Clash of the Iconoclasts (Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie)

Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? To ask that question even rhetorically seems absurd.

Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? To ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and “moral equivalency” between “medieval barbarians” and “heroic defenders of freedom of speech.”

Yet the second question may be even more important than the first, if only because everyone outside of the confines of the putative “religion of peace” knows the proper answer to the first, but few understand why the proper answer to the second may very well be the same.

I do not wish to make too much of the rapid embrace of the phrase “Je suis Charlie” by good people horrified by the meticulously planned and surgically performed strike by militant Muslims on the Paris offices of the “irreverent” weekly. Few who posted those words on Twitter and Facebook and every other form of social media know much at all about the actual content of Charlie Hebdo, as the all-too-frequent use of the line “It’s the French version of The Onion” makes clear. (The world leaders who marched in Paris behind “Je suis Charlie” banners are a different matter altogether.)  Most would undoubtedly be horrified had they seen the viciously anti-Christian cartoons that Charlie Hebdo routinely ran alongside the anti-Muslim images that have been widely circulated. Few (I trust) would be willing to defend, for instance, the cover that depicted the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity sodomizing one another, as a show of support for homosexual “marriage.”

Yet even among those exposed to the truth about the vile content that Charlie Hebdo routinely published, many continue to stand behind the slogan, because as a society we have become so beguiled by the words “freedom of speech” that we regard the quotation routinely and wrongly attributed to Voltaire—“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—as the very foundation of civilization.

Of course, we don’t act like we believe that. “Je suis Charlie,” cry those on the left, who normally spend their days screaming “Racist!” at those on the right. Would they defend to the death the right of someone to question affirmative action, much less the right to call someone the n-word? Of course not, nor should they; to die for the right of someone else to champion something you strongly oppose is surely one definition of insanity.

“Je suis Charlie,” shout those on the right, who routinely denounce the antisemitic ravings of Muslim clerics. Would they defend to the death the right of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call Jews “swine,” or even the right of President Obama to call Islam a “religion of peace”? Of course not, nor should they.

The good news is that no one has to die to defend views that they disagree with, much less find abhorrent. Civilization, thankfully, does not depend on the right of freedom of speech, neither the concrete right guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution nor the abstract version ripped from the historical circumstances of that amendment by activist jurists and honed to a weapon lethal to civilized discourse first by leftists in the 1960’s and 70’s and then by “conservatives” in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Indeed, in its abstract form, elevated above all other principles and above the complex realities of actual human society, “free speech,” rather than being the very foundation of civilization, has largely become cover for the behavior of those who either do not wish to conform to the norms of civilized society or who wish to undermine those norms with the ultimate intention of destroying civilization itself. It has become, in other words, an ideology, a distortion of reality.

The partisans of free speech and the evangelists of Allah are much closer together than they or we tend to think. A few years after the pseudonymous S.G. Tallentyre (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) inserted her high-sounding words into the mouth of Voltaire, another English writer pointed out the parallels between the beliefs of Islam and those of modern liberalism. In G.K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), we see Islam not as the “medieval religion” of atheist and neoconservative screeds, but as a thoroughly modern ideology, sibling to liberalism in an iconoclasm that doesn’t simply ignore reality but tries to destroy it. Unlike the Triune God of Christianity Who deigned to send His Only Begotten Son to become man to save His Creation, Allah is an abstract principle—like “free speech”—to which all of human society must submit, by force if necessary, and through which it must be violently transformed. And those who oppose the followers of Allah, like those who raise questions about the supposed defenders of “free speech,” must be silenced.

That Islam does not merely prohibit images of Allah or images of Muhammad but all images of creation is telling, because through this prohibition it reveals a fundamental hatred of the created world, and not simply a fear of blasphemy (in the case of images of Allah) or sacrilege (in the case of images of Allah’s “prophet” Muhammad). But the iconoclasm of modern liberalism is the same. The promotion of vile obscenity à la Charlie Hebdo isn’t “courageous”; it is a rage against reality, a desire not only to destroy the norms of civilized life but to strike at the very roots of the created order that gives rise to those norms and makes civilization possible.

