Uncharted Waters

The Church is a ship sailing a sea unknown—because that is where man is.

There once were pagans all over the earth, and in the darkest of their rituals they made their own children pass through the fire to Moloch, “horrid King besmeared with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears.” So did those Carthaginians, whom Chesterton imagined as Victorian businessmen with black vests and top hats, when times were bad and trade was off. The rich among them, tenderhearted, would sometimes spare their own offspring by adopting as their own the child of a poor family, so that everybody would profit all around. Moloch would get his feed, the poor would get some bread, and they would get the credit. 

As for the child himself, his body reduced to char and his bones cast into a necropolis, he no doubt, as apologists for abortion assure us, would be happy to learn that he had satisfied the god and so many people at once, rather than live a life of poverty. Yes, there were pagans, and they believed in many a dark lie. But they stood in fear of the divine; so when the Christian missionaries came, they could get some purchase on them. They could speak as men to men before the true God. But how do you speak to people who sacrifice their children to convenience? To call it evil is to dignify it beyond what it merits.

When Matteo Ricci put his life on the line to bring the truth of the Christian Faith to the Chinese, he had spent many years studying their languages, their ancient texts, their immemorial customs, and their noblest beliefs about God and Heaven. They possessed a culture—or rather many related cultures, so vast was their land. It is hardly possible to be Fr. Ricci now, not because it requires so much study to speak of God to the modern pagan but because study itself is becoming increasingly impossible for the young mind—and because there is nothing left for the missionary to study. For the West has lost its piety in both senses. 

When your ancestors were Christian, and when the Faith, like yeast in those three measures of dough, leavened their poetry, their music, their art, their marriage customs, and even their dress, to reject the faith of your fathers was to reject your fathers too. For in the deepest core of their lives, whether they were good men or bad, wise or ridiculous, we find them kneeling. To draw near to any fully human being is to draw near to him in that still, central place. To refuse to do so, for your own forebears, is not to cut yourself free but to enslave yourself to the mass-produced passions of our time. It is also to miss the beauty nearest to you. It is to be Swiss while despising the mountains. It is to be Greek and to shut your eyes to the glittering sea. 

The illiterates of old were relatively easy to bring to the life of the mind. We taught them to read. Our current illiterates do not know they are illiterate. They do not need to be introduced to the alphabet. They need to be introduced to thought—or detoxified, led slowly but decisively away from all things that make thought impossible. For the internet has placed millions of books before the eyes of anyone to read, but no one reads books, and the habit of using the internet makes it less and less likely that people will cultivate the patience required to read them. 

Anger, half-truths, stupidity, quarrelsomeness, slander, wild exaggeration, stoked-up fear, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and discord encircle the world with the tap of a finger. Measured judgment takes time. Reason requires calm. Detaching strands of truth from a web of falsehood is a slow and patient and difficult thing, and absolutely nothing in our schools or the brain-scattering and heart-darkening media disposes anyone to take up the work. How do you speak to people who do not speak to one another?

And what of the natural world? What of creation? Despite all the noise about caring for the earth, never have we been so distant from the creatures that share the world with us. Your child will come home from school chattering about global warming. He will not know why there are such things as summer and winter. What does he learn in school about cows, wheat, bluebirds, snakes, wild apples, kingfishers, mackerel, dwarf willows, horses, and seagulls? Blaring lights make the stars invisible, and billions of people will never see the Milky Way. Children do not live much in that world. They are sucked into the gigantic, all-engrossing, digital vacuum cleaner; and the schools sweep them along.

Even the natural world that is the human person, male and female, has been deformed, defaced, and denied. Now of all times, some fresh and cheerful revival of affection and attraction between male and female is most desperately needed; now, when marriages are rare and children few, and the sexes are like Milton’s Adam and Eve after they commit the mortal sin but before they repent of it:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,
And of their vain contest appeared no end.

