That Christianity is what animated Western culture should almost be self-evident. Perhaps because it animates in a hidden, almost humble, manner sometimes disguises its powerful presence. I think we see this in the life of the late Queen Elizabeth of England, and especially in the remarkable affection she won in England and around the world – as events of recent weeks have shown. We carry in this issue Bishop Barron’s moving tribute to the faith of this remarkable woman. Her Christian faith, as she herself said, was core to her life: “To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me, the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to live my life. I, like so many of you have drawn great comfort from Christ’s words and example.” Her life, and especially her popularity, would be inexplicable without the hidden but “animating” presence of Christ in her life.
But animating principles are invisible, and sometimes they only become noticed in their absence – in a manner somewhat akin to what Amazon’s Rings of Power series has done to Tolkein according to Harley Sims in our film review. Despite throwing a billion dollars into its production, it is a flop since they excised the “soul” Tolkein gave The Lord of the Rings. “Our twenty-first century Zeitgeist, with all the hubris of its self-righteousness and revisionism, has possessed the body of Tolkien’s work, thrusting aside its old soul no less sickeningly than the demon did the little girl’s in the Exorcist” in the words of Sims. The vision of Tolkein was the heart of his work – Amazon has exorcised this and left nothing behind but very expensive and very empty visuals.
This Christian animating principle is even at work in the literature of James Joyce as Fran O’Rourke’s recent work Joyce, Aristotle and Aquinas attests. O’Rourke shows that the mind of Joyce was moulded by the rigorous Jesuit education he received as a young man in Dublin. This left him profoundly Aristotelian in his outlook, as well as deeply influenced by St Thomas Aquinas, even if he later abandoned his Catholic faith.
We also review this month Fr Paul O’Callaghan’s Faith Challenges Culture: A Reflection of the Dynamics of Modernity – a masterful analysis of how faith and culture have interacted in the West. He shows how the faith has animated the Western culture’s prized attainments in the four areas of rationality, freedom, equality and cultural conquest or development, but also shows how these attainments become distorted when that animating principle is obscured. In the words of Dutch reformed pastor Wim Rietkerk, “There is no future for a Western civilisation cut off from its roots.”
Nevertheless it is not uncommon to hear the exact opposite asserted, namely that Christianity has obscured progress, and been a force of oppression. It is hard to see how someone with a modicum of knowledge of history could say this, and it is nice to see someone trying to set the record straight here in Ireland in this regard. Mary Kenny, in her recent book The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922, challenges the now all to familiar narrative that the Catholic Church had a deeply negative influence on the growth of modern Ireland. Kenny exposes the simple-mindedness of such an assertion, and shows that the question is far more complex and concerns in particular newly independent Ireland’s search for an identity distinct from the departing British.
Finally in connection with our theme, Augusto Del Noce in his The Crisis of Modernity shows that this invisible presence of Christianity underpins Western culture, and that it is intrinsically authoritative, not needing force to assert itself. This genuine authority “has a liberating character” – but if it is lost it gets replaced by “authoritarianism based not on authority but force”. This is a sombre warning: if the soul of Western culture is lost, it is not that nothing moves in to replace it; on the contrary, something very forceful and cruel steps into its place. This should make us all the more grateful for the presence of the humble animating principle of Christianity, and leaders such as Queen Elizabeth II who embodied that gentle authority.