This desire for destruction explains a seeming contradiction that some commentators have noted. As unwise as it is to poke a bear, it would seem insane to go a step further and set out bait so that you have more bears around to poke. Yet at the very time that the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were routinely attacking Islam and Muslims, the editorial policy of Charlie Hebdo supported continued Islamic immigration to France—even after the magazine’s offices were bombed in 2011 by militant Muslims.

The staff of Charlie Hebdo, however, were not insane. They had a purpose in baiting the bears: Their ultimate target was not Islam and its adherents, but the Catholic Church and Hers. A truly Christian society can—within limits—tolerate both atheists and adherents of non-Christian religions, recognizing them as icons, however tarnished, of their Creator; but the iconoclasm of both modern liberalism and Islam cannot tolerate the incarnationalism of Christianity. The staff of Charlie Hebdo did not make the mistake of believing that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, but they were perfectly willing to let Muslims assist them in attacking the Catholic Church, in much the same way that Israeli leaders once did everything they could to elevate Muslim Palestinian leaders at the expense of Christian ones. For any monolithic principle to triumph in the long run, Trinitarian incarnationalism—the source of true, lasting, humane diversity—must be destroyed. Christ is a greater threat to both Allah and modern liberalism than either one of the latter is to the other. The followers of Allah and the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo share a vision of a world united under a single, indivisible principle; they just call that principle by different names.

That is the reality which all of those waving “Je suis Charlie” placards missed when the first postmassacre issue of Charlie Hebdo was released. The cartoon on the cover was almost invariably described as “poignant” and “courageous,” but it would be more correct to say that, for a change, it is truthful: Under the headline “Tout est pardonné” (“All is forgiven”), Muhammad, a tear falling from his eye, holds a “Je suis Charlie” placard. Yes, indeed—at a fundamental level, Muhammad is Charlie Hebdo, and the remaining staff are happy to claim him.

Not so the Catholic Church, as the editorial in that same issue makes perfectly clear. Speaking of the reaction to the massacre of their colleagues, the remaining staff declare, “What made us laugh the most is that the bells of Notre Dame rang in our honour. We would like to send a message to Pope Francis, who, too, was ‘Charlie’ this week: we only accept the bells of Notre Dame ringing in our honour when it is Femen who make them tinkle”—a reference to the February 12, 2013, desecration of the cathedral by topless “activists” who attempted to damage Notre Dame’s historic bells.

The iconoclasm of the Muslim murderers of the staff of Charlie Hebdo knows no bounds; but so, too, the iconoclasm of Charlie’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who in 2012 proudly pointed out his renunciation of normal human life in pursuit of a devotion to the abstract principle of “free speech”: “I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit.” His iconoclasm did not stop there, but extended to his very self: “It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I prefer to die standing than living on my knees.”

On January 7, two devotees of a different abstract principle granted him his wish. But as horrifying as the act of the jihadists was, the proper response of Christians and of civilized men generally to the ultimate form of Muslim iconoclasm should not be the explicit or even implicit embrace of Charlie Hebdo’s version of iconoclasm. Both have stepped outside the bounds of civilization; they are the two sides of the same debased coin.

The proper response of all civilized men is to uphold the norms of civilization, to condemn both murder and blasphemy and sacrilege; to refuse to countenance the latter (much less to exalt it) just because the former has occurred.

And for Christians, the proper response includes, as it always does, striving to be an icon of Christ in this fallen world, to shine the light of His grace into creation in order to strengthen it rather than to tear it down, to build up civilization rather than to reject it. It means the renunciation of ideology and the iconoclasm of both Islam and abstract “free speech”—and the embrace of reality in its fullness. And finally, it means recognizing the truth about Stéphane Charbonnier that he, not wanting to live on his knees, refused to acknowledge about himself—that he was a man created in the image and likeness of God, which is why his murder by the devotees of the ideology of Allah is wrong, no matter what vile obscenities he published.

First published in the March 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Christ and History

In theory, it seems like a good idea.  The corpus of historian John Lukacs’s work is so rich and has grown so large that those who have just discovered it may be uncertain where to start.  His magnum opus, Historical Consciousness, alone has gone through three editions, all of which are worth reading as separate works.  Combine that with the regrettable condition that some of his more accessible works—Outgrowing Democracy and The Passing of the Modern Age, for instance—are out of print (and used copies are very hard to find), and the need for a compact introduction to Lukacs’s thought seems obvious.  Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, At the End of an Age is not that book.

