Despite the immense, hydra-headed problems that have arisen over the last 500 years of the West and of the World, the Church’s mission has never wavered, whatever its obstacles, internal and external. As since the beginning of its existence, it must leaven the good, promote the true, and, through subcreation, engage the beautiful.
Through the gracious good will of the editors of The Imaginative Conservative, I’m releasing this book, Besieged, in serial form. I originally wrote the book around 2012-2013, and I was hoping to publish it with a small Catholic press. For a million different reasons, that publishing deal never happened, and I’ve been sitting on the manuscript for more than a decade. Please keep in mind that the book is more than ten years old and, thus, some things seem a bit dated. At the time of the writing, Pope Benedict was still pope, and, importantly, we’d not yet reached the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
Now, to the book. And, of course, to begin at the beginning….
Preface
A number of titles came to mind as I formulated the structure of this book. Several of them might be better than the one I chose. At first, I wanted to write about the Church fighting a rearguard action, so close to defeat, hanging on only through the Grace of God. But, then, it hit me. Of course, the Church is under attack. Really, when has it not been? Whether the barbarians cross the Rhein or the Potomac really does not matter. Sometimes the challengers are overt, violent, and intensely bloody. At other times, the threats are veiled in the form of a cold war standoff. At still other times, the threats have come from within, especially through corruption and pride, the banes of a post-Fall world.
The overall theme is that despite the immense, hydra-headed problems that have arisen over the last 500 years of the West and of the World, the Church’s mission has never wavered, whatever its obstacles, internal and external. As since the beginning of its existence, it must leaven the good, promote the true, and, through subcreation, engage the beautiful. It must provide a safe haven for the pilgrim City of God, sojourning through this world and next to, above, below, around, and through the City of Man. From the very beginning of the existence of the Church, it has suffered attacks. Prior to the Reformation, most of the attacks sustained came from outside of Christendom: barbarians, Huns, Muslims, and Vikings. After the Reformation, and especially after the French Revolution, the Church bore the anger and brutality of the radical abstractionists, men of system (to use Adam Smith’s term), and the ideologues, left and right, of the world. As St. Augustine warned almost 1,600 years ago, we must never allow smugness to dissuade us from serving as witnesses, calling the saved, though they and we know it not, out of the City of Man. And, we must also always remember, rather soberly, that some we believe to be secure citizens in the City of God are neither secure nor citizens.
If you seek a survey of the modern West or of the modern World, this is not the book for you. You should look, instead, to the work of Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk, Arnold Toynbee, Will Durant, William McNeill, Samuel Huntington, Paul Kennedy, or Niall Ferguson.
As a world, we rapidly approach the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of ninety-five theses upon the cathedral door of Wittenburg. If, however, you want a comprehensive history of the doctrines of the Catholic Church from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the present, this is also not the book for you. You should turn, again, to the works of Christopher Dawson or his very close friend, E.I. Watkin.
Instead, Besieged focuses on a few key ideas and events and numerous personalities, affecting the pilgrim City of God for better or worse as the Church confronts demographic and economic uplift, technological innovations, a divided Christendom, and moral uncertainty. Besieged serves more as an essay in the perseverance of the Holy Spirt than it does as an exercise of academic will. In all things, I have tried to view the world through Christian Humanist eyes.
Original introduction
The last six centuries have not been easy ones for the Roman Catholic Church. As we quickly approach the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it is certainly worth our while, time, and dedicated thought as Catholics, non-Catholics, and, well, just plain human persons, to examine the history of western civilization and the place of the Roman Catholic Church within it. Though the Jews can readily and proudly claim to be the single longest-lived people in world history–in terms of possessing and maintaining a coherent and cohesive culture for some 4,000 years—Roman Catholics can rightfully claim to belong to the longest-lived institution in the history of the world. And, yet, like the Jews throughout much of their history, the Roman Catholic Church has survived assault after assault. In its earliest history, the Church not only survived but blossomed during its persecutions at the hands of the Roman empire. Since the legalization of the faith within the empire, the Church has endured the innumerable invasions of the Barbarians, while also assimilating, ultimately, the same Germanic tribes. In its evangelization to the Germans, the church quite successfully baptized the pagan cultures it encountered. This did not prove true, of course, with Islam, and Christianity had found her greatest foe, at least until the advent of secularism, in the extremely violent and militaristic advance of Islamic culture and religion. Over the past five centuries, the Catholic Church has had to deal with a number of new ideas and the general moral and political decline of the various peoples of the West. In 1492, the Old World encountered the New, leading to the complete reshaping of the entire world. The Church also had to deal with the Scientific Revolution, the unceasing advancement of technology, the rise of the nation state and reemergence of pagan nationalisms, the emergence of secularism, and, certainly, most deadly, the rise of ideologies and the men, women, and regimes committed to revolutionizing the world, no matter the cost.
The collusion of these historical trends of the emergence of the nation-state combined with the secular religions of ideology have proved incontrovertibly deadly to the sanctify of the human person, the dignity of the human person, and, indeed, even the very existence of the human person. Ideologies have weaponized politics, allowing those with power to maintain the illusion they are working for the best of motives while utterly demeaning the human person as made in the Image of God. In many cases, such as those seen in the Holocaust Camps, Gulags, and Killing Fields, and the abortion clinics of last century, the devastation has grown vast, beyond human imagination. Our best evidence suggests that the state–in various fascistic, nationalistic, communistic, and socialist guises–murdered nearly 205,000,000 civilians in the twentieth century alone, with warfare claiming another 50,000,000. One Italian scholar has estimated that ideological regimes (always anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, of course) have produced roughly sixty-five percent of the martyrs in all of Christian history. The concept and the numbers astound and numb us.
Besieged follows the history of the Church and the extensive opposition to it over the past five centuries. It does so not as a comprehensive or systematic treatise, but much more as theological essay in the tradition of the liberal arts. It attempts to treat the major themes of the last half millennium, not to find all the answers to our problems, but to examine them in the context of divine providence, the natural law, and dignity of the human person. In doing so, it upholds three concepts as essential to understanding the mission not only of the Roman Catholic Church but, ideally, of each of its citizens as well: 1) the centrality of the Incarnation; 2) the Sanctification of the Pagan; the 3) the saint as an individual reflection of God’s universal truth.
Throughout this work, I have relied upon and been inspired by a number of incredible Catholic scholars (and some non-Catholics as well), all of whom emerged—not paradoxically or accidentally, I believe—at the height of the worst ideological terrors of the past century. These figures, generally regarded as Christian Humanists, include Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Josef Pieper, T.S. Eliot, Aurel Kolnai, Gabriel Marcel, Nicholas Berdyaev, Russell Kirk, E.I. Watkin, Arnold Lunn, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Sayers, Romano Guardini, J.R.R. Tolkien, David Jones, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Sister Madeleva, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Frank Sheed, Henri de Lubac, Willa Cather, Paul Elmer More, Bernard Wall, Tom Burns, Harmon Griesewood, Robert Speaight, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Ralph McInerny, Stratford Caldecott, and Joseph Pearce. Each of these person, in his or her own way, is a personal hero of mine.
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The featured image is First Vatican Council, contemporary painting (1870), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.