Some reasons are obvious.  Civilization is better for a long life, not so short and brutish.  But there is always a question as to its salvific role.   Does civilization make mankind morally better?    While in a certain way civilization is self-preserving, there is little or no evidence that Christ considered it his mission to save any civilization.  And this relationship becomes especially challenging when Christianity is hooked up with politics.  

There is no philosophy of singulars.  Meaning requires context.  Civilization is the expression of a culture in religion, philosophy, morality, politics, ethics, art, music, literature, manners, dress, and almost everything else.   My thesis is that all of these things are or may be not expressions of individual choice or will but are at best expressions of the highest level of reality that we can know or intuit.   

Plato argued that there was a place or region where the forms lived, a place not geographical but intellectual and more than intellectual, and this idea itself has never died, although just how this is arranged and how it ‘works’ is a matter of dispute.   Of course Aristotle denied that the forms had a transcendent ground, insisting that they were engaged in things, but then he never explained where the forms were parked when they were not informing beings of some kind.   Plato had believed there to be a transcendent form for such things as the good, but it was Plotinus, through Augustine, who argued that there was in the “Supreme” an archetype of everything that existed or would exist.  The Hellenistic world had its convictions regarding a transcendent ground that gave form to existent being.   There would have been moral relativism in that world but not the kind of relativism that confuses genders.   

If one turns to the environment, Second Temple Judaism, within which the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew were written, there are only the faintest traces of something like Plato’s forms.   What one finds is a two-tiered universe—perhaps three if the underworld is counted—consisting of nature as it is, characterized by corruption, decay, and a world characterized by Glory, or, in Hebrew, shekinah, which in Greek becomes glory, which is always associated with weight, kavod, which would distinguish it from the ephemeral or subjective.    

Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote four books in which glory is a theme, said that the word could not be defined.  Perhaps, but it can be described,  The glory of God was present when the blind man was healed; he was afflicted not because of sin but so that the glory of God might be revealed (John 9).     Where God is there is glory.  Glory is not ephemeral but real; Paul writes that Christians will bear “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (II Corinthians  4:17).   It is glory that we will share and in which we will live when Christ returns.  Glory is the characteristic of the existence of Christ in His kingdom, which is shared by all those who love Him and who live in Him.

Glory is the teleology, the end, the fulfillment of creation, the end toward which creation and redeemed humankind are moving.    In one of Paul’s most moving and fruitful passages, the heart of his theological cosmology, he describes a world we know, subjected to sin not of its own choosing but by God who, after the great rebellion and because of it,  subjected nature and human nature in  the hope that these will be redeemed in glory (Romans 8:18-25).    Glory is the name of the perfection we glimpse beyond the objects and events of life, the perfection dimly apprehended that makes the imperfection of existence present even as it inspires hope of something better.    Glory is the realm of the good, beautiful and true dimly perceived by philosophers, by Plato, Plotinus, and Berkeley, often by poets, proclaimed by revelation as the true, supernatural cosmos for which the revealed name is glory, a realm of which the true center is Jesus, and the ultimate purpose of which is not simply to serve as the home of ideas but the reality of which is a divine-human person, who is “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation,” in whom “all things were created.”  “He is the first-born from the dead . . .  In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19–20).   In the short fifth chapter of Second Peter Christians will partake “in the glory that is to be revealed” and will “obtain the unfading crown of glory,” because God “calls them to his eternal glory in Christ.”       

The clues to the existence of the realm of glory are all around those in whom  wonder has not been subsumed into an obviousness that blinds the eye of the heart.   As Saint Paul wrote:   the knowledge of God, of His divinity, is evident in creation (Romans 1:19–20).   Where there is order founded in goodness there is glory.  Where there is beauty there is glory.    It is not the sound of the Bach Mass; it is what you hear beyond the sound of the Bach Mass, what you see beyond the beauty of Raphael and Van Gogh.  It surrounds a bride on her wedding day . It is the solid something that inhabits love.     Glory is the perfection of order.   It is a sign of the presence of the holy.   Glory is the reward of fidelity, “if only we will fix our eyes on what is unseen, not on what we can see.  What we can see lasts for a moment. What is unseen is eternal” (II Corinthians 4:17). 