Lukacs would be the first to admit—or, rather, insist—that theory and reality do not always mesh.  Ideas develop in an historical context, but they are also shaped by the actions of men as much as (indeed, perhaps more so than) they shape those actions.  As Lukacs is fond of saying, writing of the half-truths of historian E.H. Carr’s analysis, “the important question is ‘What is Carr driving at?’ and not ‘What is the make of this Carr?’”  But that is precisely why, in order to understand an historian’s work, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historian.  Lukacs is correct when he writes that

The recognition that different persons see the past (and also the present) differently, and that thus every historian is different, does not mean that because he is the product of his past he cannot do otherwise.

To claim that would be to deny free will.  But to understand the choices that an historian makes—and, more importantly, his purposes (not his motives, which are deterministic) in making them—we cannot view his work as something separate from—abstracted from—his life.

A case in point: The Passing of the Modern Age, a thin, prophetic volume that is still among my favorite of Lukacs’s works, is, as Lukacs describes it in Confessions of an Original Sinner, “a summation of the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age.”  I read it first in 1990, before reading Confessions, and it profoundly influenced the choices I made as I began my graduate studies that year.  Still, I approached The Passing of the Modern Age somewhat differently when I reread it a year or two later, having read Confessions in the meantime.  Knowing that The Passing of the Modern Age was published on November 15, 1970, the day that Lukacs’s first wife died, and recognizing the extent to which her passing was bound up in his thought with “the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age,” helps reveal additional nuances and complexities in the work and, of course, in the underlying thoughts that the text expresses.  Similarly, knowing that the structure of the volume is shaped by a hierarchy of historical factors, “applicable, by and large, to the history of modern nations,” that Lukacs had sketched out in Historical Consciousness, and being familiar with that hierarchy from reading the latter work, is bound to influence the reader’s appreciation of The Passing of the Modern Age.  None of that distracts from the reader’s free will or his ability to apply (and develop, and distort) Lukacs’s ideas as he sees fit.  However, just as our appreciation of a novel changes as we grow older (and, indeed, the novel’s meaning for us changes as well), so, too, our understanding of an historian’s work changes as, broadly, we change and, particularly, as our understanding of the historian’s purposes change.

Which brings us back to At the End of an Age.  This really is two books, roughly divided into the first two chapters (“At the End of an Age” and “The Presence of Historical Thinking”) and the last two chapters (“An Illustration” and “At the Center of the Universe”), with the middle chapter (“The Question of Scientific Knowledge”) acting as a bridge.  In the first “book,” Lukacs provides a sketch of the evolution of his own thought and presents a condensation of themes developed in Historical Consciousness and elsewhere.  The reader familiar with Lukacs’s work is likely to find these chapters somewhat repetitive.  Lukacs revisits many examples from previous works (such as the remarks about E.H. Carr quoted above), often even employing very similar phrasing.  All of that would be understandable (and longtime readers could skip ahead) if these chapters provided a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with Lukacs’s thought.  For that purpose, however, these chapters are somewhat too distilled.  The new reader is likely to be left (incorrectly) with a sense of superficiality.  At best, he may be hungry for a more detailed treatment, but then he is quickly thrust into the second “book,” which (it seems to me) can be read most profitably only after having digested Historical Consciousness, because the illustration provided in Chapter Four, and the final philosophical ruminations about man’s position at the center of the universe in Chapter Five, are really an extension of the final chapter, “History and Physics,” of that earlier work.

Here, longtime readers of Lukacs will find what they have been thirsting for, as Lukacs’s continued investigations over the last 30 years have broken new ground.  He has taken the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and woven them together with his own expansion of linguist Owen Barfield’s insights into the increasing intrusion of man’s consciousness into the material world.  The result is an advance in how we think about thinking itself.  And that advance is not merely historical or philosophical but religious.  While Lukacs is not exactly one to wear his Christianity on his sleeve, the Christian implications of his work (and Barfield’s before him, particularly the latter’s Saving the Appearances) are obvious.  As I have argued elsewhere, the development of historical consciousness itself is inextricably bound up with the Incarnation of Christ, the meeting of Divine and human, the point at which the Timeless intersects His timebound Creation.  “And now—especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians—I must argue,” Lukacs writes,

for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no, that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth.

