The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (23 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Again, we should not expect that Christians all lived up to their ideals, any more than we live up to ours. But it’s one thing to violate a law, and another to deny that the law exists.
 
Christians softened the institution of slavery, as common then as the service industry is now. The teachings of Jesus made it clear that it was the position of the master, not that of the slave, that placed one’s salvation in jeopardy. Some Christians sold themselves into slavery to ransom a Christian brother. As the years went on, under the influence first of Stoicism and then of Christianity, laws condemning the maltreatment of slaves become common.
 
Contrary to what our Bible-despisers say, the Scriptures do not support slavery. They take it for granted as a social institution. How else might a poor man without land keep himself and his family alive? If a man had nothing, he at least had his back and his hands. It is not as if he could work for a day, or would even want to work for a day, and then go home, when most often there was no home to return to, or when he could have a better meal and something like a bed in the master’s house. But the whole thrust of the Scriptures is towards freedom and away from bondage—unless it is the “bondage” of love. Jesus warns his followers that if they would be great in the Kingdom of Heaven they must be slaves to everyone else.
 
They thrust a dagger into the heart of the State-worship.
 
Their failure to worship the Emperor angered a Roman like Diocletian not because he thought he was a god. Diocletian knew it was all nonsense. It angered him because they struck against the sanctity of the State he was struggling to hold together. Hence his notorious persecutions, perpetrated, as persecutions usually are, for reasons of State. But in a few decades, Constantine legalized the religion, and then Theodosius made it the official religion of the empire. That was not the same as Statist idolatry.
 
One example will show why not. The emperor Theodosius, a valiant soldier and a defender of the orthodox faith, attacked Arian Goths in Thessalonika and massacred them. For his pains, his bishop, Ambrose of Milan (the man who later baptized Augustine) threatened to excommunicate him unless he did immediate penance for his great evil.
10
Diocletian, for political purposes, had demanded to be called
Dominus et Deus
, “Lord and God.” But Theodosius had to suffer the rebuke of a mere bishop. More than a rebuke: he had placed his immortal soul in danger. For the Emperor, though he is the legitimate ruler, is but one Christian like another, and all are servants of the one and only Lord and God.
 
They took up the burden of civic responsibility.
 
People trained on Hollywood epics may think that everyone in the Roman Empire wore flowing white tunics and relaxed at the baths and ate figs from silver platters. But as we have seen, the population of the Empire stalled in the third century, and the economy stalled with it. That brought de-urbanization, as did the shortsighted increase in taxes. Meanwhile, the Empire had spread its legions as thinly as possible along the thousands of miles of borderland to protect its citizens from barbarian invasions. Rarely were emperors to be found in Rome. The great city became a backwater. Constantinople was the thriving capital in the East. Milan, closer to the vulnerable passes over the Alps, became more important in the West, as did the Adriatic port of Ravenna. But with food supplies dwindling, more and more people abandoned the cities generally, nor was it lucrative for the remaining magistrates to do the work.
 
 
“Wives, Be Subject to Your Husbands”
 
H
ave you ever been at a wedding and watched a guest wince, gape, or maybe just giggle when the lector reads the words Saint Paul wrote the Ephesians: “Wives, be subject to your own husbands”?
 
Not only is this beautiful passage from Paul’s letter politically incorrect because it assigns gender roles and eschews modern notions of equality, but its deeper meaning is even more subversive to today’s mores. Read the whole passage:
[B]e subject to one another in the fear of Christ.
 
Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.
 
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her . . . .
 
 
 
Marriage becomes not an institution for mutual gratification, but for mutual humbling. Given today’s gospels of “empowerment” and self-esteem, this universal call to servitude is pretty startling.
 
 
 
Here’s where Christian deacons, priests, and bishops came in. The Christians had developed networks of care for their sick, their widows, and their orphans. Moreover, a priest or a bishop did not have a family to support (celibacy among the clergy had become the norm in the East, and almost universal in the West), so they became natural choices to assume the places vacated by the old senatorial families. It was the persecutor Diocletian, and no Christian bishop, who first called sectors of the Empire “dioceses,” but it wasn’t long before bishops were in charge of those dioceses, for practical reasons—as, for instance, to see that grain shipments came in to feed the poor. When Augustine traveled to Milan, then the hub of government in Italy, the man in charge was not the Emperor, who had to be on the move with his army, but the bishop, Ambrose. He was the primary man responsible for preserving law and order and promoting the common good. Two centuries later, after Rome had shrunk from a city of nearly two million to a town of forty thousand, in ruins, the people chose as their bishop a humble monk who had long served their practical needs as an able administrator. His name was Gregory, and when he first heard they might choose him, he fled—for how could such as he be a worthy successor of Saint Peter?
 
Yet the people persuaded him to return. History knows him as Pope Gregory I, one of the wisest and holiest men to assume the chair—and, after all, a true Roman.
 
