A sequel to The Death of Christian Culture, this spiritual treatise covers social, cultural, and political topics. It explores the importance of religious knowledge and faith to the health of a culture, provides a historical sketch of the change in cultural and educational standards over the last two centuries, and illustrates how literary and other visual arts either contribute to a culture or conspire to tear it down. Compared to a series of sermons, this analysis explains that there is a continuing extinction of the cultural patrimony of ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and the early modern period of Western civilization, owing to the pervasive bureaucratization, mechanization, and standardization of increasing materialism.
A sequel to The Death of Christian Culture, this spiritual treatise covers social, cultural, and political topics. It explores the importance of religious knowledge and faith to the health of a culture, provides a historical sketch of the change in cultural and educational standards over the last two centuries, and illustrates how literary and other visual arts either contribute to a culture or conspire to tear it down. Compared to a series of sermons, this analysis explains that there is a continuing extinction of the cultural patrimony of ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and the early modern period of Western civilization, owing to the pervasive bureaucratization, mechanization, and standardization of increasing materialism.
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Overview
A sequel to The Death of Christian Culture, this spiritual treatise covers social, cultural, and political topics. It explores the importance of religious knowledge and faith to the health of a culture, provides a historical sketch of the change in cultural and educational standards over the last two centuries, and illustrates how literary and other visual arts either contribute to a culture or conspire to tear it down. Compared to a series of sermons, this analysis explains that there is a continuing extinction of the cultural patrimony of ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and the early modern period of Western civilization, owing to the pervasive bureaucratization, mechanization, and standardization of increasing materialism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781605700205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Restoration of Christian Culture
By John Senior
IHS Press
Copyright © 2008 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-52-7
CHAPTER 1
The Restoration of Christian Culture
MYSTICAL ROSE, TOWER OF DAVID, TOWER OF IVORY, HOUSE of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star ... Why is the Blessed Virgin called these marvelous, mysterious things? Richard of St. Victor, a spiritual master of the middle ages, says in a cryptic Latin phrase, Ubi amor ibi oculus–" wherever love is, there the eye is also," which means that the lover is the only one who really sees the truth about the person or the thing he loves. It is the perfect complement to amor ccecus est, another more famous phrase, that "love is blind"–blind to all this lying world because love sees only truth. When a young man loves a girl, we ask, "What does he see in her?" But Our Lord said, "Let him who has eyes see." If you love, you will understand. Ubi amor ibi oculus. The Litany of Loreto is written in the language of an incomparable love song–St. Bernard called it "the Holy Ghost's masterpiece":
My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates with the fruit of the orchard. Cypress with spikenard, spikenard and saffron. ... I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse; I have eaten of the honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, O my friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved. I sleep, and my heart watcheth; the voice of my beloved knocking....
This is the language the Blessed Virgin Mary understands; it is the language of the love of God, the only one she understands.
I believe, and it is the theme and thesis of this book, that true devotion to Mary is now our only recourse. Like many Catholics, I have been troubled and confused in the years since this Dark Night of the Church set in. "I sleep and my heart watcheth." As an old-fashioned schoolmaster with the inflated title of professor, I am not an expert in theology; the point of view throughout is of an amateur–a lover of religion and not very religious. It is with a certain reserve that, like a janitor holding the door, I have urged others into rooms I have never myself entered; or like someone who has studied maps and read directions and diaries by travelers to a far country reporting such marvels as to make the place seem a terra aliena, I have awakened to some deep ancestral memory of my native country and its King.
Qui vitam sine termino
Nobis donet in Patria.
It is because they have destroyed this love and longing that the experts fail to see the truth. Anything in motion takes its meaning from the end; we are creatures in motion and defined by our desires; what we long for is truth. Aimless action self-destructs. It is the story of the Church and Christian culture in our time.
Theology, and its ancillary discipline philosophy, are sciences which study ends, and some of the best minds of the last generation have mistakenly thought that they could be the means of restoration. But sciences abstract from experience; though thought considered in itself has no environment, and truth considered in itself is no respecter of persons, or times or places–still, it is a particular person who actually thinks in a particular time and place about what he really knows. As Chesterton said, insanity is not losing your reason, but losing everything else except your reason. The restoration of reason presupposes the restoration of love, and we can only love what we know because we have first touched, tasted, smelled, heard and seen. From that encounter with exterior reality, interior responses naturally arise, movements motivating, urging, releasing energies, infinitely greater than atoms, of intelligence and will. Without these motives, thought and action are aimless, sometimes random, more frequently mechanical, having an order but a tyrannical order, that is, an order imposed from without. Christian culture is the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically–that is, from within–to the praise, reverence and service of God Our Lord. To restore it, we must learn its language.
