Space Enough, and Time

It’s always good to hear that Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” still hangs in the religious consciousness, if only amongst those on Twitter or fortunate enough to the Dreher speak.  Leah Libresco has a great new book on the concept, giving it some hands and feet (and a nice personal narrative) that makes it a little more tangible for some.  More often than not, it seems, those who write about it continue to get it wrong (or just wrong enough).  Alan Jacobs, most recently of The Year of Our Lord 1943, recently responded to a review of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed that ties in Dreher’s The Benedict Option by Adrian Vermeule for the American Affairs Journal.  The issue, as is too often the case, boils down to misunderstanding the Benedict Option as withdrawal from broader culture versus finding some way to more effectively engage the culture.  Vermeule would like to see more examples like “Esther, Mordecai, Joseph, and Daniel” and others like Paul.  Jacobs wonders if that’s even possible given the current state of Christianity in our culture.  From Jacobs’ blog:

This is a powerful and in many ways beautiful vision. Perhaps the most attractive element of it, to me, is the commendation of limited goals on our part — the mere “attempt to ensure the survival of [our] faith communities in an interim age of exile and dispossession” — that may, in the providential wisdom of God, lead to something much greater: the transformation of a “decaying regime” into a “great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.” One should never expect something like that but it is meet and right to hope for it.

But I think Vermeule’s vision is missing one absolutely essential element. My question for him is: Where will these Josephs and Mordecais and Esthers and Daniels come from? . . .

So a key question arises: If you need people who are sufficiently skilled in negotiating the liberal order to work effectively within it, but also committed to its transformation, and who can sustain that difficult balance over decades, you have to figure out how to form such people. And it is just this that the churches of the West – all the churches of the West — have neglected to do, have neglected even to attempt. With the (in retrospect quite obvious) result: the accelerating collapse across the board of participation in church life.

What is required, in the face of a general culture that through its command of every communications medium catechizes so effectively, is the construction of a powerful counter-catechesis. Who will do that, and how will they do it? The likely answer, it seems to me, brings us back to the very localism that Deneen and Dreher advocate and that Vermeule rejects.

There’s more to it than that, of course.  And Jacobs’ post deserves a longer, more intentional reading.  I highly encourage it.

It think, obviously, that Jacobs’ points are valid.  What is sobering is that some of the best examples that might exist of such “Daniels” will probably/ultimately find themselves at odds with the very foundational communities that nurtured them (case in point? someone like Russell Moore, a bastion of Baptist thoughtfulness for some, a picture of liberal heresy for others).  And that can be an awfully lonely place.

This issue, on some level, also has roots in and adds color to many people’s understanding of youth ministry, where young Christians are “prepped to engage” the culture around them in their high schools.  Too often the “counter-catechesis” Jacobs would like to see starts way-too-late to be “high school effective.”

Definitely something to consider as culture marches on (and too much healthy Christian culture seems to continue to recede.)

(Briton Riviere’s Daniel in the Lions Den from fineartamerica.com)

What I appreciate most about Oliver O’Donovan’s Self, World, and Time (which I have mentioned here and here) is its assertion that the way we live life matters.  This, I imagine, sounds like a no-brainer to most.  Ours is a culture obsessed with living particular ways of life.  It is perhaps the other end of the telescope for identity politics: this is not just who I am, this is also how I understand an authentic life to be lived.  We may not necessarily have a smorgasbord to choose from, but we do have a confusing collection of ways to navigate.  O’Donovan asserts:

Alas, it is the doom of modernity to be bound up in an over-simple knowingness about itself! Our own age is the hardest of all ages to understand.

If he’s right, then our reflections on the way we live life matters deeply.  Our understanding of the world we wake-up to matters deeply.  O’Donovan adds:

I find myself poised between the saving and losing of my soul.  The summons to wakefulness confronts me with the menacing possibility of failure to realize myself: “Awake!  Keep hold of your clothes!”

The “clothes” exclamation is, of course, connected to the New Testament pictures of preparedness in light of the coming of Jesus and God’s kingdom.  It is clear, though, that O’Donovan understands the stakes well: that practical reason, the way we understand and make our way through the world, truly matters.  And with his “inductive” intent throughout Self, World, and Time, he paints broadly and yet with the eye of a realist.

Without a key to the world’s meanings we shall never be able to sift through the complex of information we receive about, and through, the world, and bring it to some kind of order . . . Practical reason looks for a word, a word that makes attention to the world intelligible, a word that will maintain the coherence and intelligence of the world as it finds its way through it, a word from God.

Such a word from God, I believe, is possible.  What I find most interesting about O’Donovan’s approach is that it speaks so easily of “Christian Ethics” (or ethics in general), that one forgets that he isn’t simply talking about the Christian life.  And while many of us would not say the two are synonymous, there is a sense that there is a deep interchangeability between the two.

And so, O’Donovan claims, we “wake up” to find a self, a world, and a time, all unique and yet all part of a larger picture, a broader tapestry, that require no small amount of reflection that can lead to positive action.  The call of Christ, from beginning to end, demands it.

(image from locksmithracine.co)