Glory has an antonym, for which it is difficult to find a single word:  the disordered, ordinary, the ignoble, the flat and undistinguished, the low and debased.   The best New Testament word is translated “corruption” or “decay.”  The promise of God’s will for the salvation of both nature and his elect is the overcoming of decay:  “for creation itself will be set free from the bondage,” the slavery, from the decay to which all things crested are subjected since the rebellion in Eden (Romans 8:21).  Corruption or decay is the inevitable companion of time.  Peter describes it as “the corruption that is in the world because of passion,” by the escaping of which we may share in the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4).   Passion:  the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, pride of life (I John 2:16), which corrupt whatever  they touch.   Of this threat to the soul nature provides the effective analogy.   Now the roof, which was repaired just short years ago must be repaired again.    Now I must do my exercises because my body is decaying before my very eyes.   There is the cosmic reality:  sin leads to decay or corruption which leads to death.  Righteousness, the acceptance of grace,  leads to holiness, to participation in Christ, which leads to glory, with its ordered permanence and beauty.  

It is the anticipation of glory that shines in the life of every saint.   Every life, says Paul, is like a seed falling into the ground, given to God, ready to bear the fruit of glory.   “So it is with the resurrection of the dead.   What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.   It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. . . .  We have borne the image of the man of dust, of Adam, “ we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (I Corinthians 15:42–50). 

Among other realities, this truth, that glory is the reality and the end,  casts into vivid relief the terms and conditions of human existence.   One consequence of sin is the distortion the created order, the existence of ‘natural’ evil—no evil is natural in God’s eternal plan—from tornados to plagues.  Another is the persistence of sin that so easily colonizes the human will so that while sin can be resisted it cannot be overcome, driven out of creation utterly and completely, until Christ returns; indeed it is the revealed pattern that the world untouched by grace grows worse.    This makes the anticipation of glory as it exists in the lives of saints, in order, in beauty, precious and worth defending, indeed celebrating.  This is why the good things of this life, beginning with the care of our own souls,  deserve our loyalty.   This is why civilization, always impermanent, and fragile, never a good in itself, ladened as it is with intimations of the life to come, deserves our loyalty.   But while the damage sin may do to the temporal order is severe, the damage sin inflicts upon the soul by denying it the fruition in glory that is its supernatural end  is far worse.   The end of disorder and decay that belong to this world may end in nothing, in the bleeding away of the very forms of reality, but the destruction of the form of souls destined for the glory and created for eternal life of holiness in God’s presence is an eternal sorrow.  

But here let us be concerned with the thought and possibility that glory is the revealed name for the reality for which Plato was groping, a reality that de-relativizes not just ideas but everything, making everything matter.    Perhaps it is true that when anything is done with the order that belongs to beauty, goodness, and truth, glory is being, often quietly, revealed.  If this is true every action, every artifact, that makes up civilization, by expressing the order of glory, is an anticipation of the glory of the age to come.    If this is evident in great, glorious, music, it is also shown in making the bed and setting the table, and along the way in manners and conversation.  If this is the case it follows that it is a Christian duty, perhaps not the most important but still very real, to support art.   What you hear in Rachmaninoff’s “Pathetique” is an anticipation of the glory of God, no small thing.  This is why liturgy must be beautiful, representing as it does the glory that belongs to God’s order.

This of course raises a question about the art of modernity and post modernity, which is, generally, critical image art, illuminating the good and the beautiful by its absence.  Here the fundamental principle that glory is the just ontological background is intersected by the seemingly inescapable rule that artists tell the story of their time and place.   Perhaps because such images represent ordered beauty, great museums in the United States are busily de-accessioning pre-modern paintings.   Necessarily so, because the civilization that reigns is  characterized at its living margins by public perversity, riot, and political prevarication, by what the Scriptures call decay or corruption.   [And to reiterate, it is neither necessary or right to deny that post-modern art simply corrupt; it is art, it is often full of insight, which raises the question once again, ‘What is art?’.  

The program for opposing the decay and corruption into which sin-infected nature will decline if unopposed must be based on the certainty that there is a transcendent ground, the background, remote or immediate, for every human action that is to be found where Plato’s region in which the ideas live is intersected by God’s reality, the realm of glory.    This why living is an art, which does not meant that the good life is merely aesthetic.  No human act is merely aesthetic.

 

The battle of the Boyne in July 1690 decided the fate of James III, who fled to France, which assured the Protestant Ascendancy. How land ownership in Ireland moved into the hands of absent English aristocracy is a longer story, but it is the essential element in Irish history. At mid 19th century native Irishmen owned very little of the land that is Ireland. Most of it was in the hands of middlemen who collected the rents from the landlords and may never have visited the plantations.

