April 1995 Print

by Edwin Faust

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”

--Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau stands near the beginning of our republic and the generation he dismisses as bereft of practical wisdom is not far removed from our Founding Fathers. As early as the early part of the 19th century then, the novus ordo saeculorum had become a tiresome thing to some of its heirs, for whom the champions of the masonic revolution appeared as unremarkable old men, peddling uninspiring ideas. This contempt for the older generation that found a voice in Thoreau’s writings is not solely the eccentricity of an anti-social author who preferred the company of muskrats to men, but an attitude that runs like a thread through the fabric of America’s popular culture. It weaves its way through time from the shores of Walden Pond to the studio lots of Hollywood, where young rebels may be without a cause, but never without a film contract.

In his low esteem for his elders, as in other things, Thoreau is the progenitor of much that is bad and even bizarre in our national life. The faithless child of Protestant individualism, he preferred not only his own thoughts, but his own company. He retreated for two years to the wilderness, where he chronicled his random musings along with detailed and occasionally rhapsodic observations of the doings of beavers and woodcocks and groundhogs. He also punctuated his now famous book with denunciations of the commercialism then strangling the country. (This was is the 1840’s), yet he could provide no remedy for it other than his own brand of materialism, which centered on a neopagan contemplation of nature. In this, he foreshadowed those earth-worshipping zealots of the present day who vilify most human enterprises and style themselves environmentalists.

What Thoreau had against the older generation was that they surrendered their lives to mortgage holders and money lenders for the sake of fine furniture, “geegaws and doodads,” as he put it, and ignored the spiritual and poetic dimensions of life. He believed, quite rightly, that America was producing misshapen men, stunted creatures who had never taken their own measure nor bothered to ask the larger questions. Why should he respect people simply because they had grown older if they had not also grown wiser? But what wisdom did Thoreau ultimately bequeath to the future?

For all of his fulminations about time wasted on trivialities, he never managed to enunciate what comprises the genuinely important business of life. “Simplify,” he said. But if we do not know the end of our journey, how can we simplify wisely? We may very well throw away that which may later prove essential. Thoreau appeared to hunger for a unified vision of life, but it was not so consuming a hunger as to dispose him to the humility truth requires of her children before she will nourish them. He clung to the superior attitude of an agnosticism that has forever characterized our liberal culture. He indulged himself in a sort of New Age search for truth, peppering his writings with eclectic sententiae from Oriental literature--Confucius, Shankaracharya, the Bhagavad Gita--but he committed himself to nothing. Perhaps, his Harvard education had not furnished him with a knowledge of the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the mystifications of Hinduism were the closest he ever came to a philosophy of being. In any event, Thoreau appears in the end to be condemned by his own standard. He, too, failed to have any cogent or coherent view of the meaning and direction of human existence to pass on to his progeny. He, too, had not profited with age so much as he had lost, yet he and his writings endure as the perennial accusation of youth against their elders: You have served Mammon, and sold your souls, and left us spiritually disinherited.

But it does not profit us to find the spiritual accounts of others to be wanting if we, too, lack faith and fortitude. Thoreau may have seen clearly that the old people about him had never properly filled out as men and remained, as it were, in stages of arrested spiritual development, freaks with shriveled souls, but he was not able to tell us what a man might look like whose life had been a progress of grace and goodness. He simply did not know and, ultimately, one might wonder on which side of the stage he stood in the freak show he reviewed so mercilessly.

The Whole Man

A Catholic writer of this century was once asked why she wrote so much about freaks. Flannery O’Connor replied that it was probably because she was still able to recognize one. She also claimed this as an ability of other Southern writers in the US and ascribed it to the fact that the definition of a man in the South was still “theological.” A man was measured by his relationship to ultimate goodness, by the virtues he manifested, the faith he lived. It is this kind of measure that Thoreau seems to have been seeking, but the North no longer looked at man theologically, if it ever had.

O’Connor acknowledged that the Protestantism of what H.L. Mencken called “the Bible Belt” produced many distorted images of Christ, but maintained that a distorted image is better than no image, and that Catholic truth might find more fertile ground in Dixie than in the North, where unbelief reigned in near invincibility.

The South, as she saw it, still existed in something of a cultural unity, badly battered, but intact, and that unity persisted as a remnant of Christendom. “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is Christ-haunted,” she said. But even the ghost of Love is enough to soften the hardness of men’s hearts. It is perhaps why eccentricity is accepted more readily in the South. If a man is the image of God, who are we to object to the shape the Creator chooses to impress upon that image? It is also probably why family tends to be stronger and old people more apt to find a home within the family, and to live there not in the shame of dependence, but in the authority of age. This can even be seen in the more profane literature of the region. “Big Daddy” may be something of a moral monster, but he is quite naturally the pater familias, with the strength of social convention behind his authority.

No Southerner who reads his Bible is unaware of the numerous commands in the Old Testament that the old be respected, nor of the exhortation in the New Testament to see Christ in all men. Every Catholic who knows and lives his faith is also possessed of this knowledge. Yet, old people tend to fair more poorly at the hands of the young, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, all of the time. Religious culture, even in today’s South, tends to become submerged in the tidal wave of secularism that inundates the continent. Individuals of faith endure, but communities of faith perish. And only in communities of faith can the family elders find true honor and love.

The Crowded Wilderness

Civilized men live together; savages prefer solitude. Such was the thought of G.K.Chesterton, and although he was speaking of the physical conditions of societies, he saw that those conditions are extensions of the spiritual domain. Thoreau’s disapproval of the shallow and commercial mindset to be met in America would certainly have received a sympathetic hearing from Chesterton; his antisocial individualism would not. For Thoreau, the answer to a society with a failing and insufficient faith was withdrawal; for Chesterton, it was conversion to truth.

Chesterton knew that what transforms individuals into a group is a common creed; what divorces individuals from a group is singularity of belief. The modern world presents us with the paradox of men both simultaneously joined in physical community and isolated in creedal solitude. We now suffer the odd and unprecedented condition of being grouped together in a highly organized material culture peopled largely by spiritual savages.

Thoreau saw the beginnings of this condition and dramatized, perhaps unwittingly, that creedal solitude with his physical solitude. But the Catholic, even when he turns away from the world, does so in religious communities. The Catholic is not a spiritual savage, but a man of shared culture. He knows that when we love God we also love our neighbor. It is mighty hard to love one’s neighbor when one has not got any. Equally hard is it to love a neighbor one never comes to know, save on superficial terms. The tragedy of the modern American family is that it is most often condemned to this sort of superficiality in the relations among its own members, for a family whose life is not based on a common faith is necessarily consigned to the same eventual disintegration that afflicts society at large.

Traditional Catholics whose family lives are faith-centered may appear increasingly odd against the backdrop of contemporary culture, somewhat like the Amish in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. But the Amish have endured, ruled by their elders, and preserved by their faith, however mistaken that faith may be in the main. How much brighter are the prospects for Catholic families that band together in the fullness of truth. How much brighter the end for men who grow holier as they grow older. And to give Thoreau his due, perhaps the young have some right to expect a spiritual inheritance from their elders; perhaps, they have some right to expect the light of eternity to shine some slim beam on their own perplexity as it opens to admit their fathers; perhaps, the old can only be loved by men in the measure that they have loved God.