They ennobled manual labor.
 
Unlike us, now. It is one of the purposes of the college degree, to safeguard the holder from a sore back and calluses. But the Christians could not look down upon the kind of labor that their Savior did, for Jesus was a carpenter. And Peter was a fisherman, and Paul a tent-maker.
 
We should not underestimate this acceptance of hard physical labor. It may be that Christianity is truly healthy only where this principle is affirmed, and that its denial is a symptom of a sickly faith, as among the French aristocrats in the eighteenth century, or the overschooled in ours. The principle long predates the Protestant Reformation. The craftsmen who built the medieval cathedrals often memorialized their trades in wood or glass or stone upon the very walls. But the Church was reviving a Roman ideal that had fallen into the yellow leaf. The Romans were fond of looking back upon the modest-living gentlemen farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic. By the second century of the Empire, many city people found themselves yearning for the peace and health of a farm. But it had been a long time since men with any money stooped their shoulders. A rich man might own a farm, but slaves dragged the plow.
 
Now, as I’ve said, a slave economy is a stagnant economy. The Romans were terrific engineers, as we see from their aqueducts and sewers and basilicas and roads. Were it not for slavery, they might have had an industrial revolution. By the time the Germans and the Huns had invaded, political and economic conditions made that impossible. But the Christian re-valuation of work would eventually build the continent anew.
 
They “baptized” the paterfamilias.
 
One of the great unheralded events in history occurred in the early sixth century, when a monk named Benedict of Nursia was asked to write a rule governing life in the monastery at Monte Cassino. Benedict aimed to provide a Roman orderliness and moderation, unlke the spiritual athleticism of the East, with its daring flights of physical deprivation and marathon prayer. In the East, you might find a Saint Daniel the Stylite, sitting atop a pillar for years in swelter and storm, praying for the people and doing penance.
11
But Saint Benedict’s genius was Roman; his instincts favored the stable and conservative.
 
He gave the West a blueprint for orderly life under hard conditions. Imagine twenty or thirty men in their prime, sworn to remain in one place, to observe an orderly round of prayer, reflection, labor, and rest, and to obey their
paterfamilias
, the abbot (from Hebrew
abba
, “father”) who stands for them in the place of Christ. Imagine that they see their work as a form of praise and prayer. What can such men not do? They cleared the water-logged land of Germany, all swamp and dark forest, and brought forth grain for bread and beer, and grapes for wine. They brought their learning to far Ireland and England and Scandinavia. They copied manuscripts (work more laborious than that of the plowman, without the benefit of muscles stretching in the open air) and embellished them with decorations fanciful and bright. Their monasteries became a network of economic hot spots, sharing their learning and their technological improvements.
 
They elevated the “barbarian” cultures from which they came.
 
The monks were not colonizers in any sane sense of the word. They entered a land, found what was good in it, attempted to preserve it and bring it into harmony with the faith, and gave to the people their inherited gifts of Roman and Christian civilization. So the monks gave the Irish their first alphabet. English, Gothic, and Icelandic are all first written by monks. Did they then eradicate the native oral poetry? Far from it. The genius who composed
Beowulf
was almost certainly a Christian monk, writing for his beloved Saxons soon after the dawn of the faith in England, cherishing the memories of the old sagas, but seeing in them a heroism that without Christ was incomplete.
 
 
 
The Poor Will Always Be with You
 
Everything around Him participates in His poverty;—His parents, who scarcely possess a few coarse garments to clothe Him with; the poor shepherds, who at the voice of the angels leave their flocks to come and adore Him.
Consider that this wretchedness of the Son of God was not necessary and compulsory, like the poor in the world; it is free and of His own choice. Conceive a high idea of this poverty, which appeared so precious to our Lord, that to espouse it He quitted heaven and His glory.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola
,
Spiritual Exercises
, “The Poverty of the Birth of
Jesus Christ”
 
 
Here we have the truly Christian championing of poverty. It does not pass over the wretchedness of those who suffer hunger and thirst and nakedness; the Jesuits were tireless advocates for the poor. But it exalts poverty to its true spiritual grandeur; we are to possess things, says Saint Paul, as if we possessed none. That is incomprehensible to the materialist mind, that sees human poverty only as an evil and only to be overcome by money—other people’s money.
 
 
Let me illustrate the point with a famous account from the Venerable Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
.
12
Bede, writing from the Irish-founded monastery at Jarrow, recalls an incident one or two generations before, when one night the cattlemen, laymen working at the monastery, were sitting round a table drinking beer. As was the custom, they passed a harp from man to man as they drank. When it came to you, you were supposed to sing one of the old pagan heroic songs, the grand deeds of a Sigemund or a Beowulf. But one fellow at the beer feast was embarrassed and used an excuse to leave, going to the cattle shed to tend the stock for the night. When he fell asleep, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and called to him, “Caedmon! Sing me something!”

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