The famine of 1842-1850 triggered an unprecedented immigration, mostly to the United States, but also to Canada. Thousands took ship from the northwest in vessels frequently unseaworthy. Their destinations were often Boston, where Irish Protestants were tolerated but Catholics were viewed as a threat, their religion being inimical to American freedom.

This was not the first time the Irish had immigrated to the United States. It had begun before the War of the Revolution and increased after the Rebellion of 1795.  Of particular interest is the immigration of Irish protestants during and immediately after the revolution, which established Presbyterianism in the American backcountry of Virginia and North Carolina.

Boston, where Catholic immigration threatened Puritan control of the city government, became a center of the Know-Nothing Party, which took control of the Massachusetts legislature in 1854. In the face of the great immigration between ‘42 and ‘50, the legislature passed laws barring Catholics from being buried in public cemeteries, denying church officials any control over church property, and requiring children to read the bible from the Protestant King James version in public schools. The legislature formed a nunnery committee that raided Catholic schools and convents on trumped-up pretexts. In the long run, several Catholic churches were burned. Interestingly, the intellectual founder of the Know-Nothing movement was Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, eminently respectable, respected American, and rabid anti-Catholic. In a screed entitled “Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States,” Morse accused the Vatican of seeking to subvert the values and ideals of Anglo-Protestant America.

Catholics lived through the Know-Nothing Movement (a total dislike of everyone who wasn’t an Anglo-Protestant). There was the task of providing churches for the unprecedented immigration, as well as schools and colleges. The only crisis in the development of the Catholic Church in America was Testem Benevolentiae Nostre, in which Leo XIII warned against what he considered “Americanism,” the claim that American Catholicism was different and needed room to engage the Protestant culture.  This sometimes included the thought that the more difficult teachings of the Church need not be represented. In his letter, the pope warned against valuing the active apostolate more than the apostolate of prayer, which was pursued in monastic devotion.

It’s possible to see Americanism as defining the fracture that has characterized American Catholicism for the last century. Americanism tended to divide the Church into Accommodationists—people who believe the American republic somehow was unique and deserved a place of special consideration—and the old-line Irish Catholics. Over the next century the Accommodationists were represented by America, the flagship magazine of American progressivism, and Father Hesburgh’s Notre Dame. The old-line Irish were represented by The Wanderer newspaper, and their control of the diocesan hierarchies.

The text of Testem Benevolentiae includes what Americans will always see as freedom of the press: “The confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt on any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now greater need for the Church’s teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful, both of conscience and duty.”

 

Having lived through the Americanist difficulty and the outbreak of modernism in the early 20th century, the Catholic Church enjoyed a century of what appeared to be real and solid progress. All this was disrupted in 1952 by the Second Vatican Council. In the wake of the council the fracture that could be discerned in the Americanist controversy grew wider. With the Accommodationists adopting the Land o’ Lakes Proposal that the only criterion for success in the universities was rejection of the role of theology in favor of a standard of secular success.

What happened to the Irish in all this? There is no scientific answer but anecdotally I would expect to see the Irish who remember grandmother’s religion clustered around EWTN and the National Catholic Register. EWTN is the most successful communications exercise sponsored by the Catholic Church. It is loudly detested by the Roman authorities as a purveyor of what Pope Francis called “backwardism.” Like the National Catholic Register, it promotes traditional Catholicism in the face of the Progressive Ascendency since 1955.

Now after five generations of immigration it is impossible to identify who is Irish and who is not because almost everyone is Irish to some degree. The religion to which the Irish clung for four centuries appears to have crashed, but we don’t know the end of the story. Meanwhile we can keep doing genealogy, some of which will lead back to Ireland.

 

            Many years ago I was a harmless Episcopalian bedeviled by the inconsistencies of the theology of that church. Kings could be divorced or annulled—take your choice—but into the 19^th century an ordinary member of the Church of England needed an act of parliament to secure a divorce.

            And there was the intractable pro-life issue. The sign that says “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” is correct. Add to this the complication of figuring out what Jesus said–if he said anything–and there was always more than one interpretation of what he meant. Buried down inside it all was the clarion call of Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

            It was bound to strike anyone alive in the Pontificate of Pius XII that expectations for Catholics were different from expectations for your run-of-the-mill Episcopalians. And something about that clarion call cast all theological conferences, all of the bright-intelligent books based on continental authors, into the shade because the Lord had said, “Do what you can. Do everything you can, and don’t stop until you’ve done the very most you can do.”

