Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West

 The Text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?...

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music...

Schall on Culture

Fr. James Schall, SJ: Culture is Never Neutral

Fr. Schall, in this ISI lecture, gives an excellent account of the Catholic theological attitude towards culture.

Here's the text, though apparently, Fr. Schall was only working from the text, not following it verbatim.

Around the Web

For the week of Saturday, November 28 through Friday, November 4.

1) In Standpoint Magazine, a shallow discussion of the staging of oratorios.

2) In The Washington Post a shallow review of, "The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy" by Adrienne Mayor.

3) At The Hoover Institution, Liam Julian on "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" by H.W. Fowler and edited by David Crystal

4) In City Journal, Michael Knox Beran asks "Can the polis live again?"

It was left to Thomas Jefferson to show that it was possible to preserve the public virtues within a nation-state. To protect civic artistry in a changing America, Jefferson sought to re-create the civic life he had known in his youth. As a college student in colonial Williamsburg, he had been drawn into little communities of sympathetic scholarship that he would always characterize in Athenian terms: “They were truly Attic societies.” It was in communities of this kind, he believed, that men’s civic impulses could flourish as they could not in a larger space.

“A great deal of love given to a few,” he wrote, “is better than a little to many.” Jefferson’s University of Virginia reflected this ideal: he intended it to be an “academical village,” and in designing its Lawn, he made ingenious use of the classical arts to frame one of America’s most beguiling public spaces.

Arendt didn’t heed Jefferson in this, and she offers little prescriptive guidance for those seeking to reclaim public space today. Yet her work remains a useful statement of the part that such spaces might play in resisting the social revolution, if only a way could be found to salvage them. A new generation of civic artists is seeking to revive the old public spaces. “New Urbanist” architects, among them Léon Krier, Andrés Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, want to restore the town square to its old pride of public place. Their effort is noble, but Arendt showed just how fierce the opposition is.

Political Theology: A Beginning (I)

As part of my interest in anti-liberal political philosophies, I'd like to draw the reader's attention to this BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief program on Christian Socialism. The program features Dr. John Milbank, founding member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. After listening to the program, I concluded that Milbank, while professing himself an English Christian Socialist, has more in common with European Christian democrats than with conventional socialists or even Christian socialists.(1) 

What are the sources of Christian democracy? This is not an easy question to answer: Christian democracy, like any political ideology, is diverse, with different and competing views. At its best, Christian democracy is rooted in the social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. At its worst, it's indistinguishable from left-wing liberalism (2), supportive of a central, bureaucratic state and none too sound on social questions, such as marriage, the family, and the dignity of the person. But what of the more acceptable version? Where are its roots located? What direction is it headed? What does it get right? What does it get wrong? And what lessons might it offer for American Christians? 

These are questions I'd like to consider and will do so by taking a closer look in future posts at some important texts from the Christian democratic tradition: the papal social documents, Radical Orthodox, Distributist and Catholic Worker texts, and the work of recent anti-liberal thinkers such as George Parkin Grant, David Schindler, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If time permits, I may broaden my topic to include economic thinkers who are within the Christian democratic tradition, including Wilhelm Ropke and E.F. Schumacher. With the possible exception of Ropke, all of these thinkers and movements are fundamentally anti-liberal in outlook, preferring to locate the dignity of man not in Enlightenment views of individual autonomy but in man as the Imago Dei. Because American political philosophy and practice is rooted in the language of the Enlightenment, I shall, I suspect, have to devote some time and energy to adumbrating a Christian critique of classical liberalism. 

(1) For instance, the moderator of Beyond Belief calls Tony Blair a Christian socialist, an appellation that Milbank contests, and oddly, Wikipedia even lists the wildly anti-clerical Hugo Chavez as a Christian socialist.
(2) I hope it's become obvious that I'm not using the term 'liberal' in typical American fashion to necessarily denote a left-wing statist.

