Re-imagining Christianity, part 2
We have forgotten who we
are. Westerners find themselves, to take
a first analogy, in the situation of G.K. Chesterton’s (hypothetical) boy whose
home is built upon the image of one of the White Horses of Wessex and doesn’t
realize it because he lives too close to the horse, indeed, within it. Only by distancing himself from his hill-side
cottage can this boy turn around and realize where his entire life has been
spent. “I think”, says Chesterton, “that
is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today;
and that is the point of [The Everlasting Man]”.[1] A second comparison would be to liken
ourselves to those denizens of the community from which Jonas must escape in
Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel[2] The
Giver. This community has managed to
insulate itself against all forms of pain, even the pain of history. However, by engaging in an effort of
“collective amnesia”, they have lost the best parts of themselves and perhaps,
the very meaning of existence. And yet,
even in that dystopian community, (historical) memory still retains an alluring
and sacred quality. When it comes to
today’s western world (a third image), we are all fish in a Christian ocean,[3] as
contemporary historian Tom Holland (an unwitting heir of Chesterton)[4] has now
had opportunity to say on what seems to be every Christian podcast. This introduction to imaginative apologetics takes
its cues from, on the one hand, a Jewish-American woman and, on the other, an
agnostic Englishman (as well as his Christian predecessor).[5] While this may have something of the absurd
about it, it may be salutary to recall that Jesus’s most ambitious apostle in
the first century was a Jewish man who had previously been, shall we say, a
“skeptic” regarding the disciples’ claims about the man from Nazareth – that
is, until he met him on the way to Damascus.
That rendez-vous on the road enabled that future apostle to
(properly) understand history for the first time, both his own and that of his
people (and indeed, of the world).
As the old adage has it, history is “his
story”, i.e. God’s. Since the call of
Abraham, the Creator has been subtly and opaquely establishing his kingdom in
his world, or, in the words of C.S. Lewis, He has been reconquering lost
territory. From this vantage point,
apologetics is seen to be an effort to “remind” those heirs of “western
civilization” – at a historical moment when this notion has fallen into
disrepute – of the strange workings of the God they ignore, workings that have
made them who they are, though they have forgotten their story, and thus have
no memory of their identity. Lois Lowry
has written a quartet of novels that can help us to understand our current
cultural amnesia, to remember what we’ve lost and guide us to a recovery of the
true, the good and the beautiful in our story.
Like Jonas’ community (The Giver: 1993) or Kira’s father (Gathering
Blue: 2000) or the inhabitants of Village who are seduced into egotistic
materialism by Trademaster (Messenger: 2004) or Gabriel’s mother (Son:
2012), we have “lost our soul”. However,
we may yet rediscover it. The way
forward is the way back. Indeed, the
revolution which truly gives freedom has long since begun, and we are all
invited to join in the divine struggle to reclaim the world “for our Lord and
for his Messiah” (Rev. 11.15).
As The Giver[6]
begins, Jonas[7] - a young
member of a (benignly sinister[8])
totalitarian society which has succeeded in eliminating suffering from their
strictly-regulated community – is “selected” as the next “Receiver of
Memory”. In this dystopic “worker’s
paradise”, all motivation and rewards for competition have been done away with
– to begin with, all 12-year-olds are assigned a life-long profession by the
“Council of Elders”, whose decisions are based on an analysis of the character,
proclivities and talents of each child during their first twelve years of life.
This literally “colour-blind” society has
been engineered in such a way as to eliminate all sources of possible conflict,
namely, all differences and (perceived) inequalities; this state of “sameness”
encompasses all aspects of the community’s life, from clothing to climate. This pain-free community has managed to keep
even the memory of suffering at bay, by tasking the Receiver with the
responsibility to remember – and therefore, vicariously experience – the
history of the world. The Receiver is
consulted by the Elders only when they face a new dilemma (a rare occurrence)
and find themselves in need of the Receiver’s hard-won wisdom. As Jonas soon discovers, there was a time,
“back and back and back”, when life was experienced differently, but besides
the Receiver, everyone exists in a timeless state in which no one can recall a
time when anything was any different, and no one can imagine why (or how)
things would ever change.
The fragile “peace” of Jonas’ community is
maintained through social conventions which include a tight control of how
language is used, as well as the almost total absence of (intense or
unpleasant) emotion (including libido), due to the regular administration of
“medication”. Anyone who is no longer
useful to the community – whether they be sickly infants, the elderly or
uncooperative citizens[9] – is
“released” to “elsewhere”. Through
meticulous social engineering, the community has seemingly “created” a
world in which “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no
more”[10]. This is the story of how Jonas, now
apprenticed to the current Receiver, discovers what his assigned “vocation”
entails, beginning with him absorbing the “received wisdom” of the Giver[11] and
learning what the community will expect of him once he is fully trained. As we will have occasion to see, Jonas’
encounter with (memories of) the past will nurture his rebellious impulses.
