March 2008 Print

^{Edwin Faust}

Having lived the better part of six decades, I often find myself rummaging through my vast store of memory as through old trunks in the attic, pulling out this or that photo or piece of clothing or faded letter, and handling it, sometimes fondly, sometimes with regret, as I recall how well or ill I acquitted myself in that episode of which it is a relic.

And recollection frequently leads to speculation. I begin to wonder how the aggregate of my actions will weigh in the final balance, for whether a man will find himself in the state of grace in his last moments would seem to have some connection to justice, as well as to mercy. A man's death is the culmination of his life, its ultimate expression, and although it may be a permissible and pious hope that a bad man be saved in extremis, it is unlikely to be realized. I have seen several people in my family die, and never have I noticed a marked change in anyone's manner as he grew nearer the end; rather, there always appeared to be a continuity of behavior, perhaps weakening or intensifying in some respects, but no dramatic departures. Deathbed conversions are not unknown, but they must be rare. Life is a preparation for death. In most cases, we will die as we have lived, either turned toward or away from God. How can it be otherwise?

This is not to say that our personal histories are a record of homogeneous thought and action. A man may swing violently from one pole to another, especially in his youth, when temperament is especially volatile. The source of this volatility is, I believe, identified by St. John as the pride of life. I don't recall when I first heard the evangelist's catalogue of the trinity of vices opposed to our salvation: concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life. I do recall having no difficulty in recognizing how the first two temptations manifest, but being puzzled by the third. What is the pride of life?

I think it arises from an exuberance that comes upon us in the first flush of youthful independence. It is, in its beginnings, a young man's vice.

As I look back now over the tortuous road I have stumbled along to arrive at my present pass, I discern the pride of life appearing at my side in my early 20s, keeping pace with me through a decade of doubt and dissipation, then falling behind me, or so it seems, until it appears to me a faintly recognizable figure from my reckless years, like some almost forgotten companion in a shameful debauch that might have proved fatal to my soul. And as my own children near that juncture in their lives where they must increase and I must decrease; where I must modify my role as paternal legislator to that of one who watches, often fretfully, while they make their decisions on their own authority, I am mindful of that ghost of my youth–the pride of life–and apprehensive of its appearance at the sides of my sons.

For few, I think, make the great translation from adolescence to manhood without becoming somewhat carried away by the headiness of physical strength reaching its zenith and intellectual power being loosed from the bonds of instruction. We look in the mirror one day, and the boy we knew is gone; in his place we find an adult; one fully vested with the dignity of self-determination. We realize, with a dizzying delight, that now we are to choose what we shall do and when and how we shall do it. We easily become intoxicated with our newfound freedom.

We then look to those on whom we once relied for guidance and are struck by their obvious shortcomings, which, to our amazement, had previously escaped our notice. Such credulous children, we were; so easily taken in. Now, those who loomed large before us appear smaller, stooped and shrunken by age, and what we took for sound judgment we now subject to critical review. We begin to stride like a colossus across our world, and if we bow our heads, it is only to regard with condescension those people and things that are below us.

Do I exaggerate? Certainly, there are young people of solid virtue who are not made drunk by the rising sap of youth, and we dearly hope our children will be among this sober company; but the likelihood is that they will not. It is a fact worth pondering that Our Lord, in prescribing the means to salvation, counseled us to become as little children, never as young adults, for little children are trusting and humble; young adults, skeptical and arrogant.

The one memorable encounter Jesus had with a young man ended unhappily, for the young man was rich, which description may be understood in a spiritual as well as a material sense. He had worldly possessions, one may presume, but such wealth would not have kept him from following Our Lord had he not possessed something else: pride of life, which may also be defined as a lack of that essential beatitude: poverty of spirit.

We read that the rich young man went away sad because he owned much. Perhaps, he had second thoughts, a belated touch of grace, and did return to follow his Savior, but we have no account of it. More probable is it that his sadness was gradually transformed into self-justification and, by degrees, into a condemnation of what was asked of him as so much foolishness.

When we refuse to be good, we usually acquit ourselves by discounting the necessity and even the desirability of being good. The great danger is that we may commit the sin against the Holy Ghost that cannot be forgiven: confounding good and evil. The result is spiritual blindness and hardness of heart.