            Guided by this inspiration I left the Episcopal Church with its friendliness and goodwill and made for the further shore of the Tiber.

            Becoming a Catholic was not easy. Once in California I climbed down one mountainside and up another to reach a Catholic seminary where I’d be greeted with advice not to worry because Episcopalians were good people too. That attempt to join the Catholic Church failed; the monsignor suggested I have a cocktail and cool off.

            My next attempt was with a crafty Jesuit at the Catholic church on the hill in Knoxville. He generously received me leaving such questions as confirmation in abeyance.

            During the next year—this would have been 1972—I worked my way into being a decent member of the Catholic faithful, abetted, it would be only fair to say, by the gracious pastor of Holy Ghost Church in Knoxville, Father Hinkle. In truth I was the last thing the Catholic Church wanted: a former Episcopalian there for all the wrong reasons, namely, convinced as I was that the Catholic Church bore the burden of divine revelation.

            Over the years I would find a place in the Roman Catholic Church in service to the flagship Texas academic institution The University of Dallas, where I chaired the theology department and then was the school’s academic head. After that, happily, I spent 30 years with the College of St. Thomas More in Ft. Worth, the love of my life.

            In 2014, the College, having chugged along for 30 years, was destroyed by my own ineptitude in alliance with those who should have been anxious for its preservation. And I now know that with regard to wonderful things like the College of St. Thomas More there are no second chances. But let it be said that I did not pass up the opportunity to join the fight.

            I was reminded just the other day of my maternal great-grandfather, Alan Jasper Harris, and Benjamin Harris, brothers determined not to miss the war.  On November 3, 1864, when the cause was surely lost, they made their way from Copiah County in Southeast Mississippi to the front lines of the Confederacy, which then lay in Middle Tennessee. My grandfather lived to return to south Mississippi. His brother—my great uncle—was shot on Dec. 30 in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, having served as a lieutenant before falling to the onslaught. He died the next day, on Dec. 1, and was buried in McGavock Confederate Cemetery on the Carnton Plantation—later remembered by Alan Tate in his Ode to the Confederate Dead.

            I hope in the autumn of my life that it will not be said that I failed to make it to the front lines. The battle formations are shifting now–ecclesiastical authority aligned delicately but unmistakably with the comfort of the world, but there is always the Lord’s advice to all of us:  “Do what you can. Do everything you can, and don’t stop until you’ve done the very most you can do.”

Most evenings  I contentedly watch right-wing television, hearing the old story one more time, told by the same persons, with familiar graphic illustrations, a pro-life father about to be imprisoned by the F. B I. for protesting abortion, a trans person in the process of trying to reverse surgical mutilation, a retired  colonel who is supposed to know about Iran, and  so on. All very contented, but then comes an advertisement to interrupt my peace by loudly proclaiming that Christ is about appear like lightening shining from east to west, that at his appearing believers will be caught up to meet Jesus, leaving behind the earth and the unbelievers on to presumably await their destruction.

This is a theology generated by  First Thessalonians 4:16, which tells us that on Christ’s return those living as well as all those departed believers will go out to meet the Lord in the air, and so we  will always be with the  Lord.  The First Epistle to the Thessalonians uses the Greek word  ἁρπάζω, meaning “to snatch away” or “to seize”. “This view of eschatology is referred to as dispensational premillennialism, a form of futurism that considers various prophecies in the Bible as remaining unfulfilled and occurring   in the future.“  This understanding of the return of Jesus was put forward by J. R. Darby in the 1830s and has since always had a following. It tends always to assign  the world, invested as it is by sin, to destruction. 

Thessalonians 4 is not the only text that may be used to support Darby.  The parable of those suddenly taken from the mill, the shop, and the field may be used to support Darby.  The account of the Apostle Peter that the cosmos will be destroyed by fire (while presumably the elect are saved) supports Darby obliquely because it assumes the destruction of the cosmos. 

