The Incarnation of
Western Civilization
Thaddeus Julian Kozinski
CatholicUniversity of America
“What’s Wrong with the World?” To this question, asked in the format of an mail-in essay contest, G.K. Chesterton sent in the perfect answer: “I am what’s wrong with the world.” You and I are the problem. If we sinners are ourselves the reason for what’s wrong with the world, then it is Christ, the sinless One, Who is the reason for what’s right with the world. As Catholics we know that the root of the world’s problems is original sin, and we know that the solution is Christ—but do we truly think and act in accordance with this truth, with a sufficient consciousness of the priority of the supernatural? We are told constantly by the world to keep Christ and the supernatural in the “religious” sphere of things and out of worldly affairs where nature reigns—Our Lord is to have only an indirect influence on the world! This is the heresy of naturalism, and it is the predominant heresy of our times. It has infected the Church as well as the world, and, tragically, it has even infected traditional Catholics. How many of us can honestly admit that we consistently think, feel, and act as if the supernatural world is more real than the natural world?
To help us resist this temptation we must fully understand the significance of the Incarnation in all its consequences for society; for, it is the theoretical and practical indifference to and outright denial of the Incarnation that is at the heart of every problem in the modern world. Four areas of widespread societal concern today are religious pluralism, education, liberty, and the future existence of western civilization. Therefore, in order to properly understand the problems in these areas along with their solutions, we must see them clearly in the light of the Incarnation. The anarchy that is modern cultural and religious pluralism, the outright stupidity of modern education, the decadence that calls itself liberty, and the overall corruption of Western Civilization are problems that cannot even be addressed, let alone solved, without complete recourse to the Incarnation of Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
I. Pluralism: The SupernaturalCity
After the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and the Treaty of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, the political mood of the West changed from one of coercive religious integralism for the sake of unity to one of voluntary religious toleration for the sake of peace, and political theorists were challenged to construct a theoretical political order that could peacefully account for the intra-religious divisions within the unity of a comprehensive, Christian worldview. This new pluralist order was to be predicated upon the historical inexorability of secularization, as Jacques Maritain notes:
In proportion as the civil society, or the body politic, has become more perfectly distinguished from the spiritual realm of the Church—a process which was in itself but a development of the gospel distinction between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are of God’s—the civil society has become grounded on a common good and a common task which are of an earthly, “temporal, or “secular” order, and in which citizens belonging to diverse spiritual lineages share equally.[1]
The practical dichotomy of secular and sacred that emerged in the modern world was an inevitable one, for it was a corollary to the theoretical dichotomy demanded by both reason and revelation itself. In the Incarnation, both the immanent existence of the supernatural in and its transcendent separation from the mundane availed itself to the mind of man.
What must be kept in mind, however, is that this legitimate dichotomy occasioned the emergence of an illegitimate one, one that involved the absolute separation of religion from public life, the de-Christianization of society, and the extermination of any vestigial memory of the Incarnation from the communal consciousness. The religious and cultural pluralism that we see today in the West from this double movement has not been one based upon a healthy respect for differences and the tolerance of error in the midst of a vigorous, societal celebration of the Incarnation; instead we see a superficial pluralism based upon the privatization of religious truth and the public orthodoxy of religious indifferentism.
What might account for this phenomena? It is my contention that in spite of the purported religiosity of modern societies, there is an abysmal lack of awareness of the societal significance of the Incarnation. Christians must recognize that society itself has been supernaturalized--not simply the individual person. Indeed, society itself has been called to a new vocation. Post-incarnational society can no longer be merely a helpful milieu for the practice of virtue or as a necessary condition for the establishment of order, as in the classical and modern models, but must serve ultimately to help dispose citizens to the life of grace mediated by the perfect society of the Catholic Church. Christopher Dawson writes:
The Christian faith goes much further than this. It and it alone shows how this higher reality has entered human history and changed its course. It shows how a seed of new life was implanted in humanity by the setting apart of a particular people as a channel of revelation which found its fulfillment in the Divine Word in a particular person at a particular moment of history. It shows how this new life was communicated to a spiritual society which became the organ of the divine action in history, so that the human race may be progressively spiritualized and raised to a higher spiritual plane.[2]
Because it has supernaturalized the world in a substantive and irreversible manner, the Incarnation deserves to have a more vital, public significance in society and be clearly manifested and celebrated in a way not restricted to the merely personal or private sphere. Two illustrative examples of where an incarnational view is desperately needed are education and our public discourse about liberty.
