Culture & Transfiguration

In Rieff’s reading, Oscar Wilde envisioned a culture in which individuals would be freed from all inhibition and all authority. Every possibility would remain an open possibility. Against Wilde’s idea of the “primacy of possibility,” Rieff insists that authoritative limits are of the essence of culture; culture requires “the primacy of interdiction.”

The writer to the Hebrews would have us know that changes in law follow upon changes in priesthood, and Rieff’s cultural theory suggests a similar pattern. The interdictory-remissive complex is internalized, Rieff claims, under the direction of authoritative cultural guides or priesthoods: “Priesthoods preside over the origins of a culture and guard its character.” Priests form and guard culture by projecting an ideal pattern of conduct…; priests teach what may and what may not be done, the interdicts and the remissions. Education is thus the inculcation by a priesthood of a culture’s “Thou shalt nots.”

A cultural revolution, then, not only involves a change in the symbolic of moral demands, but a change in priesthood: “A crisis in culture occurred whenever old guides were struck dumb, or whenever laities began listening to new guides.” For many centuries, Rieff notes, the sociological priesthood of Western culture was the literal priesthood of the Christian Church, but by Wilde’s time churchmen had defaulted in their capacity as authoritative cultural guides. They had fallen silent, and other priesthoods began projecting their ideals onto the “laity.” The “post-Christian” West can, from this perspective, be seen as the product of the revolutionary changes in law that followed from a revolutionary change of priesthood.

In Rieff’s view, no successor priesthood has yet emerged, but the culture has instead embarked on the unprecedented experiment of forming a non-moral culture, a “culture” lacking both religiously grounded interdicts and a priesthood to serve as the guardian of sacred boundaries. Such is, in fact, an experiment in “anticulture.” What is most disturbing, however, is that the Church no longer functions as priesthood in this sociological sense even for Christians. Rieff has called attention to contemporary churchmen’s penchant for abandoning all Christian dogma and practice that does not readily lend itself to therapeutic purposes. The “anticulture” has invaded the Church.

Jesus said that His disciples would be the light of the world, implying that dark ages come when the Church hides its light under a bushel. Christians, therefore, can hardly expect the rebirth of culture in the world without a rebirth of culture in the Church. One is led to echo, in a perhaps more literal sense than originally intended, Alasdair MacIntyre’s suggestion that our culture awaits the appearance of a new, very different St. Benedict.

The bracketing authors join a yearlong rediscovery of America’s most obscure critical genius, making for a remarkable new resurgence of interest in Rieff’s intellectual legacy. It comes at precisely the proper time. […] Rieff’s central preoccupation—the collapse of the social order maintained by Western culture—is the crisis of our time, and a community of resurgence versed in his insight may yet save us from the interminable vulgar banality of what our psycho-therapeutic civilization has become.

In a society where genuine community seems withered and perverted, and where the wisdom and habit of the traditional culture is often repudiated by popular publicity, is the moral dissident to fight or flee? Put more specifically, is it our duty to struggle to engage a culture that has soured to our taste, or are we better off abandoning, in Rieff’s term, the anti-culture that surrounds us?

Having worked toward an answer for years, Myers wishes he’d had the benefit in seminary of assigned passages from Triumph. Rieff’s “idea of an anti-culture,” says Myers, “his observation that cultural institutions have been mechanisms of restraint and are now mechanisms of release,” are key to understanding “the consequences of modernity”—how deeply people have “absorbed many of the root causes” of our cultural disorders “without even being aware of it.” Repentance, Myers asserts, is deeply countercultural. The greatest challenge is to get people to move, in the reconciliation of the soul, to an idea of the culture that surrounds them as a legacy of implied obligations rather than a series of fashion statements fashioned into commodities.

Man does not see God by his own powers. God is seen by men only when He pleases, only by those He has chosen, only when and how He wills it. God is powerful in all things and He has been seen in times past in a prophetic manner through the Spirit; He has also been seen in an adopted manner through the Son, and He will be seen as Father in the Kingdom of heaven. The Spirit shall indeed prepare man in the Son of God, the Son lead him to the Father, and the Father grant incorruption for eternal life which comes to everyone who looks upon God. For as those who see the light are within the light and share in its brilliancy, even so, those who see God are within God and receive of His splendor. His splendor gives them life and so those who see God are brought to life. It was for this reason that although He is incomprehensible, boundless and invisible, He made Himself visible and comprehensible and within the capacity of those who believe, in order that He might bring to life all those who receive Him and look upon Him through faith. Just as His greatness is past finding out, so is His goodness beyond telling. Granting the vision in His goodness, He then bestows life on all who see Him. It is impossible to live apart from life, and the means of life is found in fellowship with God, and fellowship with God is to know God and to enjoy His goodness. Man, therefore shall see God in order that he may live, being made immortal by the vision and attaining even to God.