“François failed to respond to his calling, but he at least understood what it would have to be if it was going to be real: total surrender. No half-measures. Nothing else works.”
" I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I."
And thus the current problems in Europe given its refusal to recognize its Christian roots in the European Union's constitution.
Is there a difference between Christianity and other religions? If so, then it is Christianity that is the consideration, not just a native religion.
When we talk about history for the 1600 years preceding 1800, no one points to another region of the world where humans flourished for any length of time. Yes, various places flourished for a short time, such as the Arab Caliphate and the Song Dynasty, but none persisted as long as Christendom. Christianity replaced the Roman Empire's native pagan religion, and the area experienced technological growth over time. (though it was primitive by our standards - Some examples are weaving, metallurgy, the water wheel, the heavy plow, three-crop rotation, the horse collar, castles, cathedrals, monastery system, construction, clocks, windmills, eyeglasses/magnification, all of which were not available during Roman times or ignored by them.)
What is unique about Christianity? Most of what was developed first in other areas was improved in Christendom, while Europe experienced continuous innovation in one technology after another. There were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which owe their roots to Christianity. I would look at Christianity as unique and try to answer why.
So why is Christianity under attack and forgotten by the elites of Europe? Part of Dreher's lengthy essay attempts to address this.
I believe it is due to belief. The intelligentsia has rejected God without reason (obviously not Dreher.) Most people go along. There is a name for this phenomenon; it is called the availability cascade. (https://effectiviology.com/availability-cascade/)
I agree. It is Christianity that is under consideration, and not just any native religion. There is too much hesitancy in saying so, too much unbelief that it’s true.
It is due to it being real. God is real. Christ is real, as is his git of salvation. As is the Holy Spirit, his indwelling and the change a believer undergoes in their life. The faith makes unique claims and backs them up. These things being real is the only reason the presence o the faith has the unique results it does.
This is something the intelligentsia is not prepared to come to terms with.
The medievals understood what moderns flee: the sacred is not a weekend mood—it is an atmosphere that demands your whole being. But beware the romantic yearning for crowns and crusades dressed up as faith. The Black Madonna calls the heart, not the empire. François fled because surrender terrifies the ego. Many today wrap that same fear in flags and fortress walls.
A decade ago I worked with a Protestant gentleman who went on the pilgramage to Santiago de Compostela with his daughter. He had got divorced not long prior. His daughter was the driving force and he went along mainly to keep her company, as he was not much of a believer.
He told me that it was one of the best experiences of his life and he planned to go again by himself. He struggled to explain the impact and his desire to go again.
People are yearning for connection to their past. In our liquid modernity we have cut ourselves off from our ancestors, our communities and our heritage in search of self fulfillment and consumerism. Even so, the profound and the deep past exist and bound us and we should connect with it as those in the past did their journeys to connect. We need to be more temporay residents in blah and reform suburbia.
" In 1166, hile digging a grave near the entrance to the chapel of the Black Madonna, monks discovered in a cave the incorrupt body of St. Amadour, which legend held was actually Zacchaeus from the Bible, but there is no evidence of that."
"This is a powerful passage from a prophetic novel. Submission is not really about Muslims, but about the French as a spiritually and morally exhausted people."
I don't understand why Betty says this: "Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here."
It sure seems to me that he IS stumping for Christianity.
Comte was also the house philosopher of Action francaise. Maurras, an atheist, regarded Christianity as a kind of Jewish heresy, not European, but it was the faith of France and so needed to be preserved. It's behind the Vatican condemnation.
I wonder whether Christianity has become a ghetto for intellectuals seeking some sort of mystic relationship with God combined with an acknowledgement that the modern West was created by Christianity, a creed most in the West not only don't adhere to but don't even understand. Does your average person in Lille or Liverpool or Louisville even care? Is their favorite sports team more important? Or what's available on pornography? Just this morning, 850 people on Quora have already posted comments on that most important subject- who was rock's greatest drummer? Sadly, more people in the West care about rock music than they do about Christianity.
But it is also true that creative minorities encourage people to think outside their materialistic boxes. That is why the pilgrimage to Chartres is so important. That is why the refurbishing and reopening of Notre Dame is so important. That is why Rocamadour is so important. When Benedict of Nursia opened up his monasteries and founded Medieval monasticism, the Roman world was falling apart. But Benedict led the way to a better world and eventually even Germanic barbarians began following Christianity, however imperfectly.