II. Education: The Incarnate Wisdom
As Plato taught, wonder, not sensual desire or economic need, is the beginning of knowledge, and awe, not personal satisfaction and prosperity, is its fulfillment. Therefore, education in its fullest sense must be ordered to that object or being which most completely evokes wonder and leads to awe. This being is Being itself, that is, the Most Holy Trinity Who revealed Himself to Moses on Mount Sinai as the very plenitude of existence, “I AM WHO AM,” and to the world in a stable as a divine infant. The Incarnation teaches us that all created things are a participation in and reflection of the Logos, the Word made flesh. In the proper study of creation, then, one encounters Christ. Speculative wisdom, the knowledge of the ultimate principles and purposes of things, is the highest intellectual activity, with all other pursuits, both intellectual and practical, subordinated to it.
As Richard Weaver argues in Ideas Have Consequences, the regression of education began at the moment, sometime in the High Middle Ages, when the philosophic doctor was dethroned from his place of authority. With divine wisdom no longer the primary desideratum of education, human wisdom, classical rhetoric, technological proficiency, ideological conformity, and universal skepticism have usurped its place. The ultimate result of this dethroning of wisdom has been the triumph of intellectual anarchy, where institutions of learning are not even capable of explaining what learning is or whether knowledge even exists.[3] But the seemingly inexorable persistence of educators to establish a unifying thread for knowledge—especially by educators who simultaneously deny the need for such a thread--reveals its necessity. The cause of its necessity is that the object of the intellect is the unity of universal truth, of which the sundry disciplines are but particular aspects. Curtis Hancock writes:
Thomas Aquinas believed the disciplines could talk to one another because they had a common object: the truth. What they did was to look at the truth/reality from different perspectives. The disciplines to the extent they have truths complement each other; they do not contradict each other; truth is a unity. Knowledge signifies, if it is authentic, the mind's grasp of reality of the uni (one) verse. This is a key principle in education, because if one is to be educated, one must be able to integrate what one learns with what one already knows.[4]
The Incarnation of the Word, being the eternal archetype of all words, is the only thread that can weave together the myriad fabric of knowledge.
III. The Liberty of the Sons of God
In Lord Acton’s trenchant formulation: “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” It is the genius of the West to have recognized the intimate and necessary connection between moral rectitude and liberty. This connection is twofold, consisting of knowledge and obedience. The first part suggests the existence of an objective, moral order in the universe that can be known naturally, that is translucent to the light of reason. The second part entails the claim that obedience to this moral order, known externally by laws and internally through reason, constitutes the good of man. The good of man is, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas, perfect happiness. But we also learn from these philosophers that happiness is freedom; for, since happiness is an activity that is absolutely self-sufficient, for no one desires happiness for something else, and since self-sufficiency is the essence of freedom, then happiness is the activity of freedom par excellence. Thus, it is in obeying the moral law, the good-for-man, that we are most free. In the words of Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Far from being incompatible with true freedom, obedience to moral obligations constitutes the perfection of man’s transcendent freedom.”
How does all this relate to the Incarnation? We have seen how liberty is bound up with truth and happiness, and the Incarnation has taught us that the final end of man, the purpose for which he was created, is to attain perfect, eternal happiness by sharing in the divine truth of God through an intimate vision of His divine essence. Though liberty is still the “right to do what we ought,” it is longer simply the right to obey the dictates of the natural law, but the privilege of sharing in the divine life of God Himself through the practice of that religion instituted by the Divine for that very purpose. In the Incarnation, therefore, natural truth and natural happiness have been superceded by the supernatural truth and happiness revealed to us by the Son of God; nature is no longer the primary locus of human liberty. A merely secular understanding of liberty is no longer possible after the Incarnation, for the “ought” of human life has been transformed from a worldly duty to a heavenly gift.
IV. The Incarnation: How the West was One
The significance of the Incarnation to Western Civilization can not be overstated. Western Civilization is nothing else than the full-flowering in every aspect of human life of the Incarnation. Whether hidden in the foreshadows of the ancient world, in the piety of Jerusalem, the philosophy of Athens, and the law of Rome, openly acknowledged in the statecraft, guildcraft, and soulcraft of Medieval Europe, or camouflaged in the Christian instinct for liberty and equality of Americans, Western Civilization will always bear the divine imprint of Jesus Christ and His Church. The fact that the event of the Incarnation is irrelevant to contemporary public discussions of political order, intellectual and moral formation, the nature of freedom, and the essence of our civilization would be unimaginable if it weren’t so indubitably evident. How could a civilization born in the communal acceptance and articulation of a supernatural revelation and a religious authority both public and social stray so far from its birthright as to deny this authority? What is more disturbing is that this same civilization still claims to be religious at heart!