It may be that, like other narcissistic baby boomers, I falsely imagine my generation of singular importance, but it does strike me that even though the pride of life has posed a spiritual peril for every young man in every epoch, it took hold of my contemporaries with an unprecedented strength. This occurred because of the confluence of two things: the dissolution of church and state.

By the late 1960s, the time of my youth, the moral authority of the United States and the Catholic Church were collapsing simultaneously: the first, as a result of the so-called "credibility gap," that is, official truth exposed as deliberate deception; the second, as a result of the Second Vatican Council, which undermined all previous Church teaching, creating an ecclesial "credibility gap" from which the Church has never recovered. To be young at such at time was to find oneself balanced precariously on the edge of an abyss.

Like all young people, we wanted to do great things, to become heroes in the domain of noble action, but we seemed to be deprived of such opportunities. We wanted to channel our youthful exuberance into a worthy cause, for the obverse side of the pride of life, its remedy, is a generosity of spirit that wants to give itself wholly. But we found ourselves thrust into a backwater of disillusionment; stagnating in a fetid swamp of doubt and decay.

The two occupations that young men used to dream of are that of soldier and priest, for both offer the scope for heroism in their respective fields. But arrived at man's estate, we found the military tragically involved in a war of dubious merit being prosecuted by politicians we knew to be liars; and the Church making herself ridiculous by panting after the unholy fashions of the age. The pride of life, as a result, was given a great impetus, and we cast off all allegiance to authority of any kind. But the strength of youth, its tremendous physical and intellectual energy, cannot remain pent up; it must be spent. And so it was.

No generation in our national history had so entirely rejected the values and traditions of its elders as did mine. There was an insurrection of the spirit that manifested itself exteriorly in long hair and strange clothes and dissonant music, and interiorly in a sickening of the soul whose higher faculties were subordinated to its lower. If we were deprived of heroic ideals, we would settle for what was left to us. We may have been cut off from our spiritual and moral traditions, but our bodies were young, our senses strong, our appetites sharp. If higher truth were in doubt, baser certainties remained. We began to live more and more in our animal nature. Sensual pleasure became our flag and our faith.

The late Malcolm Muggeridge, before his conversion, wrote contemptuously of my generation as one that had been given every advantage and, in the end, asked for the sop of every old reprobate in every age: dope and bed. But perhaps Muggeridge did not then realize how necessary it is to have faith; how meaningless all those advantages are without a belief in an ultimate purpose. If we asked for dope and bed, it was because we had arrived at that nullity of moral law that is the corollary of the absence of dogma. We asked for the only things that still appeared real.

This is not meant to be an apologia for degeneracy, but an elucidation of those conditions that led to it: conditions that persist and threaten present and future generations.

As Muggeridge noted, we were children of privilege and promise, but many of us, though clinging to privilege, threw away promise. Obscurely, perhaps unconsciously, we were affirming Our Lord's words: "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" We certainly had the world to gain, but it was an unattractive prize, for it seemed that we had already lost our souls. Our parents and teachers watched in anger and perplexity as we discarded opportunities they had spent a lifetime procuring for us. Instead of availing ourselves of those means that would have secured our futures, we plunged into a hopeless hedonism. Many dropped out, as the phrase then had it. Their number became legion and I, to some degree, joined the exodus.

I had been in graduate school. My prospects were bright, but only in the context of a failed world. There was the unmistakable taint of fraud in all my professors' words; in all the books I read and classes I attended. It seemed to me that I was participating in an immense and insane masquerade. I wanted to tear away the masks and discover who lived behind the false faces, including my own. So, I did what many around me were doing: I quit and ran away. Or rather, I should say, ran toward something that I hoped to find, but of whose existence I was unsure. But even the faint possibility of an unimaginable truth was more alluring than the deadness and deception of the dark region from which I was departing.

So, I sold what I had and bought a plane ticket to Europe. I had no plan; no certain destination. I did, however, have a companion: the pride of life was at my side and remained with me through many wandering days. Yet, I did not always find my companion an agreeable one, for I had been raised in the Catholic faith with Catholic morals. No matter how discredited the Church had become; no matter how disloyal, corrupt and plain silly the hierarchy and clergy appeared, I had been early inoculated by the truth, and no subsequent infection was able to overcome me entirely.