That God became a man and walked this earth demonstrates the centrality of history to man’s nature—and it should give pause to post-Christian “Christians” (whether evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline Protestant, or even neo-Thomist) whose vision of Christ has degenerated into an ahistorical set of platitudes and “universal” principles.  As Lukacs writes,

All of us have known many non-Christians who have acted in Christian ways, thus being animae naturaliter cristianae; and we also know many sincerely believing Christians whose expressions may show alarmingly non-Christian thoughts in their minds. . . . [W]hat we think we believe is not always what we really believe. Our thinking—our ideas—will necessarily have their consequences. Some of our beliefs ought to.

By becoming a man, Christ redeemed history; in our post-Christian age, perhaps history—for some, at least—can redeem man, by leading him back to Christ.  That may not have John Lukacs’s purpose in writing At the End of an Age; it might, however, be one result.

[At the End of an Age, by John Lukacs (New Haven: Yale University Press) 230 pp., $22.95]

First published in the August 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Truth of Blood and Time

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And — every — single — one — of — them — is — right!

—Rudyard Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age”

When I was a college student in the late 1980’s, the obsession of conservative activists in academia was summed up in the buzzword relativism. By the early 90’s, that term had been paired with nihilism, understood to be relativism’s darker and more foreboding big brother. Come to believe that the expression of truth is affected in any way by time, by place, by civilization, and you would eventually wind up believing that there is no basis for morality. And those influenced by the disciples of Leo Strauss (or those who had simply glanced at a copy of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind) often threw a third term—historicism—into the mix. There is truth and falsehood; philosophy and history; white and black —and anyone who suggests that human life is characterized by shades of gray secretly yearns for Auschwitz and the Gulag.

The “success” of conservatism politically in the 1980’s undoubtedly had much to do with such a simplistic view of reality. While most conservative students and professors still knew the name Edmund Burke and recalled that a prominent conservative thinker named Russell Kirk had declared him the father of modern conservatism (something that cannot be said today), their political hero, Ronald Reagan, cited Burke’s great opponent, Thomas Paine, more often than he did any other political thinker. Paine —a radical rabble-rouser, a moral dissolute, and a rabid supporter of the French Revolution —ultimately ended his life as a man without a country and, thus, is a fitting hero for the neoconservatives who, by 1986, had taken full control of the Reagan administration.

Paine foreshadowed the neocons also in his rejection of history, and his adoption by American “conservatives” shows how incorrectly they lay claim to that term:

Even though the political meaning of “liberal” came in the 1820s, the liberal vision of the world came from the eighteenth century. That vision was the dominant vision of the modern age: the vision that society was perfectible, that there was no such thing as original sin, that it was within the power of man . . . to transform the world: a vision which . . . was essentially anti-historical, or at least ahistorical. Against it arose the recognition of history by a thinker such as Burke, who was not behind but ahead of Paine . . . For Burke was not merely a defender of tradition: he recognized and expressed the inevitability of the historical dimension of human nature, something that not many Americans were willing to accept.

Thus writes John Lukacs in “The Problem of American Conservatism,” a chapter of his important 1984 work Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (recently released in a revised edition by Yale University Press as A New Republic). This chapter is one of 67 articles, reviews, excerpts from books, and, in one case, a whole book included in Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge.

In a delicious bit of irony, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, whose publications Intercollegiate Review and Campus often featured those doomsayers of relativism and nihilism and historicism, published this massive reader, which also includes the most complete bibliography of Professor Lukacs’s writings ever assembled. The irony, of course, comes from the fact that John Lukacs, though a self-described reactionary whose political and philosophical views expose American “conservatives,” by contrast, for the liberals they are, has been repeatedly attacked by such “conservatives” as a “relativist” and an “historicist.” Still, ISI has never joined in those attacks (indeed, Lukacs has long served on the editorial board of ISI’s flagship publication, Modern Age), and the publication of this volume makes it clear that the politically oriented articles in Campus and Intercollegiate Review did not express the whole range of thinking at ISI.