Russia & the Family

From Taki's Magazine:

'Love for the Motherland begins with family’—F. Bacon.

'Family is one of nature’s masterpieces'—Philosopher George Santayana

 

The most distinct feature of both ads is the fact that they don’t simply depict happy nuclear families, but, rather, emphasize genetic and historic continuity through multi-generational family “clans.”

Whether this country’s current pro-natalist experiment, in conjunction with the recent anti-alcohol and anti-smoking campaigns, achieves significant results remains to be seen. But for those concerned with the “Death of West,” some comfort can be found in the fact that what is taboo in western Europe and America is a national priority in the Motherland.

von Balthasar on Beauty

In a world without beauty --- even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it --- in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil. For this, too, is a possibility, and even the more exciting one: Why not investigate Satan's depths? In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency... And if this how the transcendentals fare because one of them has been banished, what will happen with Being itself? Thomas described Being (das Sein) as a 'sure light' for that which exists (das Seiende). Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself? What remains is then a mere lump of existence which, even if it claims for itself the freedom proper to spirits, nevertheless remains totally dark and incomprehensible even to itself. The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, "The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: I. Seeing the Form"

Return of the King?

Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture reports:

Today the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI met with "His Royal Imperial Highness Otto von Hapsburg, archduke of Austria." The Vatican protocol office thereby conferred upon the Austrian visitor a title that he himself had renounced.

The heir to the storied Hapsburg dynasty, Otto von Hapsburg is the son of Blessed Karl, the last acknowledged ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although he was forced from the throne and died in exile, Karl I never abdicated. Otto did renounce his claim to the Austrian throne, as a condition for being allowed to return to his native land. He has been prominent in European politics for decades. Now approaching his 100th birthday, he has stepped away from public life, and in more candid moments has admitted that he regrets renouncing his claims-- even though he made it quite clear that he was renouncing only his own personal claims, not those of his heirs.

Signs of Life: 40 Years of the New Order

 (On Sunday, the New York Times with unwonted liberality published an Op-Ed by Kenneth Wolfe, "Latin Mass Appeal." In the editorial, Wolfe reflects on the liturgical crisis of the last four decades, its origins, and Pope Benedict's support for the Tridentine Mass, which, with his imprimatur, is growing in popularity and visibility. These are my own anecdotal reflections on the New Order in the Church, its cultural implications, and the new signs of vigor that are challenging decades-old attitudes and hegemonies.)

In the foreword to his 1988 Gelebte Kirche: Bernanos (in English, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence), Fr. Hans urs von Balthasar wrote, "The flourishing of Catholic literature, which blossomed so splendidly with Bloy, Peguy, Claudel, and Bernanos during the first half of the century, seems to have left no heirs. We often regret this fact. But we have done very little to make our own what we have already been so richly given."

It is unfortunate that von Balthasar's statements should be so self-evidently true. Catholic Christians are ignorant of or alienated from the early 20th century renaissance of Christian thought. This alienation is parallel with a widespread ignorance of the root-and-branch sources of Christian culture. This ignorance is itself part of a wider cultural and historical amnesia, but there are concerted efforts to change this state of affairs. I intend to highlight a few of them.

Lay movements such as Communion and Liberation, the journals Communio, The Chesterton Review, and Second Spring (UK),  the new religious orders and institutes such as the Fraternity of St. Peter, Benedict the XVI's pontificate and his freeing of the classical Roman liturgy are all powerful spokes in the wheel of reform: all are working in some measure  for lasting renewal, renewal founded on the actual precepts of the Second Vatican Council and its call for resourcement. But what prevented the widespread success of the Council in the first place? Taking a look at the most deleterious after-events of the Council may give us some insight into our current situation and provide prescriptions for future action.

