The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (19 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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No man is an Oedipus now. No man is accursed. The blood on our hands may be washed clean; the scandal of our sins may be turned to rejoicing. Such reversals too are at the heart of the western imagination. For Saint Paul was a persecutor of the Church, standing by while the innocent were murdered, yet he was caught by the Lord, and came to preach of the peace that passes understanding. No peoples are accursed or beneath our notice. All boundaries of race and culture have been over-leapt: so Boniface ventures among the tree-worshipping Germans, to hew down their totem and show them rather the true tree of life, the Cross, the tree of love. He brought thousands to the faith, and laid down his life as a martyr along the Rhine. Even the southern slaveholders, bowing to the better angels of their nature, had to preach the gospel to their slaves, and had to concede that in Christ there was neither slave nor free. It was that gospel above all that inspired the black man with a view of his own dignity, and of the prospect of liberty.
 
The West then considers the world—thanks to the Jews, and to the person of Christ, and to the preaching of his church—to be comic, not tragic, possessed of limitless possibilities. Dante ends each of the great divisions of his
Divine Comedy
with the word “stars,” not because he was so naïve as to think that man would dwell upon those points of light, but because the stars are the clearest emblem of human destination, in the loving providence of God. Not Olympus, not Rome, not an estate in California, but
somewhere else
, a place which is beyond all human reckoning and is therefore most fit for man. It is a credit to this Christian vision that even when the West goes terribly wrong, it only substitutes an invented Christ for the true, an imagined realm of eternal love and truth and beauty for the life of God, which is heaven. So did the Marxists, longing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. So do the feminists, longing for an impossible androgyny. So do our militant atheists, dreaming of a ghoulish trans-human world of man-machine hybrids, everlasting.
 
They cannot escape the shadow of the Cross.
 
Chapter Four
 
THE EARLY CHURCH: CHARITY AND TOLERANCE ARE BORN
 
Y
our name is Dionysius. You’re a well-off youth in Athens, a city that long ago governed itself, but then fell to the imperial bureaucrats of Philip of Macedon, and now suffers the tax collectors and proconsuls of Rome. Your language boasts the finest poetry known to man, but that too was composed a long time ago. The epic poets have given way to editors and scholars, a sure sign of cultural decay. Your writers now have neither the mind nor the heart for such soaring flights of fancy. They cannot sustain the necessary reverence. They write witty drinking songs, or finely crafted epitaphs, or small bursts of creative obscenity:
 
Euagoras is made of brass;
he doesn’t need disguises:
he does them with no change of shape,
both sexes and all sizes.
(Antipater of Thessalonika, 48 BC–32 AD)
1
 
 
Guess What?
 
Europe’s glories were created by the church.
 
Christianity brought to the world the virtues of tolerance and charity.
 
Christianity would have perished if the heresies had not been stamped out.
 
 
Olympus is a cold and empty mountain peak. You can tell a farmer from one of your friends in the city by whether he can say, “Zeus, father of gods and men” without a smirk. You suspect that there may be gods, but they never turned themselves into bulls or swans to ravish pretty girls, or boys. You’re fascinated and appalled by some of the strange airs blowing from the east. You know a lad who follows the Great Mother goddess. It was no surprise. He hung around the gymnasion, naked with all the other boys, but not to hurl the javelin—
that
sport is not taken so seriously anymore. Then one night he went to the woods with the worshippers of the Mother for a drunken orgy, and came back bleeding between the legs. No need for him to worry about marriage now.
2
 
Your philosophies, too, are shrunken. No one since Plato and Aristotle has attempted to incorporate into a coherent system all the questions, moral and cosmological and theological and political, that man can ask. They have snatched at shreds and patches. Maybe when the memory of a free city finally faded, the heart went out of your wise men, too. They advise their disciples, in a sad and kindly way, what to do with the diminished thing called life. Some follow Epicurus, and shirk civic involvement altogether, living for the modest pleasures of mind and body. They buy a house in the countryside, read a little, eat and drink temperately, avoid marriage and the irritation of childrearing, and have pleasant conversations about the meaninglessness of the world, the negligence of the gods, and the inevitability of death. Others, believing that Epicurus did not draw the full conclusion from his materialism and agnosticism, laugh at such temperance. Better to follow Aristippus, and cram as much debauchery as possible into these short days, till death do swallow us up. A nobler group, the Stoics, recommend courageous resignation to fate, which they call providence, although it is impersonal and inflexible: “We must make the best of those things that are in our power, and take the rest as nature gives it” (Epictetus,
Discourses
, 1.1).
 
The Academy founded by Plato still exists. Its adherents have turned the restless questioning of Socrates in upon itself. Socrates once sought truth, showing the smug that they didn’t know what they were saying. Now he ends the search before it begins, insisting that he himself doesn’t know what he is saying. Platonism, that potent force against the drag of materialism, has degenerated into the witticisms of the skeptic. Thus Archesilaus, asked whether he knew anything for certain, replied that he wasn’t sure (Cicero,
Academici
1.45). Some manners may be growing gentler as convictions fade—slaves are better treated—but it is hollow. The best of your moralists to come, a Tacitus or a Juvenal, will inveigh against the degeneracy, but will have nothing to offer as an alternative but a sentimental glance at the pieties of forefathers long forgotten.
 
You literally have
nothing to do.
Your whole civilization, Greek and Roman, seems perched at the pinnacle of its grandeur, yet from now till its fall in the West in 476, it will produce no great new ideas. Its art will be derivative, copying the works of old, or monstrous, turning emperors into colossi. It bustles with merchandise, and is dead.
 
So you, Dionysius, accompany your friends one day to the Hill of Mars, on the Athenian Acropolis, to listen to the day’s run of madmen, “for all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). No quest for truth, but a listless search for novelty, to rouse the sluggish mind. Today’s speaker is but a small swarthy man, a tentmaker with a wheezy voice.
 
You don’t know it, but here, now, a new world overcomes the old. For that man, Paul or Saul or something, uses the shards of your culture to reveal what fulfills it and conquers it at once. He was on the road to the Acropolis, he says, looking at the temples, when
 
I found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
 
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
 
Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;
 
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;
 
That they should seek the LORD, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us;
 
For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring. ’” (Acts 17:23–28)
 
 
Now this is something. The man knows Greek poetry, and sees in it a glimmer of the truth he preaches. The man lives in the empire, yet asserts that in the beginning, before all empires, God had made “of one blood” all nations. The man feels the fluttering pulse of pagan religion: he preaches what the heart had longed for but could never hope, that God might “be not far from every one of us.”
 
Then he delivers the blow from which the world has not recovered:
 
[God] hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men,
in that he hath raised him from the dead.
(17:31; emphasis mine)
 
 
“But the dead don’t rise again!” the audience scoffs. Precisely, replies the speaker. “And the flesh?” they laugh. “The soul perhaps, but the flesh?”
 
They leave for food and drink. You, Dionysius, stay to hear more. You will one day be honored as Saint Dionysius. A nation called France, named after the Franks stirring beyond the Alps and the Rhine, will confuse you with another Dionysius and revere you as their patron, Saint Denis. Then a brilliant abbot will build a chapel in your honor, to flood the hearts of the worshipers with light.

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