See this for a discussion of Pope Benedict’s speech on 2010/11/07 during his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. For those who’ve not heard of this place, it’s said by some to be the burial site of St. James the Apostle, brother of St. John the Apostle. The traditions are too recent, Medieval Age, to be considered authoratative, yet, much good and no bad to my knowledge has come from the pilrimages to this site. It is, in fact, one of the few pilgrimage sites which would draw me if I were a world-traveler.
In any case, the “basilica of the Sagrada Família, a masterpiece by Antoni Gaudía,” was recently completed and Pope Benedict was there to consecrate it — in Barcelona, his other stop on his trip to Spain. As I understand it, this basilica was designed in an apparently successful effort to use what might be labeled the ‘modern viewpoint’ to artistically manifest Christian truths. I applaud such efforts which run parallel to my similar efforts in metaphysics and literature, and — soon enough — theology since those trained as Christian theologians seem determined to go to their graves without having the courage and faith to serve God by engaging reality in a creative, courageous, and faith-filled way.
The bloodless pagans, including blanched Christians, seem dominant in the modern age. They have diverted streams of the modern projects and have ridden upon the flood-waters in a way that can perhaps be seen as tragic, though I think one reason they’re so bloodless is that they’re no more than ex-Christians, at least in a cultural sense. It’s a sad fate to be defined by what your ancestors were and what you don’t wish to be, but men of the modern West show no real aptitude for any sort of vigorous paganism, only for non-Christianity, a sort of nullity.
As ex-Christians, they fall into the realm of Christian comedy rather than pagan tragedy — Christianity knows of tragedy only from the outside since we’re always free to choose Christ and, hence, a good end. Whatever might be the case with pagans, the modern phase of the Christian comedy has become a farce, played out by those who strive to remain Christians by remaining true to traditional human encapsulations of “the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy” as Pope Benedict termed these forms of human knowledge of God’s Creation. These Christians live behind ghetto walls refusing to look at the huge amount of material our age has added to that “book of nature” and to our understanding of at least the history of “the book of sacred Scripture” and the history of the “book of liturgy.”
If we are to rebuild a Christian civilization in the West, we don’t need hand-waving claims that religion and science aren’t incompatible, nor do we need more groups of poorly educated Christians discussing the Bible in self-affirming terms, nor do we need more smiles and more mobs of laymen at the altars. What we need is Christians willing to walk the walk, to expend sweat and time studying “the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy.” We need new understandings of Creation in the form of new thought, new art, new ways of praising God — all of which activities would be very demanding upon our soft and underdeveloped minds and moral natures. We need most of all to develop these understandings and to use them to build a new Christian civilization on top of the ruins of the civilization we’ve allowed to decay by our sheer laziness and moral irresponsibility.
It’s a bittersweet comedy that we modern Christians are acting out, a comedy in which we’re offered always a good end which lies in another world but bittersweet to our perspectives because we fail to play our roles, fail to respond properly to Creation. By not responding properly to Creation, we also fail to respond properly to God. And that will have consequences of some sort.
In a day or two, I’ll address a specific aspect of Pope Benedict’s efforts to revive Christian Civilization, one which should bring out a sense of shame in Americans.