I am looking at a couple of random lines lifted from a bleak little poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., written at a sad time near the end of a short and, by his own reckoning, unfulfilled life. He was quite mistaken about that, by the way. His last words, whispered aloud about how happy he was to be going home to God, certainly put that misconception to rest.
Nevertheless, the lines he wrote were, without a doubt, an expression of bitter lamentation, advising us that because “The times are nightfall,” we must remain ever vigilant, on high alert in order to watch and see how “their light grows less.” Indeed, says Hopkins, on all sides we are beset by forces that threaten to put the lights out altogether, leaving the world impacted by the sheer dark. “The times are winter,” he tells us; thus, he summons us to see what he sees, which is “a world undone: They waste, they wither worse…”
Perhaps this is what Sir Edward Grey, England’s foreign secretary, had in mind when, on the eve of the Great War, he dolefully announced, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Less than a year later, all the lamps having gone out, Winston Churchill would declare in a letter to his wife that, “a wave of madness has swept the mind of Christendom.”
A mere half-century later, Walker Percy would make the same point in a piece of brilliant dystopian fiction called Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Percy’s protagonist will spend sleepless nights rereading “Stedmann’s History of World War I,” a meticulous account confirming those same devastations referenced by Churchill:
For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”
Shakespeare, of course, had foreseen much the same state of derangement some two or more centuries before when, in the voice of Hamlet on seeing the ghost of his murdered father, the king—a murder so “foul and most unnatural” that it must be avenged—cries out in the midst of a time as depraved and disjointed as any heretofore recorded: “O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.”
But, alas, Hamlet proves singularly inept in doing so, leaving a stage littered with dead bodies, his own included. Still, the point is made, which is that we live in a deeply disordered age, one that seems on every side to conspire in keeping goodness at bay. Not just goodness but simple sanity, which is nothing more than seeing the truth of things, so that we don’t all go mad.
Would it be possible, I wonder, living in a world such as the one we’ve got, to sort of nudge things modestly along in a direction that will make it easier for people to be good? To remain sane? In other words, to be able actually to see reality straight on, and to act accordingly? Or must the lights always be going out, if for no other reason than the fact that humankind having had its Fall, no rebirth or reform will ever be permanent? Must the worm be forever inside the apple, insinuating its poison deep down, infecting the fruit from within?
What are we to say about all this? More to the point, what can we do? I mean, as Christians, that is, specifically Roman Catholic Christians? Are there measures we can take that might make a life of virtue possible, not just for the heroic few but for the mediocre many? Those who, as some wag once put it, are always at their best? Could not society bestir itself a bit on behalf of making the mediocre just a wee bit better? Not mere “fragments,” mind you, “shored against my ruins,” as Eliot famously put it at the end of The Waste Land, his chronicle of personal disillusion, which may or may not have expressed the disillusion of an entire generation. But something sane and solid for all of us; a scaffolding, as it were, on which the generality of human beings can lean in order to live a more decent, even saintly, life?
This is not about individual excellence, the triumph of the solitary soul, but about an effort to elevate everyone, or at least to make it easier for the generality of humankind genuinely to see goodness as a distinct possibility, even if they refuse to seize upon it in the daily round of their lives. Because, while no man may actualize himself without himself, without others he cannot actualize himself at all.
My body will, to a certain extent, always be a boundary separating me from others, but it can also become a bridge joining me to those others, a medium of communion no less. If to be is necessarily to be in relation, then all life is relational, lived out in a spirit, an ethos, of reciprocity with others. Even Robinson Crusoe, in order to find and fulfill himself, required the friendship of Friday.
Might it be possible, therefore, to build a culture where it is easier for men to be virtuous? “A cell of good living,” is how the craftsman and critic Eric Gill put it, “in the chaos of our world.” Not the beehive, but the Mystical Body.
And what exactly is culture but an embodied religion, a faith that is given flesh and blood and bone in a visible and public way, so that everyone may avail themselves of its customs and convictions. Have we got anything at all like that? I mean at the moment, right this minute? No, we do not. And were such a thing to suddenly materialize, a genuine social life rooted in religion, anchored to God, it would very shortly be suppressed; it would quite hastily be dismantled on the grounds that, having breached the sacred wall of separation between Church and State, it was nothing less than an affront to the U.S. Constitution.
Is there an answer to this? Can an argument be made to disabuse people of the high anxiety they experience whenever religion and politics, faith and culture, are thrown into the same mix, a conjunction perceived by many to be so toxic that we are forbidden to stir it into life? I think that there is. And to that end I’ve put together a number of essays which actually aim to persuade the reader that to join the two makes perfect sense—and that by not doing so we really are in the soup.
This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.