Editors Jeffrey O. Nelson and Mark G. Malvasi have, on the whole, shown very good judgment in their selection of pieces for inclusion in this reader, which they have divided into six sections: “The Problem of Historical Knowledge,” “Historians Reviewed,” “Dissenting Opinions (Or: A Few Other Prosaists),” “Places and Times,” “Some Twentieth-Century Questions,” and “Reading, Writing, and Teaching History.” Still, the 67 selections, while making for a volume of 950-plus pages, barely begin to scratch the surface of Professor Lukacs’s body of work, which now extends over 60 years. And thus the highlight of this volume, both for admirers of Professor Lukacs’s work and for those who are being exposed to it for the first time, should be the 48-page bibliography of his published writings, compiled by his granddaughter Helen. Based on Lukacs’s own collection of clippings, even this bibliography, she warns, is only about 95 to 98 percent complete, and it does not contain publications from before his emigration from Hungary or after December 31, 2003. Even so, it is the most complete account available of the phenomenal output of one of the most important, and yet consistently underrated or ignored, historians of the 20th century.

All of the themes that Professor Lukacs has developed over the years are found in this reader: the difference between an historical philosophy and a philosophy of history; the important distinction between motives and purposes (“Motives come from the past; purposes involve the pull of the future”); how what people think is often very different from what they think they think; why “facts” are not the same as truths:

Their statements or expressions can come close to truths—which is the best we can expect. A “fact” is never absolute. Nor is it given to us to fix, to nail down, to state unalterably an absolute truth. We may think that our concept (or idea) of truth is absolute; yet that, too, only hearkens toward the absolute. (Our very language reflects this: “This is true” is not quite the same as: “This is the truth.”)

All of this reflects Lukacs’s understanding of the creative role of imagination (a faculty of which memory is part and parcel) and his recognition of the false dichotomy between subject and object (a point on which he was strongly influenced by the English linguist Owen Barfield, whose book Saving the Appearances rivals Lukacs’s Historical Consciousness in its exposition of an historical philosophy). As Lukacs writes, “Historical thinking accords with the recognition that human knowledge is neither objective nor subjective but personal and participant.” And again:

The recognition of the objectivist illusion does not reduce, it rather enhances, the general validity of personal knowledge. . . . If . . . by historical “relativity” we mean not only the historicity of every form of human cognition but also of every form of human expression, it should be obvious that this idea of relativity is neither a feeble nor a senseless one; for this “relativity” of truths means not the absence but the potential richness, not the nullity but the multiplicity of truth.

It is for passages such as this that Lukacs has been attacked as a relativist in the sense that I have discussed above —even by recent reviewers of this volume, which provides ample evidence to the contrary. Acknowledging the multiplicity of truth is not the same as claiming that truth is a merely human creation; after all, Christians believe (or at least used to believe) that the ultimate Truth Himself is a multiplicity in unity. It is only to those who have lost that belief (or perhaps never had it) that Lukacs’s assertion can appear a denial of truth.

In case any doubt remains, however, here is Lukacs in “The Presence of Historical Thinking” (a chapter reprinted here from his 2002 book At the End of an Age and the very first selection in this volume):

But the historicity of our seeing and speaking does not amount to the relativity of truth. What history gives a mind, at best, is not a dose of relativism; it gives us certain standards, the power to contrast, and the right to estimate. The belief that truth is relative is no longer the assertion merely of cynics or skeptics but of postmodern philosophers, according to whom there were and are no truths, only modes of discourse, structures of thought and of text. Their relativization of truth is absolute. And yet: truths exist. Their existence, unlike the existence of ideas, is not a matter of our choice. But we are responsible for how, and where, and why, and when we try to express them.

Here, we see a manifestation of Lukacs’s persistent (and Catholic) belief in free will. Throughout his work, he attacks the subjectivist determinist idea that men’s actions are somehow the result of their history or circumstances, rather than their own moral choices. To the ideologues and systematizers, he constantly repeats the refrain that “What matters is not what ideas do to men but what men do to their ideas; how and when they choose them, and how and why they accommodate them to their own wishes, interests, lives, circumstances.” The same questions can be asked of the crass materialists of left and right, the Marxists and the free-market economists who argue that human behavior is bound by economic “laws” that represent a monolithic “truth” that, rather than setting man free, binds his will.