[1] This work consists of
Chesterton’s philosophy of history; The Everlasting
Man: A Guide to G.K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece (Introduction, Notes, and
Commentary by Dale Ahlquist), Elk Grove Village: Word on Fire, 2024 [1925], pp.
9-10.
[2] Cf. Chesterton’s
remarks about the need for a “psychological history”, which would describe the
past as a story that made meaningful sense of the present, something, in his
opinion, that was being done more effectively in the early 20th
century by novels rather than the conventional historical works – “fiction [is]
truer than fact”: The Everlasting Man: A Guide to G.K. Chesterton’s
Masterpiece, pp. 227ff.
[3] Tom Holland, in his
magisterial work Dominion (2019), makes the same point (a century later)
as Chesterton had – that Christianity’s critics are launching a Christian
critique against the faith of the Church: cf.
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man: A Guide to G.K. Chesterton’s
Masterpiece, pp. 10ff. “Their
whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty
criticism. They still live in the shadow
of the faith and have lost the light of the faith”. To paraphrase St. John Henry Newman, “To be
deep in history is to cease to be a skeptic (of Christianity)”.
[4] Indeed, Holland brings
much-needed objectivity to Chesterton’s rather rosy, idiosyncratic depiction of
the Roman Republic (cf. “the dream of Rome” in Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator
movies, 2000/2024), whom he sets against the foil of “evil-incarnate Carthage”. While Chesterton emphasises the Christian
synthesis of Classical philosophy with both Roman myth and Hebrew story in such
a way that Rome helped “prepare the way” for the Incarnation, historians like
Holland remind us that Rome (her leaders, at any rate) honoured her ideals more
in the breach than in the observance and was anything but a paragon of the
Classical virtues of “wisdom, courage, temperance and justice” – just ask the
Gauls who were “pacified” by Caesar to the tune of one million dead and another
million enslaved… Indeed, the New
Testament (even Luke!) consistently presents Jesus’ birth and
death-resurrection-ascension as a series of subversive events that delegitimize
Roman imperial pretensions (esp. those of the Caesars). The book of Revelation goes so far as to
depict Rome as a pair of beasts, empowered by the satanic dragon, the ultimate
enemy of the kingdom of God and of the Lamb (cf. Rev. 13, often dubbed as a
depiction of a “demonic trinity”). Cf.
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man: A Guide to G.K. Chesterton’s
Masterpiece (Introduction, Notes, and Commentary by Dale Ahlquist), Elk
Grove Village: Word on Fire, 2024 [1925], pp. 251-71; Carey,
Greg, “The Book of Revelation as Counter-Imperial Script” in Richard A.
Horsley, ed. In the Shadow of Empire, Louisville: WJK, 2008, pp. 157-76. Though Chesterton does describe Christianity
as an “Eternal Revolution” in chapter 7 of Orthodoxy, in my opinion,
Chesterton’s revolution is too mild by half: cf.
Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy (with Annotations & Guided Reading by
Trevin Wax), Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022 [1908], pp. 147-78.
[5] As well as two
contemporary New Testament scholars: the American Richard B. Hays (b. 1948) and
the Brit N.T. Wright (b. 1948). Also,
Chesterton and Lewis are never far away…
[6] Boston & New York:
Clarion Books, 1993.
[7] An Anglicisation of the
Greek form of “Jonah”; cf. KJV of Mt. 12.39-41 (the “sign of Jonas”).
[8] Cf. Hannah Arendt’s
“the banality of evil”.
[9] There is a
“three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy.
[10] Rev. 21.4; as we will
see, the community has not eliminated death, but has rather taken complete
control of who dies when and how. “For
the Old Testament authors, existence beyond the grave can be secured only…through
the memory of the clan or tribe…”: Harrisville, Roy A. Fracture: The Cross
as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006, p. 19. In
Jonas’ community, the memory of those who have been “released” is not
preserved, and this, in the interest of avoiding prolonged grief; rather, a
child lost to a tragic accident can be “replaced” by another child who bears
the same name. In the community, an
individual qua individual only “exists” while they are playing the role
the community has assigned them. There
are ceremonies to celebrate the release of the elderly, which resemble
retirement parties more than anything else; they are “funerals without
grief”. Perhaps this is Lowry’s way of
critiquing the trend to hold “Celebrations of Life” instead of traditional
rituals associated with the mourning/burial of the dead. Then again, what “celebrations of life” and
“celebrations of release” have in common is a lack of any religious
interpretation of the “passing” of the deceased.
[11] Once the Receiver is
assigned an apprentice, they become “the Giver” (of memories).
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