A Living Network of Hearths
The Rise of an Authentic Christian Culture
by Jacques Maritain
Feast of St Stephen, Archdeacon and First MartyrAnno Domini 2019, December 27
The Christian idea is opposed to the modern world, I agree, to the extent that the modern world is inhuman.
But to the extent that the modern world, in spite of all its defects in quality, involves a real growth of history – no, the Christian conception of culture is not opposed to it. Rather the reverse: it would endeavor to preserve in the modern world and bring back to the order of the spirit all the riches of life the modern world contains.
[…]
The world at the moment seems to be in the grip of two opposite forms of barbarism. I have not the least idea whether it will escape. In any event it must not be forgotten that if the Christian conception has not been the spiritual dominant of civilization for some centuries past, it has still remained alive, damned up, not abolished. That such a conception may succeed in dominating culture is still a possibility
today: whether such a possibility will be realized or not is God’s secret. We must therefore work with our whole hearts to bring such a realization about, no longer, certainly, according to the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire but according to a new ideal, a much less unitary ideal, in which an entirely moral and spiritual activity of the Church shall preside over the temporal order of a multitude of politically and culturally heterogeneous nations, whose religious differences are still not likely soon to disappear. If facts are fated to fall short of such an expectation, if the work of Christendom must henceforth develop in the bosom of what Scripture calls the mystery of iniquity, as that mystery formerly developed in the bosom of the work of Christendom, we may, at any rate, indulge the hope that, in the new world, an authentic Christian culture will arise, “a culture no longer gathered and assembled, as in the Middle Ages, in a homogeneous body of civilization occupying a tiny privileged portion of the inhabited earth, but scattered over the whole surface of the globe – a living network of hearths of the Christian life disseminated among the nations within the great supra-cultural unity of the Church. Instead of a fortress towering amidst the lands, let us think rather of the host of stars strewn across the sky” [Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas].
The foregoing observations make it clearly apparent what a prime, fundamental necessity it is to the life of the world that Catholicism penetrate to the very depths of and vivify culture, and that Catholics form sound cultural, philosophical, historical, social, political, economic, and artistic conceptions, and endeavor to transmit them into the reality of history.
[…]
That the religion of Christ should penetrate culture to its very depths is not required merely from the point of view of the salvation of souls and in relation to their last end: in this respect a Christian civilization appears as something truly maternal and sanctified, procuring the terrestrial good and the development of the various natural activities by sedulous attention to the imperishable interests and most profound aspirations of the human heart. It ought from the point of view also of the specific ends of civilization itself to be Christian. For human reason, considered without any relation whatever to God, is insufficient by its unaided natural resources to procure the good of men and nations. As a matter of fact, and in the conditions governing life at present, it is not possible for man to expand his nature in a fundamentally and permanently upright manner unless under the sky of grace. Left to himself, he cannot but fail to achieve the difficult harmonies of the virtues, the difficult rational regulations, the pure consonances of justice and friendship without which culture deviates from its most exalted ends. St. Augustine’s words with reference to the state apply equally to civilization: “The state does not derive its felicity from another source than man, for the state is merely a multitude of men living in harmony.” One Name only has been given to men in which they may be saved. However great civilizations may be which ignore that Name, they inevitably decline, in one respect or another, from the complete notion of civilization and culture; order and liberty become equally cruel therein. Even an authentically Christian civilization does not escape many accidental blemishes. Only a Christian civilization can be exempt from essential deviations.
[…]
Let there be no mistake. It is the most arduous and serious problems, problems most closely affecting the heart land flesh of humanity, which now press for solution on the Christian mind, as though they had long been kept in reserve for a general assault; what the mind has to face and conquer or assimilate is philosophies, scientific or artistic researches, fashions of thought and culture of a rare technical nature and a precious human quality. It will succeed in its task only if it equips itself with the most formed wisdom, the most exacting science, the most perfect and reliable intellectual harness, the most vigorous and comprehensive doctrine and method. So furnished, it will be able to fulfill its mission, which, as I suggested a moment ago, by the very fact of being a Christian mission is in some sort a crucifying mission. Quis scandalizatur, et ego non uror
(cf. 2 Cor. 11:29)? Catholic thought must be raised with Christ between Heaven and earth, and it is by living the painful paradox of an absolute fidelity to the eternal closely united to the most sedulous comprehension of the anguish of the time that it is invited to work for the reconciliation of the world and truth.
~Christopher Dawson, excerpt from "Religion and Culture"
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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