Perhaps nowhere is Lukacs’s disdain for simplistic idealism more evident than in his withering review of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, reprinted here from the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. One paragraph alone is worth the ridiculously low price of this book:

Owing to lack of space, but also because history (and human nature) do not follow the laws of physics—meaning that while it is easier to wrestle with a weak body than with a strong one, it is more difficult to wrestle with a weak mind than with a strong one—in this review I must let Fukuyama speak for himself. Fukuyama has given his chapters such titles as “The Weakness of Strong States II, or, Eating Pineapples on the Moon,” and “The Victory of the VCR.” In his introduction, he writes, “In lieu of conventional thanks to a typist for helping to prepare the manuscript, I should perhaps acknowledge the work of the designers of the Intel 80386 microprocessor.” He should. It shows.

Thirteen years later, Fukuyama’s end of history lies in the ruins of the cradle of civilization, while nationalism—the defining phenomenon of the history of the 20th century, which Fukuyama did not even acknowledge (much less address) but to which Lukacs has devoted much of his attention throughout his career—continues to shock and awe.

Though it limited the amount of out-of-print material that could be included in the volume, Nelson’s and Malvasi’s decision to include chapters of books that are still in print or widely available (such as Historical Consciousness and Outgrowing Democracy) is understandable, since this reader is an attempt to introduce the thought of Professor Lukacs to new audiences as well as to collect important pieces for the convenience of those already familiar with his work. In one case, however, I think that their institutional affiliation has clouded their judgment, and that is their decision to include the entire text of A Student’s Guide to the Study of History, a concise pamphlet that ISI published in 2000 as part of their very successful and generally well-prepared series of student’s guides to different subject areas. I have no complaint about the book; indeed, I think it is one of the best of the series and have recommended it both to college students and, most recently, to an 80-year-old man who was looking for some help in focusing his study of history in his twilight years. It adds little to this volume, however, while using up 19 precious pages that might have been better put to use. Two articles that I would have liked to see in its place (and readers may be forgiven if they assume that, here, I am revealing my own institutional loyalty) are “To Hell With Culture” and its sequel, “To Hell With College,” published in the September 1994 and September 1997 issues of Chronicles. In them, Professor Lukacs makes a very forceful case that both culture (as commonly understood to include literature, art, etc.) and higher education are largely the products of civilization, not the other way around. As he writes in the first of the essays:

Whether in an inner-city school or at Harvard, the young are not taught civilization. . . . I mean a respect for life, for an orderly life that is inseparable not only from a respect for learning but from a respect for one’s provenance, for language, and for the ability to read, write, and listen. Almost half of our young now spend nearly 20 years in schools, with the result that most of them cannot read and write and express themselves adequately.

As we enter the 21st century, it is civilization itself (the end of history notwithstanding) that is in danger of destruction.

Should government promote “culture” at all? That is at least arguable. What is not arguable is that government must protect civilization. When it fails to do so, government, as we know it, dissolves, with first anarchy and then barbaric tyranny succeeding it.

While some might argue that the dissolution of our current government would be preferable to its continuation (and even more of us might wistfully entertain that idea), Lukacs points out their mistake. The corruption on display in high places is only a reflection of the corruption of an increasingly uncivilized people, and an uncivilized people will never be free, no matter what their form of government.

Civilization arose when man became aware of his past and thus became conscious of himself as an historical creature, as more than a mere animal. It progressed as that historical consciousness deepened, particularly in the wake of the Incarnation, when it became clear (to those who have eyes to see) that history and tradition reveal truths—including the Truth of God Himself—that could not be accessed otherwise.

And yet:

Nearly four hundred years ago Descartes argued, in his Discourse on Method, that the study of history was wasteful because we cannot acquire any accurate or certain knowledge of the human past, as we can of mathematics and of the world of nature.

The historical lesson of the modern age that Descartes helped usher in is that civilization—indeed, human life itself—is threatened whenever we begin to separate ourselves from our history, to erase our memory, to believe that there is no such thing as truth or—perhaps even worse—to believe that truth is universal in the Enlightenment sense: abstract, radically monolithic, not of this world of flesh and blood and time.

