It was something of a relief when my colleague on the Catholic Herald emailed me to tell me that I didn’t need to write about my New Year resolutions after all. The project was not going to run.
I was very grateful. I hadn’t been able to work out how much pretence and deceit this act of authorial responsibility was going to cost me. Whatever heterodoxies lap around my ankles, Pelagianism isn’t one of them. I have never believed that New Year resolutions can have any effect other than demoralisation, but exposing quite how flaky and fragile the will is. I don’t make them.
New Year’s resolutions hold up a mirror to the scale of values we use to engage life with. At one end illusion and optimism, at the other catastrophe and somewhere in the middle realism. Resolutions belong at the illusory end.
But there are other more important issues which as we assess them, raise the question of where on our scale or catastrophe/optimism and reality they should be placed.
Pope Benedict’s death, much lamented and much commented on, has raised a number of issues for commentators. It is the end of an era, and with all such moments, people wonder what direction history will take.
As Joseph Ratzinger he gave five small radio speeches in 1969 where he reflected on the change from one era to another.
“We are at a huge turning point – he explained – in the evolution of mankind. This moment makes the move from Medieval to modern times seem insignificant.”
He compared the current era to that of Pope Pius VI who was abducted by troops of the French Republic and died in prison in 1799. The Church was fighting against a force which intended to annihilate it definitively, confiscating its property and dissolving religious orders.
Today’s Church could be faced with a similar situation he foresaw, undermined by the temptation to reduce priests to “social workers” and it and all its work reduced to a mere political presence.
“From today’s crisis, will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal,” he warned.
“It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity.”
This was an extraordinarily prescient observation; all the more unusual and potent in being made by a young academic theologian. And he identified the fault line as being politics taking precedence over eschatology or salvation. He offered a sombre warning about the challenge that politics posed to the Faith:
“Wherever politics tried to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.” (Truth & Tolerance: Belief and World Religions).
During the second half of the Twentieth Century, one might say that this encapsulates or summarises the ambitions of the “political spirit”; “to do the work of God”, that is to promise heaven on earth; justice, equality and peace here and now. The ambitions of the Left have never been any less than that. In fact the state has set out to replace both the functions and symbolism of God and that of the family. Once heaven and eschatology have been banned or ridiculed, the political spirit finds itself with a self-imposed duty as well as a desire to replicate heaven on earth; and of course, can only do it by force. Totalitarianism is the inverse of the gift of free-will. Ratzinger is correct to call it the “demonic” inverse. A proper judgment will need to be both theological as well as political.
The shape of Modernism has been contoured by an insistence on the illusion of moral progress. Technological progress, cleverness birthed by R & D, is obviously real. But the moral capacity to manage technological progress has not kept pace. And yet without moral progress the future is bleak. Giving psycho-chimps nuclear weapons instead of stones will make the outcome worse not better.
Despite the epic ending of Lord of the Rings which sees heroism, humility, virtue and courage defeat evil, JRR Tolkien did not have an optimistic view of the future. No New Year resolutions for him.
“Actually I am a Christian,” Tolkien wrote of himself, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255).”
This is no morose lack of optimism. It is born of a theological realism that takes the perverting energy of original sin seriously. St Paul was clear-sighted about the consequence of this metaphysical struggle; “ Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.” (2Ti 3:1-13)
But the awareness of this long defeat has been felt throughout the ages of the Church.
Even the heroic desert fathers shared a common belief that successive generations of monks would become weaker and weaker, unable to bear the great trials of their predecessors. In fact it was surmised that in the end, the simple act of believing would take greater grace than all of the ascetic feats of the earliest monks.
The years which saw the great Ecumenical Christian Councils were fought in the undertow of muscular Arianism; the High Middle Ages were refined by heresies growing like weeds. The age of Mystics and miracles was shattered by the headlong multiple schisms of the Reformation.
But if the Church fails to deliver its children from history, it can deliver them from the evil that drives history. Joseph Ratzinger insisted that
“To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover.”
If the father of lies produces offspring who mimic their source with a constant diet of accusation and lies, the children of our Father in heaven become lovers of truth, beauty, hope and compassion, rather than lies.
It is love, both of people and of virtue, illuminated by faith, accompanied by gratitude for redemption that holds the dark ominous tide of history at bay. The Church cannot quell the storm through which she sails, but she can and must constantly offer rescue to those who recognise they are drowning and cry out for help.
And so perhaps as the young Joseph Ratzinger suggested, the size of the Church is not anything that should concern us; only the quality of its faith, the clarity of its vision and the heat of its heart.
Perhaps to redirect the gaze of our neighbours from their obsession with politics and progress, we could slip in an extra word as we offer the appropriate season’s greetings; “Happy (and heavenly) New Year.”
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