Let it be said that in the first three centuries, one might say even  now, there is great confusion about the Christian future, which in no case is defined or depicted as thoroughly as we might like.  It is not that we know too little but that we know too much.  The third century saw an important controversy between Dionysius of Alexandria  who believed that the Christian future would be ‘spiritual’ and an obscure presbyter named Nepos who believed the Christian future would be ‘real.’   One might suggest that both Dionysius and Nepos had missed the truth that the supernatural is the realm of glory that manifests itself to us in the resurrection of Christ and perhaps occasionally elsewhere.   The supernatural is more real than the real world.   It is perhaps to be regretted that the Creeds and the Councils do not tell us much about the life of the world to come, just “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.  However that may be, the great Irenaeus undertook to supply the deficiency in the last chapters of the last book of his great Adversus Heresies.  Remember that he had spent much of his distinguished career as bishop in Lyons combatting Gnosticism, one of the principles of which is the certainty that the created order has no future, indeed perhaps no substance, being as it is an illusion, destined for destruction.  Irenaeus was an Asian who had migrated to Gaul.

The Adversus heresies is a long book, written in Greek but known to us mostly in a Latin translation that was never lost during the centuries when transmission of texts was difficult.  Valentinus is perhaps the obvious target, but there are also chapters against Marcion, and other Gnostics. 

In the last chapter of Against Heresies Irenaeus turns to consider the last things.   The principle of his treatment of the topic is this:

Since there are real men, so must there be a real establishment, that they vanish  not away among non-existent things but progress among those things that have an actual existence.  For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated (for faithful and true is he who established it.) but the fashion of the world passes away, that is those things among which transgression has occurred, since man has grown old in them.  Therefore he made this present fashion temporary . . . . When this present fashion passes away and man has been renewed  and flourishes in an incorruptible state so as to preclude the possibility of growing old,  then there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, in which man shall remain, always holding fresh converse with God.

The point of Irenaeus theology of the new creation is the belief that just as the human person has a teleology, passing from finite sinfulness into eternal glory, so to must all creation have a teleology, which, as in the case of man, involves not destruction but purification and renewal,    This is the burden of the highly suggestive text in Romans 5:  “Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected  it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” 

On the grounds of natural insight one might reasonably ask, especially as we know more about the history of nature itself, if it is likely that this vast drama of creation, proceeding from chaos to order,  from the age of the flying serpents to the zoo, a world of animals that man can and does dominate, in which the seasons are stable; if it is likely that, assuming the providence of God, this should come to nothing.    Looking at man and the world always as something being born rather than seeing it as destined for destruction undergirds a whole worldview that is distinctively Christian and which dominated imagination until the fifteenth century.   One of the most significant shifts in Chrisian imagination is the abandonment of the image of Christ returning to the new creation in favor of the crucifix, the image of Christ suffering that echoes in Christian life.   This in a sense represents the abandonment of future hope in favor of present experience, and it is the original de-eschatologicalization, not of course denying that Christ will return but refocusing thought and imagination on the present.  

People fall for the rapture theology because they want to believe that their lives come to something.  Part of that theology is the belief that true Christians will be spared the hard times called the tribulation.   But there is nothing in Scripture or tradition that suggests that believers are spared the troubles of the last days that are history between Christ’s first coming and his return.  But amidst these troubles it is reasonable and faithful to believe that the world and man in it is coming to something glorious.

It is remarkable that an Argentinian from Italy can think of a neologism that is translated “Backwardism,” proposed evidently as an antonym to progress, which is what the pope endorses and encourages. 

The dynamic of Backwardism versus Progressivism manages to obscure several important and highly relevant topics.   One is the doctrine of the Development of Doctrine, which proposes to unpack the original revelation given in Scripture and Tradition to create a body of intelligible and interrelated truths.  Christian doctrine has been developing from the original sketch through the mill of popular piety into careful consideration and promulgation by wisdom, the theological schools, and authority, the Church.  It is the specific claim of the Church that in the process nothing has changed in the sense that the end was implied by the beginning.   If this is progress it is progress of a particular and narrowly-based kind.  Examples of this process abound.  The teaching of the Apostle Peter intended to relieve the pressure of fervent expectation of the Lord’s return with the teaching that God of his mercy might delay winding up history for a long time is a fine early example of development.   The development of the doctrine or dogma of the Trinity is the classic example.   Belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit required resolution in a doctrine which acknowledged the equality of the three while recognizing the Father as the origin of all.  Development is not progress as post-modernity understands it.

