Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads. These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder.
The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves. There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness. Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people. Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose. And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.
How, then, do we keep ourselves steady? There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand. With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours. We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity. We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations. We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children. We can say that political causes do not make good religions. And so on. It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.
All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one. We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax. Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new. The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial. We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year. The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’ We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time. For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world. Yes, we know all this. And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.
In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose. So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one. Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society. Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions. Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that
Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself. The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality. Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.
In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen. Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear. Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for. Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused. Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo. Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching. We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language. It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.
A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church. But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much. We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society. Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well). The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.
In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex. We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism. We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it. All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.
There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded. To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations. For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes. To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games. For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been. It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed. It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right. It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated. Truth must be twisted and then toppled. Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.
This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre. I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well. But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield. Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.
But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass. For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will. It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted. Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good. If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright. Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.
The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh. I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to Heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.