The Blessed Virgin said of her Bridegroom at the instant of the Incarnation, "He brought me into the cellar of wine." The saints who comment on this passage tell us that each of our souls, like hers, must descend with him into that cellar where he will say, "Eat, O my friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved." The saints refer to this as a definite, necessary stage in the spiritual life. Without it, there is no progress toward the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the only goal of the Catholic life, whose only language is music–the etymological root of which means "silence," as in "mute" and "mystery." Music is the voice of silence, and so it follows that to enter with Our Beloved Lord into that prayer of quiet and to pray to Our Blessed Lady that He might lead us there, we must learn to speak that language too, that is, we must know music and especially the music of words which is poetry. No matter what our expertise, no matter what we are by vocation or trade, we are all lovers; and while only experts in each field must know mathematics and the sciences and other arts, everyone must be a poet in the ordinary way of salvation. As the proper ways of the Catholic life are in the province of priests, the ordinary is the province of schoolmasters like myself who from their low vantage, while in the high and palmy ways of science and theology they know little to nothing, know the things that everybody must do first. Oliver Goldsmith says that the Village Schoolmaster,
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length, and thundering sound,
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew!
In the revelations at Fatima, Our Lady said more souls are lost to heaven through impurity than any other sin. There are over a million registered murders of unborn children every year in the United States, while a sophisticated pharmacy performs ten million more unregistered ones and calls it contraception, which it is not because the pills contain abortifacients which dry up the life-supports of tiny children in the first four days of their existence.
Though, so far as I know, it is not a de fide dogma of the Church, according to St. Thomas, who cites it as "according to the Fathers," the souls of unbaptized infants inhabit a "place" of perfect natural happiness, eternally deprived of the Beatific Vision, called the Limbo of Children, "for these children have no hope of the blessed life." Of course, he is speaking here of our ordinary presumption in the case; no one knows with certainty the state of any soul except those of the canonized saints; no one knows the unrevealed and extraordinary ways the mercy of God might find. But our moral choices depend here and now on what we know with moral certainty of the ordinary rules, not on what might occur extraordinarily or as exceptions. I think the presumption must therefore be that these pills are instruments of a crime worse than murder because they cut the child off not only from life, but from the ordinary means of Salvation.
St. Thomas also says we shall rise on the Last Day at the perfect age of thirty-three. He cites Ephesians IV: 13, "Until we meet ... unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ." When they walk through the shadow of that valley on that day, one might imagine how parents who have used the "pill" will feel, face to face with their fully grown children–who will say, "Hello, Mom, hello Dad"–lost to Heaven through impurity. We used to think that meant the sinners themselves, which it does; but it is worse than that and far more sad.
But I need not document the crisis in the nation and in the Church. This is to be a positive book, a program for The Restoration of Christian Culture, not an obituary of its death. Indeed I believe it is imprudent to document the disaster quite so much as some of us have. By publishing his achievements you give the Devil more than his due. The question is what can be done–what can and what must be done, because there isn't any choice.
Whatever we do in the political and social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ Himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian Culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone's opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of two thousand years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature–all these things when they are right, are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. To enact a sacrifice, there must be an altar, an altar has to have a roof over it in case it rains; to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, we build a little House of God and over it a Tower of Ivory with a bell and a garden round about it with roses and lilies of purity, emblems of the Virgin Mary–Rosa Mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris Eburnea, Domus Aurea, who carried His Body and His Blood in her womb, Body of her body, Blood of her blood. And around the church and garden, where we bury the faithful dead, the caretakers live, the priests and religious whose work is prayer, who keep the Mystery of Faith in its tabernacle of music and words in the Office of the Church; and around them, the faithful who gather to worship and divide the other work that must be done in order to make the perpetuation of the Sacrifice possible–to raise food and make the clothes and build and keep the peace so that generations to come may live for Him, so that the Sacrifice goes on even unto the consummation of the world.
We must inscribe this first law of Christian economics on our hearts: the purpose of work is not profit but prayer, and the first law of Christian ethics: that we live for Him and not for ourselves. And life in Him is love. If you keep the Commandments, you will stay out of Hell; if you love God, and neighbor as yourself, you will fulfill the law of justice; but the Catholic life is not just staying out of Hell–though that is, to say exactly the least, essential. But the life itself is the Kingdom of Heaven which is to love Him and one another as He loves us. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, that ignorant theologian, scienter nescia, pointed out that at the first Mass, after Our Lord had distributed His Body and Blood to his first Catholics, He went beyond not only the law of justice but the law of charity. He said to us, "Don't love each other only as yourselves. It is a mystical thing. Love each other as I have first loved you." If we die having kept the law of justice and the law of charity but not this charity itself, we shall spend as much time in Purgatory as it takes to learn it, in terrible pain, such, St. Thomas says, that all the natural pain in the world together is less than an instant of it. I fear sometimes that conservatives, not just liberals, are like the Pharisees–Catholics, but with a strong, unloving determination to be right; whereas the Camino Real of Christ is a chivalric way, romantic, full of fire and passion, riding on the pure, high-spirited horses of the self with their glad, high-stepping knees and flaring nostrils, and us with jingling spurs and the cry "Mon joie!"– the battle cry of Roland and Olivier. Our Church is the Church of the Passion. Listen to the Holy Ghost Himself, listen to the language in which He speaks to His Beloved Virgin, the Bride, in the Song of Songs, and to our soul:
I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse; I have gathered my myrrh with my aromatical spices; I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, O friends, and drink and be inebriated, my dearly beloved.