Re: Christianity has become a ghetto for intellectuals seeking some sort of mystic relationship with God
Apart from labeling it a "ghetto" that's what it should be for everyone. In Christ we come together with God from whom we are divided by sin and death.(I suspect you agree of course)
If Christianity becomes popular it isn't Christianity, though it may be an extremely deceptive mock Christianity. By the 1950s, America had become a mock Christian nation. Half the nation at least attended church regularly.
"Religious fanatics" were also an acceptable and routine source of derision. Certainly, there was eyeball rolling about them in my liquefying Protestant denomination. I'm grateful to God for the processed food spiritual diet I was on while our family was in that church.
It's said that when you're starving to death you reach a point at which hunger ceases and you become indifferent. Something like that had happened to me spiritually by the time I was seventeen. Thank God, indeed, for the lady who wasn't afraid to tell me what the Gospel was when I was twenty three. A religious fanatic, but thank God for her.
Something, someone, possibly The Holy Spirit, possibly an awareness of my own deracination, maybe a combination had been at work within me for many months previously. I suspect that a man about my own age had been praying for me during that time. He was a taxi driver. I arrived at my destination, paid the fare, but before I could get out, he told me that if I didn't mind, he wanted to tell me about The Lord Jesus Christ. He had the worst stammer I had ever heard. He wasn't nervous about witnessing to me. His stammer was beyond question neurological in origin.
The beauty of this still brings me close to tears.
The Holy Spirit does make us aware o these. It is one o his purposes. But that, o course is not the end. Once he has helped you put your finger on something, spiritually speaking, he is there to help you deal with it.
Has happened to me more than once, and will continue to happen throughout my time here.
It's interesting how so many intellectuals -- from Comte to Jordan Peterson -- acknowledge the civilizational importance of Christianity but aren't believers themselves. Religion is for the rabble, they seem to say, but I can seek inspiration in Truth & Beauty, while engaging in debauchery (Camus).
As for the best rock drummer, that would be Ringo Starr. Ticket to Ride and Rain come to mind.
That was Lennon ribbing Paul McCartney. Ringo Starr left the Beatles for a couple weeks during the making of the White Album in 1968. I believe McCartney was the drummer of "Back in the USSR" and "Dear Prudence."
I'm a sucker for Neil Peart as I grew up in the same neighbourhood as two of Rush's members (though not NP). They're a generation older but it was quite a claim to fame to be able to brag that Geddy Lee went to the same grade school as I did...
Even stranger: Geddy Lee was in the same Grade 4 class as Rick Moranis at that school! Rick Moranis went to my high school in the early 70s; he sent a taped message to be played over the PA for our school's 25th anniversary. As SCTV/Ghostbusters fans, this was a big moment for us...
Re: It's interesting how so many intellectuals -- from Comte to Jordan Peterson -- acknowledge the civilizational importance of Christianity but aren't believers themselves.
Too trapped in their heads and unable to open their hearts.
I've seen recent clips of Peterson and he seems to be struggling emotionally. He'd do well to sign off for a spell and visit the many serene, beautiful, and holy places on this wonderful planet.
Jordan Peterson is no fan of licentiousness or debauchery. Comte wasn’t either but he was mentally unbalanced and had an infatuation with a woman that drove him very close to insanity.
As a drummer myself, I'd say it's difficult to pick the "best," because there are things that come into play other than sheer technique. You can't go wrong with Neil Peart as one of the best ever technically speaking, for instance, but that's not the whole story.
Personally my all time favorites are Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) and Stewart Copeland (The Police, Curved Air). I'm also always ready to give a shout-out to the great Jim Keltner (everyone else).
Tough is at his hypnotic best on some of The Benny Goodman Quartet's recordings. He replaced Gene Krupa. I agree with Artie Shaw about Tough. In his usual screaming way, Shaw demanded that the Navy accept Tough, who weighed about 100 lbs, so Tough could be in Shaw's WWII Navy band:
"This man is the best ***damned drummer in the world!!"
Big Sid can probably best be heard on compilations of Blue Note recordings from the early 1940s.
On materialism as a stand-in for religious belief, the best novel I’ve encountered on this is the 2002 YA book Feed by MT Anderson. It is disturbing but haunting when you consider he wrote it 7 years before the iPhone came out. There is a scene at the end when the protagonist orders a huge number of pants, all the same color, and can feel them “winging their way toward me through the night.” The image stuck with me, and I think helped me limit my online ordering after that. The fragmentation of ads, news spots, all the input of a materialist society, can and should be resisted with everything we have.