The concept of progress was implied if not invented by the secularizing movements of the eighteenth century, with the enlightenment claiming to bring civilization out of the dark past into the clear light of secularism and science, to leave behind the regimen of priests and kings, and to establish perfect liberty.  “The term “dark ages” was widely used by 19th-century historians as  in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt in 1860.    “Progress was assumed in early-19th-century social theories, especially social evolution as described by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.”  It was present in Enlightenment’s philosophies of history, as, for example, in  Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. As a goal, social progress has been advocated by varying realms of political ideologies with different theories on how it is to be achieved.   The Whig theory of history as progressive has become a common trope.   

It remained for the nineteenth century to make progress in the presupposition of thought and life.   The general conviction that the world was moving from inhuman conditions into a better world,  fostered by John Ruskin and Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Dickens, was caught up in the more systematic Hegelian myth and in the popular myth of  “March of Mind,”  which saw such things as the settling of the American West, undoubtedly an acquisition of land and an extension of power, as progress.   In the United Kingdom the reforms that enlarged the franchise were assumed to be progressive.   In politics in the United States progress blossomed as the Progressive Era (1896–1917),  “a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States focused on defeating corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency.”  Begun in the United Kingdom, and derived ultimately from Robert Owen and from the Rochdale group, “the cooperative movement, based on mutual assistance rather than competitive individualism, proposed a  ‘New Moral World’ whose superiority, once established through the working of communities in which labor was the unit of currency, would drive out the irrationality of capitalism.” The First World War was a speed bump in the progressive movement, in its various manifestations but its advocates might have lived to see the era of Roosevelt progressivism.  But political change is no better than Francis Bacon as an interpreter of the moral meaning of human experience. 

Viewed as the fruition of Francis Bacon’s project for the utilization of nature, progressivism has been a stellar success.   If 1830 is taken as the base line, everything subject to the ingenuity of humanity has improved.   Average life expectancy was then 37; now it is in the eighties.  It took Andrew Jackson three weeks to travel from the Hermitage near Nashville to Washington in 1824. By 1860 the trip might have been made in a day.  After 1849, with the invention of the telegraph, information traveled at the speed of an electron moving along a copper wire. By 1880 slums were considered an urban embarrassment and the attempt to build better has been begun, often with the imposition of building codes. By 1940 life in the United States was not perfect. But the ‘ ‘standard of living” had reached a height heretofore unknown.   The history of the next century is the story of Baconian science triumphant, with belief that nature could be mined and controlled, which had characterized the world before 1940 incorporated in a much larger project involving ambitious goals:  fusion and fission, population control by state fiat and propaganda, Chemical sterility for the majority, scientific-medical determination of gender, universal instantaneous communication, imitation humans who are better than the  original, and finally control of the climate.  To the degree that the goal has remained the control of nature, who could deny that the Baconian project has been a great success.   In Baconian terms the world is much improved, even if more dangerous.

The difficulty with the scene of improvement I have set before you lies in the fact that the inheritors of the Baconian project have not themselves made progress, being the same creatures who started a war over a woman at Troy in the eighth century BC; the same creatures who will wreck the system as Brutus did when their opponent, Julius Caesar,  seems triumphant; the same creatures who will in England in 1520 destroy the religion of a people through pusillanimity and  fear and sycophancy; the same people who will not happily consent to the reduction of Social Security  benefits or an increase in taxation to save the system, which absent such measures will surely go bankrupt; the same people who stubbornly refuse to understand that the collapse of private morality will be reflected in the failure of public morality and vice versa.    

The tradition of the wise men, Confucius and Cicero, with Epictetus, to say nothing of the tradition of the Hebrews,  in one form or another provide  a kind of theoretical check on the folly of fallen mankind, with what Christians call “the fall” being a doctrine accepted across the world in one form or another; the Greeks knew all about hybris, which threatened all human projects from the smallest to the greatest.  The greatest moralists in the classical world, Aristotle and Epictetus, gave good advice, sometimes followed, but the wise men of the ancient world did not propose to renovate human nature.  There have been modern attempts.  Rousseau and Voltaire believed that there had been a kind of cosmic misunderstanding, which they proposed to clear away.  The belief in God, the moral tradition they had inherited, the regime of kings and priests, had imposed a morality of guilt and obedience that had warped human nature, which, once freed from this destructive past, would blossom.   A century later Sigmund Freud proposed another revision:  we had been mistaken in believing that conscious life defined personality. The disciples of Rousseau have their modern disciples aplenty Whether these proposed revisions in fact advanced knowledge of human nature is contentious, a matter of argument.   That they changed it is even more in doubt.   