It is not enough to keep the Commandments, though we must; it is not enough to love one another as ourselves, though we must. The one thing needful, the unum necessarium of the Kingdom, is to love as He loves us, which is the love of joy in suffering and sacrifice, like Roland and Olivier charging into battle to their death defending those they love as they cry "Mon joie"; that is the music of Christian Culture. These devils in the nation and in the Church who murder children and disgrace the Bride of Christ can only be driven out by prayer and fasting. Impurity results in breaking the Commandments, but in essence it is a misdirection of love. We shall never drive it out–all attempts to solve the crisis in the Church are vain–unless we consecrate our hearts to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which means not just the recitation of the words on a printed card, any more than fasting just means eating less, but a commitment to her interior life. We must descend for a certain time each day into the cellar of wine–if He will draw us there–where, alone with Him, we are inebriated by His love.
Ubi amor ibi oculus. How shall we see without the eye of love? But how shall we learn to love without love's language? And to learn that language, what is the school? Well, listen to the greatest English schoolmaster:
If music be the food of love, play on.
Is it difficult to follow the meaning of that? The question is a schoolmaster's to his children, not an expert's to his peers. For lovers, though it might be difficult–in fact impossible–to make a translation into scientific formula, the meaning is clear and strong as good wine. "If music be the food of love...." Reflect a moment on that famous opening line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night– twelfth night of Christmas, written as ordinary entertainment for everyone, not for scholars, on the Feast of the Epiphany three hundred and fifty years ago. As the Old Law forbade the eating of all meat animals save ruminants, we should forbid all criticism–which thrives by tearing the flesh of texts into footnotes and appendices–in favor of an appreciative, ruminating savor of the most ordinary, obvious verse. The best commentary is a similar passage from the same or a similar author. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the King of Music, Oberon, makes something like a commentary on the Duke's opening speech in Twelfth Night:
My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou remember'st
Since once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot wildly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music.
And Puck replies,
I remember!
Note carefully what this great master of our culture says about the power of music: that the "rude sea grew civil at her song." "Music is the food of love," ultimately the love of Christ, which gentles the rebellious, rude, savage, sinful heart. You see what it means–that civilization is the work of music. Shakespeare says this again and again. In The Merchant of Venice the young lovers step into a garden as a musician plays. It is night; above them, the moon and stars. Lorenzo says,
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep into our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica, look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
This is a reference to the famous theme that all creation sings, that the heavens declare the glory of God, that stars in their courses make a music of the spheres which sounds in harmony with angels singing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus about the throne of God–and that the souls of men have such a music in them too, but in this "muddy vesture of decay," that is this worldly exterior life we lead, drawn to the struggles for survival and success, we neither listen nor can hear. The musicians come out into the garden and Lorenzo cries,
Come ho! and wake Diana with a hymn,
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear and draw her home with music.
In the Song of Songs the Bride cries out, so beautifully in St. Jerome's Latin, "Trahe me"–" Draw me!" And Jessica replies,
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Restoration of Christian Culture by John Senior. Copyright © 2008 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword Andrew Senior,Introduction David Allen White, Ph.D.,
The Restoration Of Christian Culture,
I. The Restoration of Christian Culture,
II. The Air-Conditioned Holocaust,
III. The Catholic Agenda,
IV. Theology and Superstition,
V. The Spirit of the Rule,
VI. A Final Solution to Liberal Education,
VII. The Darkness of Egypt,
What People are Saying About This
Direct, wise, and rooted deeply in the classics of the Western tradition, Senior offered a Christian humanist critique of the modern world without the slightest measure of trepidation. (Bradley J. Birzer, PhD, Russell Amos Kirk Chair of History, Hillsdale College, and author, Sanctifying the World and J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth)
The republication and editing of these volumes will solidify, and I do not say this lightly, Dr. Senior will take his proper place in history as a true prophet. (Reverend C.J. McCloskey III, research fellow, Faith and Reason Institute, Washington, DC)
A thought-provoking proposal for a way out of today's cultural crisis. (Andrew V. Abela, PhD., professor, department of business and economics, The Catholic University of America.)
Next to Senior, every other combatant in the present culture war for the soul of the West pales like a Lilliputian. (Peter A. Redpath, PhD, professor of philosophy, St. John's University)
I once referred to my teacher, Mr. Senior, as 'the Socrates of Kansas.' I would say now that he was the Catholic Socrates of the 20th century. (James S. Taylor, PhD, author, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education)