Post-Christendom: Thinking About Politics in Light of 1789, Part I

POST-CHRISTENDOM: THINKING ABOUT POLITICS IN LIGHT OF 1789

“There are ages which are so deeply in love with the primal forms of existence that they seek to express these in all spheres of life and to reflect them, for instance, in the forms of rank and class in society, which for a brief moment in history can express a sublime truth, but which then become hollow and restrictive. What these forms intended to express, however, is something which may not be dispensed with if man is not to fall into an undifferentiatedness in which everything is so wholly indifferent that in the end it is of no consequence whether it is defined as matter or as spirit.”

– Hans Urs von Balthasar, GL I, 24

This quote by von Balthasar might be the starting point for a theological politics.

The emphasis on the word “what” is perhaps misleading. In his aesthetics, von Balthasar articulates a position on form and content that avoids two pitfalls: first, an elimination of any distinction between form and content—characteristically “ancient”, in the sense of pagan idolatry—and second, the divorce of form and content that is characteristically modern (but also a retrieval of Gnostic thought). Form, von Balthasar reminds us, is not identical with content, but neither is form extricable from content, and hence disposable. We always encounter content through form. (I plan to dedicate an upcoming post to the Preface and Introduction to The Glory of the Lord [GL], Balthasar’s theological aesthetics.) This epistemological principle corresponds to a metaphysical reality. It is in fact the metaphysics of Christianity, and Judaism before it, in distinction to what we might call the two other basic metaphysical options (perhaps finally coincident): pantheism (which predominates in prehistorical societies) and “Gnosticism” (in the broadest possible sense, by which I include Buddhism and atheism)—the dominant metaphysics of our time.

In this quote Balthasar says that culture has at times sought to be a perfect mirror of metaphysical reality, that this has been achieved, but that the precise cultural forms of this expression of truth are subject to change, indeed, must change. What must not change is the effort to express metaphysical reality in culture. When culture ceases to express metaphysics, metaphysics becomes obscure, and hence all knowledge falls into darkness. How perfectly Balthasar expresses the sad condition of the dominant global culture today where the most ardent materialists, who insist love and faith can be explained by the mechanics of the brain and dedicate their leisure hours to orgasm, fashion, and gourmandise, are also devoted followers of Buddhist renunciation of the illusion of dasein! “Matter or spirit”—goes the credo of our age—“iz all good.”

When Balthasar speaks of ages “so deeply in love with the primal forms of existence,” Christendom—in its Greek and Latin wings—springs first to mind. Clearly, he is no “reactionary”—he admits that the ancien régime became “hollow and restrictive.” Here, a caveat: did Christendom ever have the chance to grow “hollow and restrictive” in Byzantium before it was vanquished by the Turks? In the Latin West, however, most observers would grant that the ancien régime had a long, decadent period before its overthrow.

Part One: Christendom’s Final Hand

In the Grand Siècle, Louis XIV converted a modest hunting lodge into the greatest house of cards in the world; at Versailles, gambling replaced the hunt as the favorite leisure activity of the aristocracy. And whereas the hunt had deep Christian resonances (as any medieval romance and Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” richly exhibit), gambling is pretty irredeemably a distraction from reality. Versailles was certainly the grandest pleasure-palace the world had ever known. Richelieu and Louis XIV removed the nobility from its land to this Las Vegas of the 17^th century in order to prevent the religious and political instability ravaging contemporary England and Germany. They succeeded in keeping France one and nominally Catholic, but paid a high moral cost: removed from his land and his people, the nobleman became the libertin, engrossed in the distractions of pleasure. To pay off his gambling debts, supply his lavish parties, and dress himself sumptuously à la mode (fashion, too, was an invention of Louis XIV), he turned to Jewish and Genoese bankers, and to merchants and artisans, enriching and ennobling the bourgeosie. The splendor and pomp that had been signifiers of the glory of God and His structured, hierarchical Creation, became themselves the signified, the object of the rake’s caprice.

Still, in the Grand Siècle, for the last time, the grands hommes were Christian: Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, Pascal, Racine, Corneille, Bossuet, Fénelon—perhaps only Molière, among men of the first rank, stands apart. They did their best to convert the libertins, establishing the compagnie du Saint Sacrement, pouring themselves in pious and charitable activities, opposing the loosening of morals. In the growing culture of divertissement—which is ours a fortiori—Pascal offered the best hand for redemption with his Wager.

