Saturday Links
The problem with Christian civilization, the tomb of Saint Nicholas, Christmas metaphors, the rise of the private library, and more.
Good morning! Paul Kingsnorth gave this year’s Erasmus Lecture in New York. It’s called “Against Christian Civilization,” and it has now been published in the January issue of First Things:
What is this “West”? Well, it depends whom you ask. A liberal, a conservative, a reactionary, and a Marxist might give very different answers. But let us, instead, ask a historian. In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after the Second World War, the medievalist Christopher Dawson offered his definition: ‘There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.’
The West, said Dawson, was a religious construction. Specifically, it was a creation of the Roman Catholic Church. This is the only reason we talk about a “West” at all. But this claim immediately raises a question. If the Christian faith is the basis of Western culture, what happens when that faith retreats—or is rejected? We know the answer, because that rejection, or retreat—what the poet Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “sea of the faith”—has been going on perhaps since the Renaissance. As we survey the twenty-first-century landscape, at least in Western Europe, we can see that our founding religion is now defunct as a guiding force and a cultural glue.
A question logically arises from that observation: Is the decline of Christianity responsible for our current malaise? Is our lack of faith at the root of our loss of confidence and the ensuing inversion of our old values? The answer to this, in one sense, is obviously yes. As another historian, Tom Holland, demonstrated in his book Dominion, it was Christianity that formed the Western mind. When such a sacred order dies, there will be upheaval at every level of society, from politics right down to the level of the soul.
This, I think, is where we are. And I am hardly the only one to have noticed. In fact, almost everyone who is paying attention has by now noticed. Some of those people, in response, have come to a conclusion: Since Christianity was the basis of this “Western” culture of ours, and since this culture is now sick or even dying, the way to revive it must be to revive Christianity—not so much as a religion, but rather as a social glue, or even as a weapon. What we need, we increasingly hear from many different quarters, is a return to something called “Christian civilization”—regardless of whether the Christian faith is, in fact, true.
At a certain level, this might appear to be an attractive narrative. But I believe it is a deadly mistake.
It’s a bracing lecture. You can also watch it here.
Does a book published by an obscure press by a retired psychiatrist living on a Scottish island make the definitive case against neo-Darwinism? Dan Hitchens thinks so: “Many philosophers and physicists have argued against reductionism, or what McGilchrist calls the ‘school of nothing buttery’: the approach that dictates that everything can be accounted for in terms of its parts. Human behavior can be explained in terms of genes, complex systems in terms of physical particles. However forceful the philosophical arguments against reductionism, it exerts immense power over the contemporary mind, partly because it appears to be a complete worldview with an answer for every question. And therefore it can be finally displaced only by a worldview as comprehensive in scope and as detailed in application. That is why The Matter With Things has to be 1,579 pages long. Reductionism, in McGilchrist’s view, is like not getting the joke or not hearing the music: a failure to see properly.”
WORLD has announced its Books of the Year for 2024. They include Niall Williams’s novel Time of the Child, Dana Gioia’s collection of essays Poetry as Enchantment, Brad Wilcox’s Get Married, and others.
I review Andrew Hui’s study of the private study in The Washington Examiner: “Hui traces the rise of the private library from Petrarch to Montaigne and explains how a ‘well-stocked library and well-furnished study became must-have for any self-respecting, high-net-worth individuals.’ In The Book of the Art of Trade (1458), the merchant Benedetto Cotrugli writes that every good house should have both an office (a scrittoio) for welcoming visitors and a private study (a studiolo) for reading great works of literature. How a private study should be built and furnished became topics of much discussion. In On the Art of Building (1485), for example, Leon Battista Alberti remarks that private libraries should be built in the east or south side of the house to prevent ‘mold’ or ‘rust’ and be filled with ‘a large collection of rare books, drawn, preferably, from the learning of ancients.’ They should be decorated with maps and various ‘mathematical instruments.’ Paolo Cortesi, the bishop of Ubrino, argued in 1510 that a cardinal’s palazzo should have both a library and a private study. The study should be close to the bedroom, ‘safe from intrusion,’ and have ‘a spiral staircase’ to provide ‘an inside passage down into the library.’”
