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.

The Word Remains

“In the beginning was the Word. (Not the picture. Or the number.)”

— John Lukacs, “The Reality of Written Words,” Chronicles (January 1999)

The last time I visited John Lukacs at Pickering Close, his home just outside of Phoenixville, Penn., he greeted me in Hungarian. My knowledge of that language is confined to goulash and paprikash and the proper pronunciation of Budapest, so I was a bit unsettled as we made our way to his library, and John offered me a chair, still in Hungarian. He finally noticed my bewilderment and shook his head slightly. “Of course—you don’t know Hungarian,” he said, smiling, in his lugubrious cadence. “We’ll speak in English.” And we did for hours, except for moments when we simply sat and enjoyed each other’s company.

I first met John Lukacs in 1992, two years after I had devoured The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1989), and his magnum opus, Historical Consciousness (1968). I brought him in to speak at The Catholic University of America, as part of a lecture series I had put together that also included Russell Kirk, and I used my connections with both men to convince Kirk to publish a third edition of Historical Consciousness, as much for my benefit as for the greater good. Back in those pre-Amazon days, it was much harder to locate copies of out-of-print books. In my remaining years at CUA, and then at Chronicles, John and I became correspondents, interlocutors, and finally friends.

In my column and in my reviews of his books for Chronicles, I have frequently noted how important John’s work was in my own intellectual development. I have written virtually nothing since 1990 that wasn’t influenced in some way by John’s writing. My own historical consciousness, and my understanding of philosophy and theology, flow from deep engagement with his work.

But it goes beyond that, to my very choice of words and the construction of my sentences. Because I learned from John that every action, no matter how small, is a moral choice, and that includes the words we use and our intentions in using them.

“[T]he purpose of the historian,” Lukacs wrote in Historical Consciousness, “should be the reduction of untruth.” But in that purpose the historian should be no different from the rest of us—or rather, we should be no different from him. The great tragedy here at the end of the modern age is the widespread loss of concern for the truth and the consequent degradation of language. According to Lukacs, if the words we choose aren’t consciously designed to reveal the truth as best we understand it, then they will conceal it—intentionally or unintentionally. One does not have to immerse oneself in our degraded political rhetoric to see the reality of Lukacs’s insight. In this age of social media, we float in a sea of words that are used, not to draw us closer to the truth, but to create alternate unrealities.

To say that John was obsessed with words gives the wrong impression. But he saw that, at the end of this age, “for large masses of people, verbal images and verbal imagination seem gradually to be replaced by pictorial images and pictorial imagination.” A picture, we are told, is worth a thousand words, but as Lukacs understood, that that says nothing about the relative ability of pictures and of words to express or conceal the truth:

[W]ords are not the symbols of things: They are symbols of meanings. And the meaning of meaning is that it carries our minds not only deeper, but further. Meaning is not mechanical or determined; it is spiritual and teleological. It is no longer sufficient for us to recall that the Greek word “logos” means both “word” and “reason.” We may have to understand that our recognition of the word as a symbol of meaning amounts to an enrichment of our reasoning.

As John and I talked in his library that morning late last July, he asked me a question that, at first, filled my heart with sorrow: “Tell me, Scott, is this the first time that we have met in person?” While we had continued our correspondence and phone calls, it had been 10 years since we had last seen each other, in that very space.

As I reminded him of our many meetings, it became clear that, while his visual memory had faded along with his eyesight, he remembered our words, repeating verbatim large portions of our conversations and correspondence. By the time I left John in his chair in the library he had designed and built and filled with 18,000 handpicked volumes over the course of a lifetime, my sorrow had turned to joy, even though I knew that we had spent our last day together.

In the beginning was the Word. And in the end, for John Lukacs, the Word remained.

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

Sufficient to the Day

I take a lot of pictures.  I am old enough to have spent thousands of dollars on film and photo developing over three decades, from my late single digits up until about the age of 35.  While I was an early adopter of the iPhone in June 2007, my film photos trailed off almost four years before that, when I purchased my first digital camera of any quality.  Without the expense of film and developing, the number of photos I have taken has vastly increased, but I have printed very few.

I have become obsessed with backing up my digital photos, however, and copies exist on our iMac, a backup drive attached to the iMac, my iPhone, my iPad, Apple’s iCloud service, and Google Photos.  Many, of course, are also on Facebook (though, for a variety of reasons, I don’t consider that a reliable backup).  My current count of digital photos is 53,874, and that’s after a recent effort to clear out thousands of duplicates, near duplicates, and misfires.

I go through periods when I force myself to quit snapping photos of significant events or of places that we visit so that I can live entirely in the moment, but those phases never last.  While I always try to strike a balance, there’s a reason I am an obsessive photo-taker (though hardly a photographer, since that implies a level of skill that, alas, I’ve never developed).  My photos are my visual memory.  My aphantasia, my complete inability to visualize anything outside of dreams (which I have discussed in recent columns), has left me, the older I get, with a fear of losing forever the faces and places most dear to me.