Perhaps the most arresting cultural effect of the bungled implementation of the Council was the rapid destruction of the classic Christian aesthetic: much that was beautiful was callously destroyed or altered, retaining, however, the cheap thrills of devotional kitsch. To my mind, it is not coincidental that the wells of Christian inspiration seemingly dried up at precisely the moment when the Roman Church began to abandon en masse its liturgical and artistic patrimony. In recent decades, we can claim very little of lasting liturgical value: no liturgical art, architecture, or music worthy of its subject matter. But there too we see some incipient dynamism: the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture is establishing itself as a leading institution for church architecture, and the new institutes and orders devoted to the classical liturgy are increasingly in need of new and larger churches to house their growing congregations. In music too, we see the gradual recovery and dissemination of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. That recovery and creative re-reception is necessary if we're to again have a native school of liturgical composition. 

The abandonment and repudiation of the classical liturgical patrimony doubtless did much to dry up inspiration, but the concomitant surrender of the educational and apologetic achievements of the past only exacerbated the crisis. In the early twentieth century, the Church, as Fr. Aidan Nichols put it, was a "presentation of truth, goodness, and beauty that was at once a powerful philosophy, a comprehensive ethic, and a vision of spiritual delight." The abandonment of a coherent and reasoned apologetics (pre-empted doubtless by the many doctrinal controversies that rendered the apologetic task largely moot) and the missed opportunity after the Council to renew and reinvigorate the philosophical life of the Church only weakened the Her appeal to men and women of genius. The parochial clergy, whose self-proclaimed task it was to interpret and implement the Second Vatican Council, seem, in retrospect, to have been willfully ignorant of the best currents of European and American Catholic thought and art: instead of attempting to leaven the minds of their parishioners with the best, they often chose the expedient and shallow, adopting music, theology, and architecture devoid imagination, beauty, and order: they served up theological pabulum and political ideology instead of the  thinkers and writers like Henri de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Danielou, SJ, Joseph Ratzinger, and our very own Dorothy Day (whose life and work seems to me to be the most striking evidence for the possibilities of renascence and vigor in the American Church).  

That they chose the easy way is not altogether surprising: an immediately fruitful and lasting reception of Vatican Two would have defied conciliar odds (councils are notoriously productive of schisms, heresies, and controversies); immediate optimism should have been disciplined by a strong statement of the challenges at hand. 

I hope that the efforts at reform, particularly the recovery of the classical liturgy, will spark a renascence of Christian artistry, but suppose that does not come to pass. Previous eras of the Church have been characterized only by stability, not by grandeur or sublimity. Extraordinary outbursts of creativity are fleetingly rare, and men do not live perpetually on the heights. While we hope for the future and the improvement of our estate, we should make every effort to preserve and generously disseminate the patrimony of our past. I believe the pontificate of Pope Benedict will be particularly decisive in this effort. 

All of the efforts of the great pre- and post-conciliar thinkers and actors were ordered towards recovering elements of Catholic life they thought had been overlooked or overlaid in the Tridentine Church: recovering the evangelical counsels for the laity and their transforming role in secular society and the indispensable centrality of the liturgy in the life of the Church and of the individual Christian. In short, the Council was indisputably a call to perfection and holiness in life, liturgy, and theology. That's our still task, a task admirably summed- up by Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP:  "What the Church can do today is to reform herself by repeating like a mantra the words 'only the best will do': the best intellectually, morally, aesthetically."

The Church must not settle down with what is merely comfortable and serviceable at the parish level; she must arouse the voice of the cosmos and, by glorifying the Creator, elicit the glory of the cosmos itself, making it also glorious, beautiful, habitable, and beloved. Next to the saints, the art which the Church has produced is the only real 'apologia' for her history. . . The Church is to transform, improve, 'humanize' the world --- but how can she do that if at the same time she turns her back on beauty, which is so closely allied to love? For together, beauty and love form the true consolation in this world, bringing it as near as possible to the world of the resurrection. The Church must maintain high standards; she must be a place where beauty can be at home; she must lead the struggle for that 'spiritualization' without which the world becomes the 'first circle of hell'.

 Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith, 124-125

Movie Review: Mon Oncle

Directed by Jacques Tati. 1958.

Mr and Mrs Arpel have really everything they want, they have achieved every success, everything is new in their house: the garden is new, the house is new, the books are new. And I think they need to be warned, somebody should definitely say to Mr Arpel: “Be careful, you should not forget a bit of humour! Your son is only nine and I think you should enjoy yourself and have a good time with him.” People think it is a message but it isn’t: one should be free to say to a man who is building a house “Be careful. It might be too well-built.”

- Jacques Tati

Creating and maintaining that personal tone is perhaps Tati’s greatest achievement in Mon Oncle. Like Playtime, Mon Oncle is not a hyper-intellectualized criticism of modernity. Nor is it an unsparing critique of consumerist habits. Rather it is a wistful look back at the world Tati knew and loved, and a quizzical, apprehensive look at the one he saw replacing it.  He sets up the contrast  no sooner than the opening credits, where the camera pans down the names which are neatly typed out on a neatly designed sign at the loud construction site of a new building. In contrast, the title card is a plain old street corner from Mr. Hulot’s town, with Mon Oncle scrawled on the wall in chalk. Dogs walk by and relieve themselves on the street lamp.

That image, however inglorious, is not a bad representation of Hulot's world. It has puddles, garbage, misshapen patches of grass, cracked stones, and yes, dogs do relieve themselves. It is a lived-in world and one that reflects what the people who live there do. Tati’s town was not built at once according to one master plan, but built and changed over many years as people came and went, as families grew and people passed on. Like his house, it many ad hoc solutions, little cribs, additions, and cheats to meet a new need without destroying what was there.

Sure, it is a rigmarole to get in, but what character it has! Mismatched shutters, mixed styles, hanging laundry, and so on. One wonders many people, how many generations worked on it. It reflects the characters of those who do, and who have, lived there. It is also, of course, Hulot’s home, filled with his friends and neighbors, so why would he want to live elsewhere?


Now the Arpel’s house is certainly a contrast to Mr. Hulot’s, but not so much in terms of outcome as of intent. Sure Hulot’s apartment building is inefficient, but it was not designed with the pretension of efficiency. The Arpel’s house is designed to be the pinnacle of modern style and efficient design. The house was built according to a plan, but a thoughtless, inhuman one. The building is simply not conducive for living. Take the kitchen for example, which looks like a cross between a dentist’s office and a NASA laboratory. It has every convenience, but it is cold and unwelcoming. The appliances buzz and whirr and crank. Even something as simple as a cabinet, which might have a gentle squeak as cabinets often do, instead has been engineered into a mechanical maw which nearly has Hulot’s hand for supper.

The yard is also quite a spectacle. It is large and walled off for privacy. It is the home of a ghastly fountain that only gets turned on for visitors and this touch most epitomizes the whole situation of the Arpels: they have all of this stuff that is not really for them. They have the fountain because it is supposed to impress others or display affluence. They have all of these conveniences and time-saving appliances, and what do they do with the time they save? They spend it on more time saving devices or they spend it away from their house. Have they really thought about what they would like to do, for its own sake? Of course none of what they do is bad, really, but it looks so silly because it is not done for any particular end. Look at the yard:

It is designed into many sections and cordoned off so you are only “supposed” to walk in certain areas. Why? Look at the picture above. In the scene, the party had to move from the other side of the yard to this side to sit down and eat, but there is no room because there is no other space sectioned off “for eating.” They have this big yard and cannot use it for what they want. In the scene depicted above, which may have presaged a similar scene in Playtime that uses cars instead of people, the characters walk around that little square like a circus line, amplifying the ridiculousness of the situation. We are glad to see later, when a dog gets loose at the party, the people running around trying to catch him. We want to say, “Yes, good! Go, run over the lines! It’s your yard, you can set the rules. Have fun in it and make a bit of a mess for once!”