Thanks for reading tip, Laura. I'm always looking for books for my 10-year-old son and we can use all the ammunition we can get for our "You're not getting a smart phone until you're 18" campaign we can get!
Well, I wouldn’t recommend it for a 10 yo, unfortunately—the language is terrible. I just thought it was a poignant and prescient example of what happens to a society that takes materialism and especially personal technology to the extreme: the flattening of relationships and personalities and the desolation of how people spend their time and money. It feels a little like Lord of the Flies—not a comfortable read but a potentially useful one.
And good luck with the no-smartphone campaign! We have held out so far with our 16 yo, but he hasn’t been super interested in them yet.
It’s pretty much ours too, although he has one other friend who doesn’t have internet access on his phone. He’s also pretty introverted and wasn’t necessarily aware of everything he was missing, and a little stubborn about not following the crowd, but the older he gets, the more he feels the difference. Parenting is intense right now—you have my sympathy!
Does he have siblings and neighborhood friends? That helps a lot. Ours is an only and really needed to be able to connect with his buddies outside of school and activities as none of them live in our neighborhood.
Good luck, I really admire you for sticking to it!
Your countenance expresses a transcendent joy that testifies to the presence of the Holy. Thank you.
“François failed to respond to his calling, but he at least understood what it would have to be if it was going to be real: total surrender. No half-measures. Nothing else works.”
From “Four Quartets”:
“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”
A poet's praise. Pentecost and Baptism.
"Consumed by either fire or fire"
Thank you for that!
This is beautiful, Rod. Bravo!
" I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I."
And thus the current problems in Europe given its refusal to recognize its Christian roots in the European Union's constitution.
Is there a difference between Christianity and other religions? If so, then it is Christianity that is the consideration, not just a native religion.
When we talk about history for the 1600 years preceding 1800, no one points to another region of the world where humans flourished for any length of time. Yes, various places flourished for a short time, such as the Arab Caliphate and the Song Dynasty, but none persisted as long as Christendom. Christianity replaced the Roman Empire's native pagan religion, and the area experienced technological growth over time. (though it was primitive by our standards - Some examples are weaving, metallurgy, the water wheel, the heavy plow, three-crop rotation, the horse collar, castles, cathedrals, monastery system, construction, clocks, windmills, eyeglasses/magnification, all of which were not available during Roman times or ignored by them.)
What is unique about Christianity? Most of what was developed first in other areas was improved in Christendom, while Europe experienced continuous innovation in one technology after another. There were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which owe their roots to Christianity. I would look at Christianity as unique and try to answer why.
So why is Christianity under attack and forgotten by the elites of Europe? Part of Dreher's lengthy essay attempts to address this.
I believe it is due to belief. The intelligentsia has rejected God without reason (obviously not Dreher.) Most people go along. There is a name for this phenomenon; it is called the availability cascade. (https://effectiviology.com/availability-cascade/)
I agree. It is Christianity that is under consideration, and not just any native religion. There is too much hesitancy in saying so, too much unbelief that it’s true.
It is due to it being real. God is real. Christ is real, as is his git of salvation. As is the Holy Spirit, his indwelling and the change a believer undergoes in their life. The faith makes unique claims and backs them up. These things being real is the only reason the presence o the faith has the unique results it does.
This is something the intelligentsia is not prepared to come to terms with.
Only Rod could bang out something so profound (and profoundly at the heart of our present condition) on the way to the airport...
The medievals understood what moderns flee: the sacred is not a weekend mood—it is an atmosphere that demands your whole being. But beware the romantic yearning for crowns and crusades dressed up as faith. The Black Madonna calls the heart, not the empire. François fled because surrender terrifies the ego. Many today wrap that same fear in flags and fortress walls.
—Virgin Monk Boy
What a place! Thanks for the report!
A decade ago I worked with a Protestant gentleman who went on the pilgramage to Santiago de Compostela with his daughter. He had got divorced not long prior. His daughter was the driving force and he went along mainly to keep her company, as he was not much of a believer.
He told me that it was one of the best experiences of his life and he planned to go again by himself. He struggled to explain the impact and his desire to go again.
People are yearning for connection to their past. In our liquid modernity we have cut ourselves off from our ancestors, our communities and our heritage in search of self fulfillment and consumerism. Even so, the profound and the deep past exist and bound us and we should connect with it as those in the past did their journeys to connect. We need to be more temporay residents in blah and reform suburbia.