But not a single institution in our time has taken up the task of healing and repair. Rather, they are all committed to making things worse. Feminists envy what they cannot give, as Satan who admits that he cannot make even himself happy:

Nor hope to make myself less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound,
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.

And churchmen who never in their lives felt a single warm and normal attraction for a woman, and others too weak to call things by their proper names, will prefer to throw the Church into worldwide schism than to retrace a single step that has led them to the brink. Nature here must be despised as mere erogenous flesh. Scripture must be put on the rack and tortured out of joint. The break between East and West must be cut clean through forever. All the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage, true, salutary, and difficult, must fly away like dust in the wind. She must become little more than a social club for antiquarians, without firm convictions, as flimsy and phony as a bouquet of plastic flowers over a tombstone. Fiat sodomia, ruant omnia.

When the monks at Iona began that magnificent work of art and devotion which we know as The Book of Kells, they did not have to persuade their fellow Christians or the pagans around them that there really was such a thing as beauty. One thing that strikes me with immediate force is how colorful the art of the Middle Ages was. All it takes is a glance at the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures and you know that the dark brooding of the Renaissance malcontent has not yet settled upon the soul. But in every healthy society, artists wish to create what is beautiful or noble or grand or sweet, and that is why they learn the painstaking lessons from those who came before them. If someone says that beauty was only for the rich, I should like to remind them of folk music, of the bright and dashing costumes that peasants once wore for festive occasions, of the staggeringly beautiful churches and cathedrals open to everyone, of children everywhere, and of the natural world that was so near. 

Again, the internet can bring great art to anyone’s eyes and great music to anyone’s ears, but it makes the contemplation of such works less likely, while music quickly fades from the direct, personal, and embodied experience of almost everyone alive. In such a world, the Church, like a dragon snoring away in his cave on a hoard of untold and unregarded riches, has the task of bringing real music back to the mind and the soul of man, but instead she fills her pews and the ears of the faithful with—what? Medieval plainsong? Bach? Palestrina? The haunting shape-note melodies of Southern Harmony? English folk tunes arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams? Lyrics by Prudentius, Ambrose, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, Paul Gerhardt, Isaac Watts, William Cowper, John Mason Neale, Catherine Winkworth? But this is to beat a dead horse.

In 1996, when my family and I moved to Coventry, Rhode Island, there were nine Catholic churches within a mile or two of our house. Now there are four. Casualties included the Irish church (Sts. Peter and Paul, boasting a stained-glass window donated by Hall of Fame outfielder Hugh Duffy, a local boy), the French church (Notre Dame de Bon Conseil, and its parochial school to boot), a Portuguese church (Our Lady of Fatima), and another Irish church (St. James, folded into the French church St. Jean Baptiste). The Italian church we attended, Sacred Heart, is hanging on for dear life; it had already lost its school by 1996. St. Vincent de Paul, another survivor, has lost its school too. 

Meanwhile, public education, and those Catholic and private schools that play tag along, is a bog of impotence, incompetence, and social diseases such as no one in my childhood could ever have imagined. We could be once again the instructors of the world, except that the world does not want to be instructed. Except for perceived political utility, almost no one can conceive what a human education in arts and letters means. We could again lead in prayer people who have lost all hope in the ways of the world, except that the world now has a wide variety of pills, most of them not pharmaceutical in the chemical sense, to muddle, distract, and dull.

Again and again I say, these are new things in the world.

Many years ago, I was having dinner with a wise, learned, and pious gentleman, a priest in the Church of Sweden who would not go along with that church’s capitulation to the world of sexual breakdown disguised as liberty and love. He told me that no matter how gray the land had gone, how far into apostasy his own church had fallen, how evil the government of Sweden was, the human would remain. It must remain because it is made by God, for God. He was right—not because there is some staying power in the human, by its own strength, but because God will not permit us to sink into complete sub-humanity once and for all. Yet it may be that He has made that lifeline depend on our own recommitment to all things human.

The waters are unknown, but the stars are above.