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David Bentley Hart - Julian Our Contemporary

An encomium to Julian the Apostate by, of all people, David Bentley Hart:

I find it impossible not to be affected, moreover, by the simple pathos of Julian’s protest against what he saw as his culture’s progressive abandonment of the traditions that had sustained it from time immemorial. From his giddy eminence, he could look back over countless centuries of civilization, at a history of incomparable achievements in philosophy, the arts, law, warfare, and civil administration.

He also could look back to religious customs that mediated between the human and natural orders, that guarded innumerable sacred sites where human and divine stories intermingled, and that bore witness to a cosmos in which, as Thales said, “all things are full of gods.” But he could also see, all about him, temples deserted or destroyed, the gods not only forsaken but deprecated as demons, and the entire ethos of the empire slowly melting away.

If nothing else, it is a pathos that some of might find strangely familiar.

We now also live in the twilight of an ancient civilization, and many of us occasionally deceive ourselves that the course of history can be reversed. Christendom is quite gone, and the Christian culture of the West seems irrevocably destined for slow dissolution. The arts it inspired, the moral grammar it shaped, the shared stories and convictions by which it bound peoples together seem surely to belong to a constantly receding past.

It is interesting to put this in the context of Ross Douthat’s column on gay marriage. Douthat is careful on the one hand to note that so-called “traditional marriage” is a cultural artifact:

What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The default family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient, has been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is often communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological children.

(Ironically, this is something we see most strongly in the Bible with its many polygamists.) At the same time, Douthat says that if traditional marriage collapses any more than it already has (and to large degree, it already has collapsed because of divorce, birth control, etc.), then we are going to be losing something, something that’s hard to explain:

But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

In other words, if gay marriage triumphs (and inevitably will), we’re admitting that a certain cultural ideal wasn’t really so ideal after all. And maybe it wasn’t.

On Bloggingheads.tv, they made the supremely boring choice of having two liberals, Hanna Rosin and Ann Friedman, talk about the column, and neither is really capable of understanding what it was actually about. They are both looking at it from the lens of politics—Is Douthat for Prop 8 or against it?—so they can’t understand that the piece is ultimately an elegy. Douthat’s whole piece is premised on the idea that history is against his side. That’s why he ends the piece with

But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.

The incomprehension of Rosin and Friedman illustrates this perfectly: they cannot even entertain the idea of whatever it is he’s saying. Of course, some of this can be put down to Catholic-style, woe-is-us, doom-and-gloom decline-of-civilization-ism. (And Hart, though Orthodox not Catholic, is certainly as guilty of indulging in this as anyone else.) But the idea of mourning cultural change is something we should try to understand not just when the cultural change is happening to funkily clothed (or unclothed) indigenous peoples but also when it happens in our own society. A shift has occurred. We are watching the ramifications of the shift play out. Maybe in the end, it’s all for the greater good, but it’s still sad to see the old world burn to the ground.

Link via Reditus (a Catholic who otherwise has no tolerance for Catholic declinism), who adds this comment,

Of course, all of this was transmitted to Christianity through the mysterious figure called “Pseudo-Dionysius”, who replaced the idea that “all things are full of the gods” with “all things are full of the angels “, (though Origen may have already stated this). From that vision of the celestial hierarchies came the cathedrals of Europe, our pomp and ceremonial, our most exalted works of literature, and so forth… all the way up to modernity. It is arguable then that the reason that we are becoming less Christian is that we have become less “pagan”: we have ceased to see our culture and religion as a tradition based on the eternal harmony of the music of the spheres and more as an absurd leap of faith amongst a lot of dead rocks. We tend to try to build our faith without culture, and it is no wonder that we fail.