At one point in my travels, I found myself in Heidelberg on the weekend of the annual wine festival. It was a crisp, clear day in autumn, pleasantly warm, with sunlight dancing on the Neckar River and the great castle perched on its hill looking down with seeming benevolence upon the revelers. The whole town was celebrating, with the streets closed to traffic and people jostling one another happily as they ate and drank and laughed and sang. I had never seen so many people in uniform good spirits. I made myself one of them, and through the long afternoon I sampled the local fare and downed more than a few glasses of cool, golden wine.

As I wandered the cobbled lanes, I arrived without design at an old church whose doors appeared locked and on whose steps was gathered a different sort of crowd. Many were lying prone, other sprawled indecorously, some on the steps, some on the sidewalk and even in the street. The sexes were not easily distinguishable at a distance, as all had long hair and disheveled clothes and the same abandoned posture. They represented that class of the disaffected then called hippies.

Emboldened by the wine I had imbibed, and the unthreatening aspect of the assembly, I approached them and offered a greeting. One looked at me and held out his hand, which contained a small pipe from which curled smoke of an identifiable aroma: hashish. I took the pipe and looked into its glowing bowl for a few seconds, then saw another hand outstretched to receive it, so I relinquished it and took a step back. I looked at the church more closely and noticed its inscription: Heiliger Geist Kirche. As I learned later, it was a venue notorious for drug dealing. The police were said not to be much interested in curtailing the activity, so the trade took place with little circumspection. I was asked that day if I wanted to make a purchase and declined. But the atmosphere of the whole encounter stayed with me, adulterating the otherwise wholesome joy of the festival.

For there was no joy at the Holy Ghost Church: just torpor, ennui, the breath of corruption, and a vast indifference that went beyond despair. I wondered what occupied the introverted attention of the lost children of the Holy Ghost as they reclined outside His church. Nothing distinct, I imagined; only confused images and sensations playing in enervated minds and bodies.

As evening fell, everyone, save the Holy Ghost crowd, made for the river, where they spread blankets on the slope of the bank opposite the castle. As the sky darkened and the river grew black, the first of the fireworks exploded above the ancient battlements, and with each succeeding burst, the age-worn sandstone took on different hues: red, green, blue. The mountainside became a riot of color and the sky dotted with lights that flared, then streamed downward and faded into plumes of smoke that were extinguished in the river. I watched, exhilarated, and when it was over, I returned to my room feeling inexplicably oppressed, as though some unwanted thought were forcing itself upon me.

The next day, I had resolved to leave Heidelberg and head south, I knew not where: I would take hitchhiker's luck. But before I left, I decided to walk through the town to fix in my mind its sights and memories. I passed by the Holy Ghost Church and saw that little had changed from the previous day. I thought I recognized some of the loungers and wondered if they had stayed through the night. I supposed they had little reason to leave.

I returned to the place along the Neckar from which I had watched the fireworks and stopped to rest there and collect my thoughts before walking toward the highway. The castle rested monumentally in its usual sandy-colored mass, giving no hint of the part it had played in last night's festival nor the bright shades it had assumed, and the sky was a pacific blue. All appeared usual, quite real and steady and enduring, and the late revels seemed insubstantial, like a vague dream that even then had receded into a seemingly distant past.

I formed a plan, of sorts, to proceed to Munich to see the Oktoberfest, so I walked out of town and stood on the shoulder of the road, my thumb raised in the customary gesture; and as I waited for a ride, that inchoate and oppressive sensation that had weighed upon me the night before began to take definite shape: so you will go to Munich, I thought, and drink and have a high time at the festival, and after that, perhaps you will move on to another town and another festival; but life cannot be lived at festivals. The day after arrives, sobriety returns and the festival becomes a confused memory that bears little relation to the main business of life.

Certainly, not the fugitive pleasures that had been occupying me. I had seen the terminus of such a prolonged pursuit on the steps of the Holy Ghost Church, where the only pleasure that remained was an escape from the vacancy of life into narcotized dreams. And I could not forever wander aimlessly in strange lands, for in a few years, I would no longer be young and the world would become less hospitable and indulgent, for a young man is forgiven many things for which an older man is judged culpable. The more I mused along these lines, the less attraction I found in intoxication and travel; the more I longed for order and purpose. I continued to bumble about for some time, in America as well as abroad, but my old companion, the pride of life, appeared to fall a step or two behind me, and my sense of self-sufficiency gave way to knowledge that I needed guidance. Gradually, I returned to the sanity of those truths I had known as a child.

