The Feast of Saturn
One thing I like about being Christian is that I find a greatly expanded scope to who is with me. I have more brothers and neighbors than I once did. Allies turn up in unexpected places, such as in jail in Birmingham.
Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
This is the opening of that same letter:
16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.
Perhaps the rank-and-file Leftist would still retain enough non-scientific humanity or retain an atavism of Christian sentiment to scorn the practice of driving armed slaves to homicide for the amusement of idle crowds, or to recoil from the sight of many tiny skulls and fragile baby bones in the Apothetae, the cleft where the stern Spartans cast their unwanted products of conception, but the intellectual leadership of the Left, much like Plato mocking the gods the commoners of Athens believed, has no metaphysical or ethical ground which would offer intellectual support for such condemnation. To the elite of the Left, such condemnation is mere opinion, no better and no worse than the contrary opinion.
In other words, the modern Left could not, without at least a blink, support the words of Martin Luther King.
I have noticed this before. The New Left is always overturning and dismissing the Old Left, buttering them with disesteem.
Once I read an article on Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, saying (as if it were a matter of fact, not opinion) that "to modern readers, some statements in the book may seem to convey a sense of misogyny or homophobia". That book was a banner and the rallying cry of the Sexual Revolution in the dark days of the Carter Years; perhaps not the largest and best known banners of that revolutionary army, but the one under which I marched. This article condemned the book as being insufficiently Revolutionary, as Heinlein committed some sort of thoughtcrime in relation to homosexuality, showing insufficient enthusiasm for it. But homosexuality would be no more acceptable in current society than it had been in 1930, had not the whole edifice of sexual mores and customs been leveled into rubble (not just the Christian notions of decency, but any notion from any civilization. Even the temple prostitution of the Carthaginians had a higher standard than our current ones.) Heinlein was one of the grenadiers in the vanguard, who breached the wall through which the barbarians of the Revolution rushed; and now they turn on him.
The ingratitude was (and is) shocking to me: revolutionaries apparently must always be in revolution, and if the revolutionaries of the previous generation helped establish the ideas and institutions of the current party, but their ideas no longer match modern fads and fashions, why, to the machine of Dr. Guillotine with them!
Robespierre, who sent so many to the machine, ended up under the blade himself. Like Saturn, the Revolutionaries eat their own children, and like Saturn, they castrate their own fathers.
Perhaps this is because the year is always Year Zero with them, and they have no past and no future.
Perhaps this is because the "brights" are not very bright, and do not have the intellectual power to sustain an accumulation of wisdom, precedent, or scientific achievement over generations: surely we have noticed their main accusation against their foes is that we are stupid. Perhaps this is what psychologists call projection.
Perhaps this is because they are Hegelian, and they believe morality and law are in a constant flux of evolution and change, a clash of thesis and antithesis, and the old things must pass away, before all things are made new.
Perhaps they are Gnostics, who believe the Demiurge has already corrupted any virtue, any gnosis, the previous generation of Gnostics once knew, merely by the act of categorizing and analyzing it. On the planet Tormance circling Arcturus, the wise would no doubt say that the Crystalman has already corrupted the esoteric fluid of the dew of wisdom into fixed false form of his icy crystals, and made it part of his evil material world-system, one more trap for the weak and unwary.
But whatever the reason, it must make them lonely.
They cannot look to earlier and foundational figures of Revolution for inspiration and comfort. The revolutionaries and progressives of earlier generations were racists, like Margaret Sanger, mega-mass-murderers like Mao, or else they were white males. Even a Deist like Thomas Paine was a white male. A true believer of the Left can read their works only like an anthropologist, as someone enjoying something not his own native atmosphere, making painstaking allowances for changes of time and custom.
In contrast, any Christian can pick up and read with entertainment, enlightenment and edification, as read as his own:
- a poetic theophany written in the Bronze Age,
- a teaching manual of the First Century
- an autobiography from the Fifth Century
- a theological tract from the 13th Century
- a poem from the 14th Century
- an elegiac allegory of the 14th Century,
- a devotional of the 15th Century,
- An epic poem of the 17th Century
- a sermon written in the 18th Century,
- a history written in the 19th Century
- an apologetic written in 1909
- a science fiction story written in 1938
The Christian can also listen to Rap, Country-Western, or to The Great Mass in C Minor of Mozart, or the St. John’s Passion of Bach as our own.
Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that Christendom preserved and incorporated pagan philosophy, ideas, and ideals, leaving aside the devilries condemned by the Rev. King above, like infanticide and gladiatorial games, so that Aristotle and Plato and now "our own" part of the Christian heritage, in sharp contrast to the Orwellian obliteration of the previous cultures in areas conquered by the Prophet. It is no coincidence that the study of antiquities and the science of archeology arose in Christendom, and nowhere else: it is no coincidence that (despite that the Church is routinely condemned for her alleged obscurantism and persecution of scientists) the celebration of Lysenko and the execution of Lavoisseur was both at the hands of ideological anti-Christian revolutionaries.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
