The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (17 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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The true heroes of the Old Testament reveal to us who are the true heroes of the world, if the world had eyes to see, and was not dazzled by the glare of an Alexander or a Hannibal. They are the young Gideon, who with a tiny army hurls the great Midianite force into confusion. Or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, tossed into the fiery furnace by the envious courtiers of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, yet saved from harm by the power of God. Their calm defiance of the king should ring out as a motto for all men who still seek to resist the might of a smothering State:
 
“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
 
“But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” (Dan. 3:17–18)
 
 
 
 
Philosophy and Faith
 
God replied, “First tell them that I am He Who is, that they may learn the difference between what is and what is not, and also the further lesson that no name at all can properly be used of Me, to Whom alone existence belongs.”
Philo Judaeus
,
On the Life of Moses
(1.75)
 
 
 
Philo was an Alexandrian Jew learned in Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism. He’s defending his Jewish faith
not in opposition
to the Greek use of reason, but in concord with it, seeing it as fulfilling the Greek quest to know the ultimate reality. Here he sees and elaborates upon the proposition that eluded the grasp of Plato and Aristotle. God is not merely supreme among beings; he
is Being
.
 
 
Or Jonah, unlikely and unwilling prophet, finally doing his job, preaching impending doom to the heathen Ninevites, who repent, from their king down to the meanest hired hand. Of those lowly people, as foolish in matters of good and evil as their own beasts are, the Lord has care: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?” (Jon. 4:11).
A thousand years are as a day
 
“Salvation is of the Jews,” said Jesus to the Samarian woman at the well (Jn. 4:22), revealing in a play on his name his mission to all mankind (Hebrew
yeshu’ah
= salvation), and identifying that mission as fulfilling the role of the Jews in the history of man. I have said that we would never expect such a role to be played by so lowly a people, we who are impressed by raw power. More than that. The deep assumption lying within Christ’s words is that there is such a thing as salvation, meaning that God is the Lord of time, who works within time, but is not bound to time. It is He, not blind fate, who writes the narrative of the world, and of each man’s life, and of the glory to come.
 
This salvation is not the same as what other theological systems offer; and the difference is crucial for understanding the West. Let’s see why by comparing it with a few of the contemporary competitors.
 
I am a world-weary Roman citizen living in Greece in the second century AD. I might assuage my fear of death by turning to one of the renowned
mystery religions—
for instance, that of Demeter at Eleusis.
4
The idea behind a mystery religion, as also behind the Gnostic heresy (a New Age cult of old), is that you can wangle immortality by becoming a member of a cabal.
5
If you follow certain rules (sometimes requiring ritual sex with priestesses, or beatings), then you can advance in the mysteries, gaining more and more “knowledge” hidden from the fools outside. Even the noblest of pagan moral philosophies, for instance the Stoicism of the gruff slave Epictetus, or the world-denial of the Buddha, promise enlightenment only to those who undergo the spiritual regimen. The rest of the world is left to its folly.
 
In other words, “salvation,” such as it is, is available to this person or that, but is never meant to reach everyone. Epictetus, an immensely appealing teacher, does preach the brotherhood of man, but when it comes to that movement of the heart out towards the unenlightened, the best he offers is a little patient instruction and pity; the worst, indifference:
 
What then, ought we to publish these things to all men? No, but we ought to accommodate ourselves to the ignorant [Greek
tois idiotois,
literally, those fools wrapped up in themselves] and to say: “This man recommends to me that which he thinks good for himself. I excuse him.” (
Discourses
, 1.29)
 
 
In the Old Testament, by contrast, we have vigorous prayers for victory over Israel’s hated enemies, alongside mystical visions of the coming together of all the nations at God’s holy mountain: “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the ends of the earth” (Is. 49:6). Nor is there a hint that some people, for instance women and children, cannot scale the heights of salvation. Everyone, after all, is poor before the Lord. Hence the West’s fascination with the weak who prove strong, with the least who overcome the mighty: Joan of Arc, the barefoot soldiers at Valley Forge, the little boy commenting on the nakedness of the emperor, the child with the crutch and iron brace whose goodness batters the heart of a miser named Scrooge, working man Rocky Balboa’s fight against the Champ. The Jews have graven for us the templates of our moral imaginations.
 
The salvation on offer from the pagans is also strangely detached from time. Stoicism, with all its noble insistence upon duty and resignation, never shows us where that duty takes the world. If you are intelligent and severe enough, you can be as wise as the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, beholding the vain spectacle of human life before him, not moved to love it, nor to envy it, but to do right by it, no matter what others do or say. But to what end? The Stoics believed in a providential Mind governing all things, but if that Mind had a goal for the world, man could never know what it was.
 