Hulot’s brother in law works is a similarly sterile and highly polished, impersonal world. Trying to make Hulot more like himself, Mr. Arpel asks his boss to hire Hulot. The boss’ office looks like the lair of a James Bond villain, with ceilings so high they are out of sight, strange silver chairs, a map of the world in the back, and the boss sitting at an enormous desk. While in the office, Mr. Arpel phones Hulot to offer him the job, but wherever Hulot is, music is playing and Arpel cannot hear him. In a brilliant touch, Tati lets the music take over the soundtrack, and delightfully, it is as if Mr. Hulot’s world is pouring into that big and cold room, warming it and giving it life for the first time.  Of course the company is not up to any nefarious business like world domination and that is the point, why does it look like that? Why should someone's office, where someone works, be so uninviting? Even Arpel’s briefcase, which looked chichi at home when his wife neurotically dusted it, looks warm in such a hostile atmosphere.

Indeed it is atmosphere, specifically a personable one, that lies at the heart of Hulot’s world. The Arpel’s house, for all of its order, is in fact an order imposed upon them and not by them, and their house reflects their desire to live apart from others. (Recall that cursed, clanking, buzzer-operated fence that closes off their yard.) The human relationships are the heart of Hulot’s town, for better and worse. It is human incongruities that made it mismatched and imperfect, but also the desire of its people to live there, together, that kept it together. The combination of those two elements made it unique. The film’s title suggests what Tati’s quote about the film does: the desire to remind people who choose to live the “new way” to make the human component the heart of their endeavor. Hulot’s nephew is dreadfully unhappy at home. Quite simply, it is too clean and boring and more like living in a hospital ward than a home. When he goes out with his uncle, he rides on his bike amongst the townspeople (as opposed to riding past them in a car,) he eats jam-covered crullers with extra sugar, and plays pranks on people with other boys in the town. The boy’s classic prank, and a running gag throughout the film, is to whistle at someone as he approaches a pole in order to get him to turn around and look at you and thus crash into the pole. Towards the end of the movie, the boy’s father accidentally pulls the prank on someone and the boy grabs and squeezes his father’s hand in excitement as they try to sneak away. It is a beautiful little moment and we hope his father can learn from it.

We hope he learns what Mr. Hulot has taught us, that you have to be willing to make yourself a little vulnerable and go out and live with your neighbors. Sometimes you get splashed, covered in dust, or punched in the face, but that is probably better than having nothing happen at all, the same way the folksy little “town tune” is preferable to the silence of the Arpel household. Yet there is a certain wistful sadness to Mon Oncle, for just as surely as Mr. Hulot was moving away, the old world was passing. This theme is conveyed throughout the movie by cutting to a scene of construction workers tearing down an old building with pickaxes. The town is such a character this feels a surprisingly violent act, but we should not be too alarmed. It is not really the stuff we should be concerned about. Some change is normal, like Hulot’s little neighbor who is all grown up when he leaves. We should just make sure we do not get carried away with change just because it is novel and that we never forget the human element, the humour as Tati said; and in Mon Oncle Tati is not scolding or imploring us. The tone of Mon Oncle is not that of a self-righteous spokesperson crusading for a better world or an intellectual browbeating you into accepting his aesthetic philosophy. It’s more like your neighbor leaning over your fence as you  remodel your home and saying to you, “You’re going to add what? Really? Oh. . . Really?”

Msgr. Albacete contra Christopher Hitchens

On a related bibliographic note, Dr. David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, has published a book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, to counter some of the claims made by the New Atheist authors. Dr. Hart was featured in the July/August volume of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, where he discussed his book and the New Atheism: the interview, however, is only available to subscribers.

(N.B. I cannot recommend the Mars Hill Journal highly enough: consistently high quality, it's worth the price of the subscription.)