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I

The Dream of the Rood

Let me tell you a story.

This story begins in a garden, at the very beginning of all things. All life can be found in this garden: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen and heard and spoken to. Everything walks in the garden together. Everything is in communion. It is a picture of integration.

At the centre of this garden grows a tree, the fruit of which imparts hidden knowledge. The humans-the last creatures to be formed by the creator-will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain its knowledge and be able to use that knowledge wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation they are only partially formed. If they ate from the tree now, the consequences would be terrible.

Do not eat that fruit, the creator tells them. Eat anything else you like, but not that.

We know the next part of the story because it is still happening to us all the time. Why should you not eat the fruit? says the voice of the tempting serpent, the voice from the undergrowth of our minds. Why should you not have the power that you are worthy of? Why should this creator keep it all for himself? Why should you listen to him? He just wants to keep you down. Eat the fruit. It's your right. You're worth it!

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into dis-integration and we fall out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates; even if we find our way back to the garden again, we cannot re-enter. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The Earth is our home now.

This Earth is a broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. There is war and dominion and misery. There is beauty and love and friendship too, but all of it ends in death. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.

There comes a time when the creator takes pity. After so many centuries of this, after so many years of humans missing the mark, of wandering from the path, of civilisations rising and falling and warring and dying, of eating the fruit again and again, the creator stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Most people don't listen, naturally, and we all know how the story ends. God himself walks on Earth and what does humanity do? We torture and kill him.

But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice. When he comes to Earth he comes not as warlord, king or high priest, but as a barefoot artisan in an obscure desert province. He walks with the downtrodden and the rejected, he scorns wealth and power, and through his death he conquers death itself, releasing us from our bondage. He gives us a way out, a way back home. But we have to work at it. The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among those ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful-intact cathedrals, Bach concertos-but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called 'Christendom', a 1,500-year civilisation into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: The organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of individuals, with 'God-given' rights and duties; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe-its structure and meaning, and our human place within it.

Current arguments about the state of 'the West' usually begin with disputes about what it actually is, and the answer you receive to that question will depend on who you talk to. For liberals, the West is the 'Enlightenment' and everything that followed-parliamentary democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom of speech. For conservatives, it might signal a set of cultural values such as traditional attitudes to family life, religion and national identity, and probably broad support for capitalist economics. For the kinds of post-modern leftists who have dominated the culture for some time now, the West-assuming they will concede that it even exists-is largely a front for colonisation, empire, racism and various other historical horrors.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, conservatism, Marxism or empire. The West, in fact, is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.

In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two, the medieval historian Christopher Dawson explained it like this:

There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.

Your personal attitude to that 'living faith' is beside the point here. So, come to that, is the entirely legitimate question of whether 'Christendom' was even Christian much of the time. People will be arguing about all of that forever. The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: everything will be up for grabs.

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the very notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no telos, or higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what 'virtue' means, or why it should mean anything. MacIntyre's favoured teacher was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and his prediction of its ultimate failure were based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom, and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it.

MacIntyre, writing four decades ago, believed that this failure was already clearly evident but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the Empire's fall. To illustrate his thesis, MacIntyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. 'The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians', MacIntyre explains, 'and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information'.

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed, either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So were such prohibitions meaningless all along? No: but when the context in which they once had meaning evaporates-once times change-the taboos, even if they are still standing, have less and less meaning. They eventually become relics. Once a society reaches this stage, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down.

MacIntyre believed-forty years ago, remember-that this stage had already been reached in the West. 'Modern moral utterance', as he put it, is best understood as a series of badly understood and fragmented survivals from a forgotten past. These 'fragmented survivals' are a remnant of that Western sacred order. Now, as MacIntyre predicted, the final taboos are falling like ninepins, and from all across the cultural spectrum the effects are being felt.

If you're broadly socially conservative, for example-which in practice means that you hold views which were entirely mainstream until about fifteen years ago-the questions are currently coming at you in a rolling barrage. Why should a man not marry a man? Why should a man not become a woman? Why should a child not have three fathers, or be born from a uterus transplanted into a man's body? Why should the state not assist people to commit suicide? Since the source of our old understanding of marriage, family, sexuality and perhaps even biological dimorphism was the now-problematic Christian story, these are the kinds of questions to which there is now only one officially legitimate answer.

Things are not much better, though, for those on the left who are concerned about the destructive inequalities created by the modern economy. 'Woe to you who are rich', said Jesus, in one of many blasts against wealth and power that we can read in the Gospels. 'Greed is a sin against God', wrote Thomas Aquinas, one of the giants of Western Christian theology. Not any more. Now our economy runs on greed, and it laughs in the face of any foolish and unrealistic romantic who rejects it. The shaky binding straps with which medieval Christendom kept the traders, the merchants and the urban bourgeoisie tied down have long since broken, leaving us with no better argument against rampant greed and inequality than against total sexual licence or the remaking of the human body itself.

This is what Friedrich Nietzsche knew, and what today's liberal humanists will too often deny: if you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalise away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name-if that.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? It depends on how the break happens. When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported MacIntyre, an unexpected 'moral vacuum' was created, which came to be filled by 'the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries'. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of an earlier sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract 'freedom'; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled-and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been-often literally-torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century was an attempt to build a 'morality' (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense-no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force-would form the basis of the culture and the individual.