Church, that rolls up its sleeves, militantly and gently, offering the lists, the booths, the men on duty if you need them, the long slow interplay of experience and self-examination, aided by prayer and the promise of the Eucharist as a reward. Confession is beautiful, despite the difficulties. More converts should be aware of it.

The post How I Learned to Love Confession appeared first on First Things.