And here the French Jesuits played an interesting role that Pascal, in his Lettres provinciales, perceived and battled better than anyone. It is a role that came to dominate the Society of Jesus in the later 20^th century, the role that has given “equivocal” as the sense of “Jesuitical”: moral casuistry. Today we prefer the euphemism “being pastoral.” Faced with a deterioration of morals—especially the inflaming of lust—the Jesuit confessors of the Palace of Mirrors preferred laxity where the Gospel demands the crucifixion of passions (cf. Gal 5.24). Absolution became an excuse to sin. (In the 1960s, absolution would become unneccesary altogether, as moral theologians, following the lines of their 17^th century Molinist forebears, discovered that it was more or less impossible to sin mortally; cf. Pascal’s Provinciales, Letter 4.) What prompted this decision for laxity over evangelical severity? It is not necessarily damning to blame politics. The Jesuits had positioned themselves as the most politically active of the orders; they had immense influence in most of the Catholic governments of the world. They used this influence to battle Protestantism and to evangelize the pagans of faraway China, Japan, and America, and they were valiant in martyrdom as in learning and political intrigue. Perhaps part of the Jesuit confessors’ laxity can be traced to the concern to prevent the outright rejection of Catholicism by lusty kings. Could Jesuits have kept Henry VIII from butchering his wives and monks? At any rate, the Jesuits succeeded in keeping Louis XIV, and thus France, “Catholic.” Catholic, perhaps, but less and less Christian, and thus less genuinely Catholic. Louis XIV may not have made libertinage the religion of France (as his grandson would in practice and the Revolutionaries in law), but he made libertines of the French. Laxists today have, I suspect, much the same concern as the Jesuits of Versailles: they fear a smaller, more evangelical Church, and prefer a kind of cultural Catholicism “lite” that is vague and tepid anough to keep people calling themselves “Catholic” without living the Gospel. There is a misguided charity in this, a failure to take seriously the words of Christ, a loss of eschatology: because if the Church was founded, as she has always claimed, to save souls, she must be clear and pure in her doctrine, not vague and accomodating of sin. Christ accomodated the repentant sinner, never the sin, nor even the unrepentant sinner. If the laxity of the post-conciliar years may account for “Catholic” politicians like Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Kathleen Sebelius, whose policies directly attack the Faith, I suspect the laxity of French confessors in the 17^th and 18^th century bears considerable responsibility for the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The price the Jesuits payed for preserving Louis XIV’s Catholicism may well have been the eventual destruction of Christendom.

In some ways, France under Louis XIV presages fascism: the charismatic leader who makes the religion of the State incarnate in himself. Louis XIV’s dictum, L’état, c’est moi, might just as well have been Mussolini’s. Louis explicitly presented himself not even as the lusty sage-king Solomon, but as the even lustier proto-imperator Alexander—and as the new Apollo: le roi soleil. In this, his favorite title, we see beneath the veneer of Antiquity a shocking blasphemy: for the Christian world, Christ was the true Apollo, the Light of the World; now, a prince of France, the descendant of Saint Louis, aimed to eclipse Christ’s brilliance with his own. As he grew old, Louis XIV, like many kings before him, grew pious; the Chapel at Versailles, one of his last and perhaps his finest monument, remains one of the greatest houses ever erected to and for the dwelling of God’s glory. But today they use it for concerts. After all, the Chapel rises away to the side of the great palace, marring its symmetry, almost an after-thought to the endless mirrors, promenades, and waterworks. Absolutism, born in part to preserve Christendom, surely hastened its demise. It is the political extension of the voluntarism that slowly poisoned the Christian perception of God, remaking the True, the One, the Good, and the Beautiful into a capricious despot. Though the the Sun King died with the Sacraments, can we be sure his judgment was any less severe than that of the apostate princes of Germany and England?

What I am groping towards here is this question: did the ancien régime fail to adequately represent metaphysical reality because of something intrinsic to this political order (its inability to adapt to change, say), or because this order was perverted by something extrinsic? If the Middle Ages, despite their flaws, did express sublime truth, why did the 18^th century so miserably fail in this expression? So miserably, in fact, that the system toppled utterly within a few years in France, the eldest daughter of the Church, the country that had been the supreme expression of the social ideal of the Middle Ages? Yes, no historical society can perfectly represent eternal reality. Yes, change is endemic to post-lapsarian life; forms may always need some adaptation (without overstating this adaptation in the fashionable manner of contemporary excurses on the “strangeness” of the past, since the Communion of the Saints and the divinely ordained transmission of Revelation quasi per manus ensures historical continuity: a people must be intelligible to itself, a Body a fortiori). But what had changed, I propose, is that the ancien régime had largely ceased to be the ancien régime. France in the 18^th century was not truly feudal. There were feudal “forms” that did not correspond to feudal “content”: hence the forms had become “hollow and restrictive.” In reality, the ancien régime did not topple in 1789, it had been slowly toppling for centuries. I suspect its auto-destruction became irreversible during the reign of Sun King.

And yet everything did change in 1789. In 1789, Christendom, long ailing, died. And everything that has happened since 1789 in Western culture—and, since 1945, in global culture—lives in the shadow of 1789.

Christian metaphysicians might be tempted to rejoice at the fall of the “hollow and restrictive” forms of the ancien régime because of a possible reunion of form and content. But we must be clear: Christendom represented, imperfectly but in its totality, metaphysical reality. What changed between, say, 1300 and 1789 was not metaphysical reality, but society. Western society had become much less Christian. New cultural forms might express the same metaphysical reality, perhaps more persuasively to a rapidly secularizing culture—but if the new cultural forms give up the expression of metaphysical reality to express cultural reality, the Truth fades even further from view. What was wrong in 1789 was not that France was too Christian, but that it was not Christian enough. In theory, Christendom has no monopoly on authentic Christian society; in practice, no other cultural system has better expressed the Logos.

(To be continued...)