" In 1166, hile digging a grave near the entrance to the chapel of the Black Madonna, monks discovered in a cave the incorrupt body of St. Amadour, which legend held was actually Zacchaeus from the Bible, but there is no evidence of that."
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
I'm moved and challenged by this meditation, Rod; thank you very much.
"This is a powerful passage from a prophetic novel. Submission is not really about Muslims, but about the French as a spiritually and morally exhausted people."
Or "Modern" Western people?
"What's All About Alfie?"
Thank you so much Rod for offering us great spiritual sustenance today. We will all look upon the world with more hope and faith after reading this.
I don't understand why Betty says this: "Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here."
It sure seems to me that he IS stumping for Christianity.
Yes, but in a back-handed way.
Comte was also the house philosopher of Action francaise. Maurras, an atheist, regarded Christianity as a kind of Jewish heresy, not European, but it was the faith of France and so needed to be preserved. It's behind the Vatican condemnation.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/05/Flag_of_Brazil.svg/1200px-Flag_of_Brazil.svg.png
Fascinating. Inspiring. Thank you. When do you rest?
Jamais!
I wonder whether Christianity has become a ghetto for intellectuals seeking some sort of mystic relationship with God combined with an acknowledgement that the modern West was created by Christianity, a creed most in the West not only don't adhere to but don't even understand. Does your average person in Lille or Liverpool or Louisville even care? Is their favorite sports team more important? Or what's available on pornography? Just this morning, 850 people on Quora have already posted comments on that most important subject- who was rock's greatest drummer? Sadly, more people in the West care about rock music than they do about Christianity.
But it is also true that creative minorities encourage people to think outside their materialistic boxes. That is why the pilgrimage to Chartres is so important. That is why the refurbishing and reopening of Notre Dame is so important. That is why Rocamadour is so important. When Benedict of Nursia opened up his monasteries and founded Medieval monasticism, the Roman world was falling apart. But Benedict led the way to a better world and eventually even Germanic barbarians began following Christianity, however imperfectly.
Re: Christianity has become a ghetto for intellectuals seeking some sort of mystic relationship with God
Apart from labeling it a "ghetto" that's what it should be for everyone. In Christ we come together with God from whom we are divided by sin and death.(I suspect you agree of course)
1Corinthians 4:13.
If Christianity becomes popular it isn't Christianity, though it may be an extremely deceptive mock Christianity. By the 1950s, America had become a mock Christian nation. Half the nation at least attended church regularly.
"Religious fanatics" were also an acceptable and routine source of derision. Certainly, there was eyeball rolling about them in my liquefying Protestant denomination. I'm grateful to God for the processed food spiritual diet I was on while our family was in that church.
It's said that when you're starving to death you reach a point at which hunger ceases and you become indifferent. Something like that had happened to me spiritually by the time I was seventeen. Thank God, indeed, for the lady who wasn't afraid to tell me what the Gospel was when I was twenty three. A religious fanatic, but thank God for her.
Something, someone, possibly The Holy Spirit, possibly an awareness of my own deracination, maybe a combination had been at work within me for many months previously. I suspect that a man about my own age had been praying for me during that time. He was a taxi driver. I arrived at my destination, paid the fare, but before I could get out, he told me that if I didn't mind, he wanted to tell me about The Lord Jesus Christ. He had the worst stammer I had ever heard. He wasn't nervous about witnessing to me. His stammer was beyond question neurological in origin.
The beauty of this still brings me close to tears.
The Holy Spirit does make us aware o these. It is one o his purposes. But that, o course is not the end. Once he has helped you put your finger on something, spiritually speaking, he is there to help you deal with it.
Has happened to me more than once, and will continue to happen throughout my time here.
It's interesting how so many intellectuals -- from Comte to Jordan Peterson -- acknowledge the civilizational importance of Christianity but aren't believers themselves. Religion is for the rabble, they seem to say, but I can seek inspiration in Truth & Beauty, while engaging in debauchery (Camus).
As for the best rock drummer, that would be Ringo Starr. Ticket to Ride and Rain come to mind.
My father-in-law is a drummer and he absolutely insists that Ringo is the best... He just wasn't very flashy like Keith Moon or John Bonham.
Pete Best
Blasphemy!
LOL
John Lennon on Pete Best: "He could move the sticks."
John Lennon on Ringo: "He's not even the best drummer in the band."
That was Lennon ribbing Paul McCartney. Ringo Starr left the Beatles for a couple weeks during the making of the White Album in 1968. I believe McCartney was the drummer of "Back in the USSR" and "Dear Prudence."