But God’s promises, in the Old and New Testaments, stretch not only to the future but to the consummation of the world. That world is
going somewhere.
All nations shall worship the Lord, says Isaiah, prophesying the peaceable kingdom of the Messiah to come, and “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (Is. 11:6). In those days, says Jeremiah, God will replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh: “I will put my law in their inward hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33). An army will arise from the dry bones of the dead in the Valley of Jehosophat (Ez. 37). “Behold,” says the One seated upon the throne, “I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
 
Yet although time is an instrument of God’s plan, He forbids the Hebrews to observe “times and seasons” (Lev. 19:26), or to worship the zodiac, as their weather-predicting Chaldean neighbors did (cf. 2 K. 21:3–5). God is not a deity confined to the cyclical patterns of nature. He is not the Phoenician Thammuz, slain every fall only to be reborn for his beloved Astarte in the spring.
6
And precisely because God is not a nature God, he is not a God bound to time. Other gods may be established elsewhere to justify how we came to be where we are, and where we (that is, we the powerful) are going to stay. Legends of Romulus, apotheosized after his death, “justify” Roman preeminence, and legends of Osiris “justify” the hegemony of the Pharaohs, but never do they imply that the whole people, indeed the whole world, is going somewhere, is going to be redeemed. All the development happens in the legendary past, and ends with the powers that be. But in Israel, the development is mainly in the future, and is a threat to the powers that be
.
 
The typical human view of history was that it is cyclical, or static. It has no arrow to it, no goal. The Scriptures change all that. It is indeed one of the defining features of the Western mind, this notion that we are on a journey, all of us, to a place that is sweeter and happier than what we know now. Even people who have lost their faith in God retain, sentimentally, the notion that man’s history is not cyclical, not static, not random, but a real story, with meaningful events, great discoveries, influential minds, and “salvation” in some secular Land of Rest to come.
 
It’s the old Jewish faith in a God who molds man’s history, but without God, and without the hope to “dwell in the house of the LORD for ever” (Ps. 23:6). So feminism is supposedly an advance in human relations, a wash of secular grace along our path to the peace of being neuter. Or the religion of environmentalism comes as a chic hobo Christianity, with Earth as mother, consumers as sinners, global warming as hell, and recycling or organic farming or mass sterilization as the Savior who will lead us all to harmony on earth. Marxism is incomprehensible without the view of time and history revealed in Scripture. Even Darwin, under the influence of this vision of things that unfold to their appointed fulfillment, slid from talking about how species developed to the vaster and less clearly established “evolution”—a word he did not at first like and seldom used, as it suggested the unwrapping of a finished state that had lain hidden long before.
 
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
 
Let me be frank. I’m a Roman Catholic, and I believe that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah, the Son of God.
 
But as far as the history of Western civilization is concerned, my belief is neither here nor there. Nor is that of an atheist, a Buddhist, or anybody else. The fact is that a Jewish carpenter named Jesus, who came from Nazareth and preached for a few years before he was crucified by the Roman authorities, is the most influential man in the history of the world.
 
I know I must derogate from my faith, to talk about Christ as I would talk about Cicero or Pericles. There’s no help for it, though; we must examine what Jesus has meant for all men, even those who do not believe.
 
Most important: Jesus sums up in his person and his preaching one universal yet often latent feature of the Old Testament and the history of the Jews. That is the primacy of love. When the scribe asks which is the greatest of the commandments, Jesus appeals not to the requirements of the natural law as codified in the Decalogue, but to the heart of the matter: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mk. 12:30-31). For “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:40).
 
 
 
Make a Feminist Cringe
 
“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots round your table.”
Psalm 128:3
 
 
It isn’t an isolated episode. One day Jesus is dining at the house of Simon, a leading Pharisee and therefore learned in the law of Moses. A woman suddenly enters with an alabaster box of ointment. She anoints Jesus’ head, and then falls to his feet to wash them with her tears and dry them with her hair. The scene would be scandalous even for us today, who manage to be licentious and self-righteous at the same time. Simon and his friends think that Jesus can be no prophet, or he would know what kind of sinful woman, possibly a whore, knelt at his feet. But Jesus shows his oneness with the Father, the God of Love, precisely by knowing full well what kind of woman she is, and what kinds of men have condemned her in their hearts. He turns to Simon:

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