That was reserved for Christianity, which came not only with laws and counsel but with power, the power to open the soul toward God and to fill it with the divine life itself through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. We are, says the Apostle Peter, called to participate in the divine nature, given the Holy Spirit as a living presence in Christian life.  

The reign of grace does not change human nature; it heals and elevates, producing the only condition that looks like progress, but is in fact restoration.  The difficulty with religious progressives is their tendency to draw an analogy between the success of the Baconian project and the illusion that human nature in itself has improved.   This in turn reinforces the progressive moral illusion that there could be such a thing as progress that would render some part of the moral canon moot.   For example, in moral theology this might mean that the two-thousand year old prohibition denying access to the Eucharist to those in mortal sin has been a mistake, or, alternatively, that the understanding of what constitutes mortal sin is a mistake.

Pope Francis obviously considers this, to mention only one of the proposed moral revisions, to be progress and progress, improvement, silently construed on the Baconian model,  to be self-evidently good.  Doctrine on this model does not so much develop, it progresses, so that it is possible that actions uniformly considered wrong can be right,

The word “backwardism” aimed at American Catholics could equally well be aimed at conservative American protestants.  Perhaps is has to do with the existence of a preference for the traditional Latin mass among some American Catholics.  But this is a small group; perhaps the Pope thinks the troublesome Bishop of Tyler represents American Catholics.   Would that this were true.   In any event, the progressive model has been progressively destructive, removing, among other things in the name of progress (and kindness, the only progressive virtue) the legal structure that supported marriage and piety. The only salvation lies in supporting and defending backwardism.  The Baconian model, in none of its forms,  is suitable for understanding the moral universe.    If Backwardism means fighting to preserve the great moral and moral-theological tradition, long may it live.

The obvious answer is no.   But first, what is socialism?  At the heart of socialism as a political movement from the beginning was distrust of individualism and a complementary conviction that the conceiving of culture as a collective whole organized for efficient production by the state, whose objectivity would enable it to overcome the inefficiencies and inequities of capitalism.  Elements of this political theory were adopted by the Labor Party in England and, with qualifications,  by the Democratic Party in the United States.  For both the traditional goals of politics, the administration of justice and the defense of the realm were obscured by an increasing willingness to see their role as the protectors of the poor and the middle class against the unreliability of market forces.  These working people were not so much interested in the theory or theories of Socialism.   In 1945 the British Labour Party took as their reward for supporting Churchill’s wartime government a national health service, the which to touch means political suicide.    

Socialism as a religion has no moment of transcendence; being as it is a systematic materialism.    Jesus had taught his followers not to be anxious about tomorrow, what they would eat, what they would wear;  our Father in heaven knows we need these things.   Socialism teaches the necessity of fighting to the end for a fair share of the social wealth, which means that, justly or unjustly, it wants someone else’s property.  Somewhere along the way the Christian vision of a world whose vision was fixed on the future, when Jesus would return in glory, succumbed to the essentially utopian vision of a world administered to give the poor (and the middle class) a fair share of the national wealth and in the end to blunt the consequence of the fall (disease, poverty) with universal health care and social insurance. 

  The evidence is that to the degree that this goal has been accomplished Christianity has vacated the field.    The Scandinavian countries are effectually post-Christian, while boasting programs that cushion the risk of living, not by outlawing capitalism but by taxing it to provide relief from the most-feared dangers of life:  unemployment and disease, a penurious old age, offering thereby a kind of salvation.  They are the bellwether followed by most western states, whose leaders have found ways to link free-market capitalism to domestic socialism.  

            Socialism slipped its nose under the Christin tent first by providing an alternative to Christian orthodoxy as that orthodoxy suffered blow after blow and then by co-opting the second great commandment.    Does not love of neighbor, mean desiring the best for everyone?   Does not care for the poor mean providing them as a minimum   a guaranteed income and health insurance?   And is not the government the best agent for securing these good outcomes?  And what can a religion shorn of a doctrine of creation (Darwinism) and without an eschatology (Schweitzer and Weiss) be but some version of moralistic therapeutic deism, seeking brotherhood among all, laboring to limit climate change, welcoming all, especially those whom traditional morality marginalizes, its vision firmly focused on this world.   In this new world Christianity is an outlier, with its belief in the Creator, its love of a divine-human person, its emphasis on the conversion of the heart, and its acceptance of suffering, and its contempt for “the world” in its character as “the kingdoms of this world” firmly in the domain of the Adversary (Mt 4:8–9).