Perhaps this round of life I have briefly described used to be common, and so long as one survived the follies of youth, little harm was done and valuable lessons learned; but our culture has suffered a sea change. Most people my age represent the last generation that, as a whole, was fully instructed in the faith, a fact that greatly aided our return to sanity.

Now, we are becoming grandparents. Two generations have come into the world since our greener days, and those children, with few exceptions, must face the temptations of the pride of life without our reserve of truth and recourse to grace. What was for us a temporary aberration now easily becomes for them a permanent acquisition. For if finding our way back to the Church was made difficult by the disappearance or distortion of the faith in the postconciliar epoch, it may well be near impossible for the generations that have followed us.

One thing that will always remain constant, along with the pride of life, is its remedy: selfless dedication to an heroic ideal. And no matter how flawed our church and state, God still calls people to serve Him within these ever imperfect structures. Of course, to discern and follow a noble vocation has been rendered immensely more difficult by the pandemic ignobility of society in general. Honor, it seems, must now be won individually, apart from and, indeed, often in opposition to the institutions that once supported and nurtured it.

It is characteristic of our age, in which so many conventions are stood on their heads, that we face a situation quite the reverse of that described in King Lear. In its way, Lear is a play for our times, when authority has been surrendered and disorder reigns. The final lines of the play are a lament by the Duke of Albany over the sufferings of the older generation:

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

But in our time, it is the young who have the most to bear, for we who are old still have the memory of a world in which order prevailed and life's purpose was plain. The institutional Church supported us and was a bulwark against the incursions of the age. What sort of memory of the Church have the generations who have succeeded us? When has the institutional Church been anything to them but a maelstrom of contention and corruption?

When the pride of life swept us away, we knew that there remained, always within our reach, the terra firma of the faith in all its impressive manifestations. We had attended the Tridentine Mass in great cathedrals and magnificent parish churches; we were schooled by devout nuns and priests; the Catholic faith was then a force to be reckoned with. But the children of these latter days have often traveled with their parents great distances to attend in halls and homes and rented spaces a Mass proscribed by Church authorities; they have not known the great religious orders that instructed us; they have not heard sound teaching from the hierarchy. Shifting improvisations have taken the place of the once great institutional structures and they are besieged on all sides.

So when children raised in such circumstances succumb to the pride of life, they will have no memory of the solidity and security of the Church to lure them back to the faith. The chaos of the world may not seem to them very much different from the chaos of the Church.

But there are signs of hope.

We will never see again the sort of Church we knew a half-century ago, but there appears to be a turning in high places toward Catholic Tradition, both in worship and doctrine. The beginnings are small, but they can be discerned. This will help provide some structure of stability for our young people. Meanwhile, we must be ever patient with our sons, especially when they become prodigal sons. We must keep a lamp lit for them in the windows of our home and the prayers of our heart. God will not forsake His children; neither should we. And let us hope that the Holy Father will at long last open the doors of the Church to all her wandering children now cast upon the world.

 

Edwin Faust is a longtime contributor to traditional Catholic publications. In addition to being a news editor for a daily newspaper, he lives with his wife and three children in New Jersey.

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The Death of Christian Culture

Dr. Senior deals with the root causes of how and why Christian culture is dying. It approaches its subject through an in-depth study of literature, culture, history, and religion, to alert citizens of the West of what they stand to lose, especially as education ceases to be about the truth, and becomes merely an exercise in bureaucracy and "ticket-punching." Ultimately, Senior warns that the cultural, literary, artistic, and social treasures of classical and Christian civilization must be preserved and lived, lest they be lost forever.

Senior was an architect of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, a course that combined aspects of the Socratic and "Great Books" methods. It aimed to convince students by an immersion in the classics of Western thought, art, and literature, that there is a truth worth knowing. It resulted in numerous conversions to Catholicism and was the principal forum in which Senior worked out the keen insights presented in his books.

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Searching for and Maintaining Peace
A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

Fr. Jacques Philippe

Our age is characterized by an extraordinary amount of agitation and lack of peace. This tendency manifests itself in our spiritual life, in our search for God and holiness, in our service to our neighbor...a kind of restlessness and anxiety take the place of the confidence and peace which ought to be ours. What must we do to overcome the moments of fear and distress which assail us? How can we learn to place all our confidence in God and abandon ourselves into his loving care? This is what is taught in this simple, yet profound treatise on peace of heart. Taking concrete examples from our everyday life, the author invites us to respond in a Christ-like fashion to the upsetting situations we must all confront.
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