As another great historical philosopher who emigrated to America once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—and they do so because they have become lesser men. Thankfully, those who still understand that civilization has always depended upon those who do remember the past have Professor Lukacs, and now this splendid volume, as a guide.

[Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, by John Lukacs. (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books), 922 pp., $18.00]

First published in the December 2005 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Incarnation and human scale →

The only thing more wonderful than God’s creation of the world is the reality that he sent his only begotten Son to walk the earth as one of us.

Life Is Not a Fantasy

The reality of place has weighed heavily on me from a very young age.  My knowledge of self has always been inseparable from the place in which I live.  My understanding of who I am has been closely tied to those with whom I most often interact—family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even those with whom I have a nodding acquaintance (a phrase that has become unfortunately abstract in a world that no longer values simple signs of courtesy and respect).  Remove me from familiar places, and I become a stranger in a strange land, longing for my home.

Even when, as a typical teenager, I longed to leave my hometown, my departure always ended, in my imagination, with my return.  A life elsewhere, among other people, is an abstraction: Home is reality.

Of course, I no longer live in my hometown—and yet, in fact, I do.  In Huntington, as in Rockford, as in Spring Lake, I have walked the streets until they have become a part of me, and found my place among a people who are not simply passing through but are deeply rooted in this portion of God’s green earth and the little bit of civilization that has been built upon it, for all intents and purposes autochthonous and autonomous, a true community made up not of individuals with entirely separate lives but of persons whose sense of themselves is tightly woven with their sense of their neighbor and of their place.

Chaucer was the first to claim that familiarity breeds contempt, and most (if not all) of us can point to concrete examples that seem to prove his adage true.  Yet these words are, at best, a half-truth, which makes them (as John Lukacs reminds us) more dangerous than a lie.  Because it is even more true to say that familiarity breeds community, and that civilization cannot arise among an agglomeration of rootless individuals, but only among men and women who are rooted in a particular place and in deep knowledge of one another.

These brief thoughts were occasioned by continued reflection on what role, if any, aphantasia—my complete inability to create mental images—may have had on the development of my theological, philosophical, and political understanding.  As I mentioned last month, I was initially dismissive of David Mills’s suggestion even to consider this.  But the centrality of incarnationalism in my theological understanding, my visceral rejection of abstraction in philosophy, and my preference for localism in politics, economics (broadly understood), and culture, taken together, do seem like the positions one might expect a person who can’t imagine an orange sheep with five legs perched on the dome of the Huntington County courthouse to have arrived at.

On the other hand, shouldn’t we expect a Catholic who has truly encountered Christ to place the Incarnation at the center of his theological thought and, therefore, to reject philosophical abstraction in favor of an epistemology resembling a traditional Aristotelian empiricism?  If even God must become man in order for us truly to know Him, why would we think that we can have true knowledge of anything else outside of experience?  Even book larnin’ must build on experience, moving from analogy to analogy, and the mental images created by people who are not aphantasic of things they have not directly experienced are still conditioned by their actual experiences.  Thus, the presentation of the Blessed Virgin in medieval art as more European than Middle Eastern is no more a form of cultural imperialism than images emerging from other Christian communities at roughly the same time of Mary with Asian or Ethiopian features.  We know what we know because we have experienced it.  Even those with the ability to create extraordinarily vivid mental images—hyperphantasia, we might call it—cannot conjure up a mental figment that does not correspond in some way to something they have experienced.

Yet there are Catholics today who intellectually accept the Incarnation as a reality but whose theology is otherwise maddeningly abstract, and philosophical abstraction ism, like centralism in politics, economics, and culture, has become more the norm among the intellectual classes than the exception.  Over the last century—and accelerating exponentially in recent years—those tendencies have spread beyond the intellectual classes into the broader populace.  Mass communications, and now social media, have turned abstractionism into a form of mania, a type of mental illness no longer confined to individuals but affecting society as a whole.

Walker Percy saw it coming nearly 50 years ago, and it’s no coincidence that this Catholic convert made the hero of Love in the Ruins (1971) and its sequel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), both a psychiatrist and a descendant of St. Thomas More.  The answer to the abstraction that’s making us all mad lies in the faith that is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.  Far from abstraction, that faith is an experience, a personal relationship with the God made Man; not a fantasy, but the ultimate ground of reality.

First published in the March 2019 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.