I'm not a musician but I believe Jim McCarty of The Yardbirds is underrated. Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts are very good.
Neil Peart.
And Buddy Rich.
I'm a sucker for Neil Peart as I grew up in the same neighbourhood as two of Rush's members (though not NP). They're a generation older but it was quite a claim to fame to be able to brag that Geddy Lee went to the same grade school as I did...
I can top you Jim I graduated from the same high school as Tupacs father. 😆True but ridiculous.
Even stranger: Geddy Lee was in the same Grade 4 class as Rick Moranis at that school! Rick Moranis went to my high school in the early 70s; he sent a taped message to be played over the PA for our school's 25th anniversary. As SCTV/Ghostbusters fans, this was a big moment for us...
One of my old coworkers had a great nickname: "six-pack for sure"
Ginger Baker.
Re: It's interesting how so many intellectuals -- from Comte to Jordan Peterson -- acknowledge the civilizational importance of Christianity but aren't believers themselves.
Too trapped in their heads and unable to open their hearts.
I've seen recent clips of Peterson and he seems to be struggling emotionally. He'd do well to sign off for a spell and visit the many serene, beautiful, and holy places on this wonderful planet.
Jordan Peterson is no fan of licentiousness or debauchery. Comte wasn’t either but he was mentally unbalanced and had an infatuation with a woman that drove him very close to insanity.
As a drummer myself, I'd say it's difficult to pick the "best," because there are things that come into play other than sheer technique. You can't go wrong with Neil Peart as one of the best ever technically speaking, for instance, but that's not the whole story.
Personally my all time favorites are Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) and Stewart Copeland (The Police, Curved Air). I'm also always ready to give a shout-out to the great Jim Keltner (everyone else).
Hal Blaine of the Wrecking Crew was pretty good too.
Absolutely.
Sid Catlett, Dave Tough.
Tough is at his hypnotic best on some of The Benny Goodman Quartet's recordings. He replaced Gene Krupa. I agree with Artie Shaw about Tough. In his usual screaming way, Shaw demanded that the Navy accept Tough, who weighed about 100 lbs, so Tough could be in Shaw's WWII Navy band:
"This man is the best ***damned drummer in the world!!"
Big Sid can probably best be heard on compilations of Blue Note recordings from the early 1940s.
On materialism as a stand-in for religious belief, the best novel I’ve encountered on this is the 2002 YA book Feed by MT Anderson. It is disturbing but haunting when you consider he wrote it 7 years before the iPhone came out. There is a scene at the end when the protagonist orders a huge number of pants, all the same color, and can feel them “winging their way toward me through the night.” The image stuck with me, and I think helped me limit my online ordering after that. The fragmentation of ads, news spots, all the input of a materialist society, can and should be resisted with everything we have.
Thanks for reading tip, Laura. I'm always looking for books for my 10-year-old son and we can use all the ammunition we can get for our "You're not getting a smart phone until you're 18" campaign we can get!
Well, I wouldn’t recommend it for a 10 yo, unfortunately—the language is terrible. I just thought it was a poignant and prescient example of what happens to a society that takes materialism and especially personal technology to the extreme: the flattening of relationships and personalities and the desolation of how people spend their time and money. It feels a little like Lord of the Flies—not a comfortable read but a potentially useful one.
And good luck with the no-smartphone campaign! We have held out so far with our 16 yo, but he hasn’t been super interested in them yet.
Lucky. I was in the impossible situation of no phone = no friends, sadly. It was simply our reality.
It’s pretty much ours too, although he has one other friend who doesn’t have internet access on his phone. He’s also pretty introverted and wasn’t necessarily aware of everything he was missing, and a little stubborn about not following the crowd, but the older he gets, the more he feels the difference. Parenting is intense right now—you have my sympathy!
Thanks again, Laura. I will hold off on the book. We'll see how the no-phone rule goes. I think it will be a struggle with our guy...
Does he have siblings and neighborhood friends? That helps a lot. Ours is an only and really needed to be able to connect with his buddies outside of school and activities as none of them live in our neighborhood.
Good luck, I really admire you for sticking to it!
I gave in at 12 with the phone - emotional blackmail! However, in exchange, he made his Confirmation, lol.
Has your boy read the Warriors series by Erin Hunter? It's about cats. My boy devoured them several times over.
We’ll check them out. Thank you!
Thank you Laura M. I've seen those books at our local library and we have three cats. Could be a hit!