Editorial – May 2021

In our final book review this month, Margaret Hickey looks at the influential Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žizek’s Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. This work belongs in the growing genre of post-pandemic prediction, since the big question on the mind of cultural and political theorists is how will life be different after Covid, now that, thankfully, its end is in sight (though sadly not for countries like India and Brazil). Žižek for one believes that Covid19 will “give a new boost of life to communism” – which might turn out to be wishful thinking on his part. Either way it is hard to imagine that the world wide experience of Covid will not have very significant repercussions on societies across the globe, and in particular how we approach work and the work-place. Perhaps this will be the theme of books yet to be reviewed here in Position Papers. However – in the meantime as it were – I would like to make a more personal observation about two contrasting “mindsets”: what might be called a Genesis mindset and conversely an Apocalypse mindset, named after the first and last books of the Bible of course. I’ve come across both during the past few months. To start with the second, which is, as the name suggests, apocalyptic. It was, and probably continues to be, the view that the pandemic was in some sense the end of things: it was the “great reset” or a prelude to the end of history. It is of course a fundamentally nihilistic summation of things, but not for that reason is it wrong. It seems to be fundamentally devoid of Christian hope, and especially of any real sense that divine providence is at work in the world. Of course for the non-Christian this view may be perfectly understandable, but not in a Christian. 

The “Genesis” mindset appears to me as the only truly Christian one. It is a profoundly optimistic understanding (not a thoughtless naivety) that creation is fundamentally good: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day” (Gen.1:31). At the same time creation is a task entrusted to man: “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:28). It entails a vision of the world – particularly after the Fall – which would involve hardships, but not such that cancel out either the goodness of the world, the ingenuity of man, nor the providence of God. 

I have found this Genesis mindset expressed in a phrase that I’ve been coming across in casual conversation over the past few months. The phrase is “silver lining”: the silver lining of the extra time parents have had with their kids; the silver lining of how ridiculously easy it has become to “meet” people anywhere on the globe via Zoom etc.; or the simple silver lining of a slower paced life and the time to reflect. This “silver lining mentality” contrasts strongly with a more apocalyptic take on the pandemic which sees only the dark clouds, minus the silver linings. This mentality has been able to judge the pandemic, with all the troubles, and even tragedies, which it has brought in its wake, within the fundamentally positive context of the goodness of creation, of man and of God. 

Reflecting on this it is clear that this Genesis mentality has made it possible for Christians to be singularly adaptive. The first Christians adapted to their tumultuous expulsion from Jewish society in the first century, and to the subsequent waves of persecutions at the hands of officials of the Roman Empire. Christians adapted slowly, but ultimately spectacularly, to the calamitous collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, managing eventually to build a radically superior civilisation on the rubble and ashes of the old. 

This same theme appears in Michael Kirke’s In Passing column this month. Here he looks at Mark Hamilton’s new book: Escaping the Bunker: Democracy Needs Christianity, the principal theme of which is that democracy will wither if its Christian roots die. Kirke points out that the construction of Christendom was a laborious process, but that it triumphed against all the odds:

“But if Rome was not built in a day, neither was Christendom. Professor Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbarians, or the story of St Columbanus and his mission in the decaying Europe of the seventh century, show us how long it took to root the values we take for granted today in the soil of that still residually pagan world. Even into the twelfth and thirteenth century, the flowering which we see in the lives of St Francis, St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, took place side by side with a brutality underwritten by an utterly confused and confusing political morality, represented by The Hundred Years War, blundering Crusaders and the dis-edifying struggles between the Empire and the Papacy.”

We see in two other reviews this month, both by James Bradshaw, just how awful the persecution of Christians can be at times. Chad Bauman’s Anti-Christian Violence in India and in particular Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924 chronicle almost unbelievable cruelty inflicted on Christians in both these countries in recent history. (And in a – to me at least – surprising move, just last month President Biden formally recognised the massacre of Armenian Christians precisely as “genocide”).

The ability to adapt is key evidence of life – we see it all the time in the wonderful capacities of plants and animals (and viruses too unfortunately) to adapt to changed circumstances. Literally, through adaptation they make themselves apt for the new scenario. It seems to me that this adaptation is made possible only by the “Genesis mindset” – a mentality which has great reason never to lose its hope in the future, and to make provisions for that future, even if it is just in bringing new human beings into the world. Sadly, the loss of hope in the future is manifested in falling birth rates, which seem to be an expression – a self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps – that we are “at the end”. This is something Pope Saint John Paul II dubbed the “culture of death”. Ultimately it is a collapse into nihilistic despair. 

The Genesis mentality has given Christians a resilience, adaptability and even creativity in the face of all manner of trials, allowing them again and again to build something greater than what was lost or destroyed. It strikes me that Covid is one of these historical moments calling for that creativity of Christians to give a lead to society. The most truly creative Christians are of course the saints. They are the true drivers of history, and are the ones who time and again lead society out of dead ends, into a fresh start: a new genesis. St Columbanus in the seventh century, St Francis in the twelfth century, Ss Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and Pope St John Paul II in the twentieth century are all cases in point. And albeit in a more mystical way, the martyrs too are drivers of history. They too, even while suffering unspeakable tortures and cruel deaths, declare their hope for the future, that their deaths are not an “apocalypse” but a “genesis”: “We multiply when you reap us. The blood of Christians is seed” (Tertullian).