 ‘Christian; Socialism was the trojan horse, attempting to combine the fundamental aims of socialism with the religious and ethical convictions of Christianity, promoting cooperation over competition as a means of helping the poor. The term was coined in Britain in 1848 after the failure of the reform movement known as Chartism. It is organized around a desire to meliorate the living and working conditions of the urban poor.  Perhaps it was John Ruskin who first excited interest in the condition of those living in dirty, vermin-infested tenements.  Typically they had moved to town to work in the factories or to enter domestic service.   They were poorly paid and ignorant.   Ruskin’s scheme was to move them back to the country, in aid of which he bought farmland, divided it into small plots, and proposed that the urban poor return to farming.  This was ineffectual but typical of the age of good intentions that was the middle decades of the nineteenth century.  F. D. Maurice attacked ignorance with the workingmen’s colleges.  There was the famous incident in which Newman entered into controversy with Sir Robert Peel over the Tamworth Reading Room.

            Before Socialism could become the religion of nations the old faith must be  Peal.  In the background during the last half of the nineteenth century was the question of the reliability of the Biblical text.  The ‘higher’ criticism challenged many widely held facts about the Old Testament, and Darwin’s account of the genesis of creatures could not be reconciled with the Biblical view.  But it was not until popular Christian belief suffered two damaging blows in the last half of the century that Christian Socialism invaded the churches of the Anglosphere.  First Darwinism then the Konsequent eschatologic movement delivered a one-two punch to popular Christianity;  no creator had created and established an ordered universe, Jesus was a failed prophet whose message that he would come again had proved false.   These opinions provided an opening for what came to be called Modernism, which proposed that  the betterment of the human condition was a goal that could replace the traditional Gospel, which had  been proved false by history:  no creator, no second coming.     

It was a perfect storm.  Just then, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century historicism, a philosophy built around Hegel’s Philosophy of History (E. T. !888), became academically reputable and in some circles dominant.   [Whatever subtleties Hegel may have intended the message was:  history is a self-justifying process that had no need of the transcendent God of Christianity.]  The great ecclesiastical establishments saw what was at stake,   Leo XIII wrote Lamentabili and Pascendi condemning  Modernism in   1907.   Presbyterian Fundamentalism, a work of 1910,   was a deliberate attempt to contradict the  Modernist theses.  

            These movements in theology and philosophy matured in the age of McKinley and Roosevelt while a parallel movement in politics that did not need the qualifier Christian was becoming important.   The word  socialism was used by Pierre Leroux, in the Parisian journal Le Globe in 1832.  Leroux was a follower of Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the founders of what would later be labeled utopian socialism. Socialism rejected the liberal doctrine of individualism that emphasized the importance of the moral agency of every person in favor of the collection of the state. The original utopian socialists condemned this doctrine of individualism for failing to address social concerns, including poverty, oppression, and vast wealth inequality during the Industrial Revolution. They viewed capitalism as harming community life by basing the economy on competition. They presented socialism as an alternative to liberal individualism based on the shared ownership of resources. Saint-Simon proposed economic planning, scientific administration and the application of scientific understanding to the organization of society. By contrast, Robert Owen proposed to organize production and ownership via cooperatives; in  Britain it was  Owen who became one of the fathers of the cooperative movement.

            Much time could be spent on another day in examining the relation between the acceptance in part of the socialist program with its relentless materialism and the general debasing of culture in the pursuit of pleasure. 

            To return to the original question:  can faith survive socialism? If we mean Christianity as dominant in the culture, the answer is that to date it hasn’t been done.  As active Church membership has slipped below fifty percent in the United States transfer payments have reached record levels.   It was Sir William Harcourt, sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer who in the 1880s coined the phrase:  “We are all Socialists now.”   It is to be remembered that Socialism means different things to political scientists and ordinary folk.   To the political scientists it is a theory in political economy with many interesting variations.   To ordinary people it means, whether called by that name or not, a system providing some confidence in the future.    Of course a Christian would reply that the future Socialism guarantees is short and secular, ultimately debasing.   But the evidence is that this, while true, doesn’t matter. 

            In fairness, urbanism means socialism as defined above, for the poor and middle classes will not, or cannot, be trusted to save for old age, and lacking a collective safety net would fall into chaos.