1 post tagged “protestant”
It's amazing how big the world can still be. Becoming Orthodox has opened me to a near-inexhaustible library of astounding and propounding -- and indeed holy -- literature, both ancient and contemporary (seeing as how the contemporary is also ancient, given its infinite source), as well as in book and blog form. A great example would be Fr. John Tobias' review of David Bentley Hart's new book, Atheist Delusions, a book I have been so eager to read that I'm contemplating pushing back my next summer reading book back a slot. Few, if any, match Hart's eloquence in writing and wit, but Fr. Tobias doesn't leave his readers wanting.
Consider the following passage, in which Fr. Tobias clarifies Hart's thesis, for anyone who may have thought Atheist Delusions could or should be boiled down to "a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists."
His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).
That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."
The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles.
He has a good deal more to say on that subject and others, touching on even the recent (and suddenly receded) wave of hero worship around our new president. I found this part particularly enjoyable and insightful:
I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.
But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.
That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.
The whole piece, while admittedly I don't quite grasp it all, is quite intriguing, and makes me only more eager to read Hart's book. Can The Brothers Karamozov really stand to be pushed back?