Throughout much of the 20th century, it was not unusual for a young man to carry a photo of the girl he loved in his wallet.  (Today, he can, and usually does, keep many such photos on his iPhone.)  For me, it was a necessity, and not simply a sign of devotion.  In the summers of our college years, and in the two years between our graduation from Michigan State and our marriage, Amy’s high-school graduation picture kept her present to me in a way that (I did not realize at the time) most other young men did not need.

But since the fact that I could not (and still cannot) visualize Amy’s face is not a problem inherent to her but to me, the same obviously applies to all other women I have known.  There’s something comforting about letting old girlfriends and passing crushes literally fade away, and being able to give my full attention to the woman who consented (God knows why) to be my wife and the mother of our children.  Midlife crises, I suspect, are rather rare among those afflicted with aphantasia.  Living in the present, though, is quite easy, since the past is dark, and so is the future.

When my son Jacob first brought aphantasia to my attention a little over a year ago, my initial bewilderment at the reality that virtually everyone else can (with more or less clarity) conjure up actual images was followed by a bit of despair.  Why had God allowed me to be afflicted with this?  Today, I look at it a bit differently: I live a charmed life.

What could be better than to wake up every morning in the same house, to walk the same streets, to see the same sights, to meet the same people, and yet, in a very real sense, to experience them all once again for the first time?  I smile a lot, and always have, and now I know why.  I’m Bill Murray in the latter part of Groundhog Day, with the difference that time hasn’t stopped for me.

It’s all too easy to live life caught between the regrets of the past and fantasies of the future.  I can’t visualize either, but I fall prey to regrets and fantasies, too.  That’s not the way we were meant to live, however, and the serpent is the only one who wins when we let ourselves be pulled out of the moment with promises of a future that can never be, or despair over a past that can only truly be healed by the saving work of Christ Himself.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye not much better than they? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

“All that was in the past,” Joseph Stalin once told Winston Churchill, “and the past belongs to God.”  Which just goes to prove that you can take the dictator out of the seminary, but you can’t erase the law of God from even the most depraved of human hearts.

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

Returning to Earth

What lies at the root of the abstractionism that I discussed last month, which afflicts the modern world like a mania, especially here in the United States?  Walker Percy dubbed the phenomenon angelism, by which he did not mean that those who exhibit it have evolved to a state of moral purity but that we have individually and collectively cut ourselves loose mentally from the ties that bind us to the world and the people around us.  And yet (for reasons that should be obvious) we have not been able, through such abstraction, to overcome the limitations that are inherent in human life and the material world.  Stymied by our inability to overcome those limitations, we have come increasingly to despise the world and our place in it.  And so our response is not to become more human but less so, as Percy’s Dr. Tom More put it so clearly in Love in the Ruins almost 50 years ago:

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man.  Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, namely: More’s syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery.

Walker Percy did not live to see the rise of social media (he died in 1990), but the various forms that social media have taken and the conduct they have engendered among so many of their users would not have surprised him.  For all of the potential that social media have to draw people closer together, to rekindle ties with old friends and relatives, to keep us rooted in one another and therefore in the communities in which we are mutually a part, in practice they have all too often enabled the opposite: Social media allow us to engage in flights of fancy, to escape from the reality of our lives by imagining ourselves (consciously or even unconsciously) to be someone different, or even just to cast aside the manners and mores that are essential to civilized life in an actual community.

There have been dozens of investigative articles over the past several years on the phenomenon of “trolling”—people exhibiting behavior toward others with whom they interact online that would, in face-to-face encounters, skirt the line of diagnosable sociopathy, or even cross over it.  A common theme runs through all of them: When trolls meet the reporters, they behave much differently in person.  They are frequently shy, almost invariably polite, and express hurt when the reporters ask them about their actions online in tones that imply condemnation or disapproval.  The reporters themselves experience cognitive dissonance—they expect to dislike, even hate, the trolls but find themselves liking and even sympathizing with them.

The behavior exhibited by trolls looks increasingly like one extreme of a broader phenomenon that afflicts an ever-wider swath of users of social media, and I don’t mean just white nationalists and “social-justice warriors” on Twitter.  More and more of us find it both easy and a relief to create identities on social media that do not reflect the reality of our everyday lives—even if we use our own names.  (And I use us here not as a rhetorical device but as a recognition that I have strayed in this direction myself over the years before recognizing that I had loosed the bonds of earth and needed to return to reality.)

Were Walker Percy still alive, I suspect he would see in this parallels to the psychological condition of dissociation.  With our increasing use of social media (and other electronic media, such as email and texts) as a substitute for the hard reality of dealing with flesh-and-blood human beings, we create alternative unrealities that consume more and more of our attention and consciousness until, one day, we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the man we see there.  We become strangers to ourselves, but the ghosts we have created through our abstraction can never truly replace the creatures that God has made us to be.  Bound by time and ties to people and place, we have only two options: keep raging against reality and losing our true self in the process, or start recovering that true self by accepting the limitations inherent in it, and returning to earth.    

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

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.