The rural lives of writers: Patricia Craig reviews Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann: “‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just begun, are so full of flowers that in the evening they smell exactly like the breath of cows’. And a bit later, ‘I have never lived with trees before.’ At the same time, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Rodmell in Sussex, was playing bowls with visitors from London, wearing an old felt hat on her head and long pointed canvas shoes, putting on a show of bonhomie in the intervals of brooding about the state of the world. And Rosamond Lehmann, at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, was entertaining guests at the Queen Anne manor house she shared with her then husband Wogan Philipps, and complaining about the Women’s Institute meetings she felt obliged to attend (‘Damn and hell … I hate it so’). It would be another ten years before she was able to report to a friend, ‘I’m in my cottage at last.’
Poem: Valerie Wohlfeld, “Stained Glass”
Rembrandt in Vienna: “Readers in Europe, and non-European readers who might be in Vienna before the exhibit ends on January 12, do what you can to get there. It’s magical. You will need to book a time to go, because it’s hugely popular, and the museum needs to manage the crowds.”
Peter Howarth reviews the selected writings of William Morris: “For the first two hundred forty pages of this handsome selected edition, we are girdle-deep in battle, captivity, and defeat. ‘The Hollow Land,’ Morris’s first medievalist romance, divided into ‘Fytte the first,’ ‘Fytte the second,’ and so forth, relays the failed uprising of Florian and his brother Arnald of the House of the Lilies against the tyranny of the House of Red Harald; just as they die, they fall into the foggy, time-slipping Hollow Land, where they meet their old enemies once again and learn the injustice of their former cause . . . Then, abruptly, the book brings us back to the nineteenth century with ‘The Lesser Arts,’ Morris’s crucial lecture on decorative craft and its power to restore the British social fabric. For the following three hundred pages, there are lectures and letters on interior furnishing and the pattern-making of Morris’s unique wallpapers, on socialism and revolution, on the protection of ancient buildings, and the full texts of Morris’s time-traveling fables, A Dream of John Ball and its anarcho-utopian cousin, News from Nowhere, concluding with brief selections from the prose romances. Our familiarity now with the look of Morris & Co. shouldn’t diminish the astonishing range and capacity that these texts reveal.”
In praise of Paul Bailey: “Though it may seem spurious to say it of a novelist who was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, who counted Beryl Bainbridge amongst his friends (they used to watch Coronation Street and compare notes over the phone afterwards), and at least half of whose novels are still in print, that spavined term of faint praise ‘overlooked’ seemed to me to apply to him in the last couple of decades of his career. Time to make the case for Bailey’s greatness and permanence.”
Joseph Bottum writes about Christmas metaphors:
Christmas is the season of metaphors — similes, analogies, and increasingly mad metonymies. They hang on the holiday like ornaments on an overloaded tree, the branches creaking under the weight of bells and tinsel and glass doodads and bulbs, Santas and snowmen and stars, sprayed with extra flocking. The Christmas season is a fruitcake so overstuffed that it crumbles when we try to cut it. Citron and raisins and candied cherries. Currants and chopped walnuts. Figs and prunes and dried apricots. The wonder is that it held together in the first place.
Partly that derives from the way Christmas preserves language. Think of that word citron, and ask yourself when was the last time you saw it outside a Christmas recipe. Sleigh bells and crèches. Magi and mangers. Ha’penny — a word Americans know only because it comes in a jingle about how the Christmas goose is getting fat. These words have dictionary definitions, of course, but their now almost-exclusive association with Christmas gives them a shine, a richness, that makes them tokens of memory and the season. They denote something, but they mean something more. A ha’penny is worth half a penny — and also half the world: an emblem of charity, and goodwill, and God’s love of the poor.
Archeologists discover what they believe is the tomb of Saint Nicholas: “The six-foot-long limestone sarcophagus was found buried 6 feet deep within the two-story annex of St. Nicholas Church in Demre, Antalya, Turkey. Long considered the final resting place of the Saint, excavations have been underway here since 1989.”
Forthcoming: Volker Leppin, Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint, translated by Rhys S. Bezzant (Yale, January 28): “Drawing on centuries of scholarship, Volker Leppin pieces together fragments of Francis’s life story to find a seeker who never reached his destination, a man whose extraordinary charisma drew others in yet who was uncomfortable in the spotlight. Amazingly, Francis stayed within the fold of the church while offering a new and radical vision of Christianity that proved wildly popular. Leppin’s Francis of Assisi sets Francis’s inner emotional and spiritual world against a broader historical background to show how the message of this inspiring and often vexing medieval saint continues to resonate in our contemporary world.”
Great to see your review of the Gioia book!
Thank you Micah for the link to Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture. I heartily recommend others do as well. I will listen again.