The main cause of this seeming paradox, this spiritual schizophrenia, I think, is the tendency in modern thought, even of the most conservative and religious bent, to consider such realities as pluralism, education, liberty, and western civilization in isolation from each other and from the supernatural world, from the Incarnation. Such has permitted the juggernaut of secularism free sway. In the light of the Incarnation, things look quite different. When one considers the problem of pluralism, for example, one must acknowledge that religious freedom, the freedom to worship and obey God within the due limits of the common good, is a prerogative of all peoples held by natural right. However, in the light of the Incarnation, one must also grapple with the bold and exclusive claim of Catholicism to be the one, true religion ordained by God for the ordered return of human society to Him. The easy religious indifferentism of contemporary discussions of pluralism would be impossible, then, if the Incarnation were perceived in its overarching significance and authority. Again, if the essence of education transformed by the Incarnation is ultimately ordered by Catholic theology to the contemplation of the divine, then the role of the Church, the authorized custodian of the divine teaching, should be integral in the universal catechesis of society; public education in a Catholic society would be under the direct guidance of the Catholic Church, not merely relegated to the private, voluntary sphere. Finally, liberty, as the professed goal of all liberal democracies, must now be seen, in the light of the Incarnation, to involve both the issues of education and pluralism in a new way. If liberty is the right to do what we ought, and the knowledge of what we ought to do is now authoritatively given by the Catholic Church and not by social science, practical exigency, or public opinion, then to best achieve liberty, society must privilege the liberty of the Catholic Church above all other institutions of education; for only the Church can claim an intimate relation with the Incarnation. In short, the Incarnation can not be treated as a private affair in any of these spheres if it is to be treated fairly.
V. Incarnating the Incarnation
I have suggested that the dogma of pluralism has supplanted the Incarnation as the primary foundation of western society, with the consequence that many aspects of contemporary life, such as education and the conceptual boundaries of public discourse, now reflect the god of pluralism instead of the Heart of Jesus. But I think this false god would eventually lose all credibility in the West if Catholics simply took the Incarnation seriously. What this means is that they would permit no aspect of Western culture to be separated in thought or practice from the life of grace and its fount, the Incarnation. If secularization has been the architectonic force for Western Civilization’s disintegration in the last century, then sanctification is the only effective prescription for reintegration. In the remainder of this essay, I will try to show how we Catholics might begin sanctifying society, how we might apply the theoretical principles we have been examining to the warp and woof of everyday life, how we might, as it were, incarnate the Incarnation.
The most important thing Catholics can do to incarnate the Incarnation into the very life of society is to incarnate Christ in ourselves. This requires most of all the union of our souls with Him. Spiritually, this union is consummated on earth at the communion rail, but for this union to bear fruit, we must be suitably prepared for it; we must ensure that our senses, emotions, imagination, intellect, and will have experienced Christ as He really is, in all His beauty, awesomeness, goodness, holiness, transcendence, mystery, and love. Therefore the most practical thing Catholics can do for society is to conscientiously attend and promote those celebrations of Holy Mass in which the most authentic and intense encounter with Christ occurs. Attending the Tridentine Mass whenever possible is the most practical thing one can do for the restoration of Catholic culture.
Secondly, to incarnate the Incarnation in society we must first have some glimpse of what an incarnational society would look like in our times. As St. Thomas taught, intention of the end is the first cause of any action. It is, of course, extremely difficult to imagine the details of a truly incarnational society without having ever experienced it for oneself. What makes it especially difficult is that we all have been sensually, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually habituated into a non-incarnational society. Merely to begin to imagine what such a society would look like, we first have to understand the principles that would undergird it. One will find these principles in their most authoritative and illuminating form in the encyclicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century popes, such as Immortale Dei by Leo XIII and Quas Primas by Pius XI. For a more concrete, practical, and particular treatment of these principles, one should study Thomas Storck’s Foundations of a Catholic Political Order (Four Faces Press). One should also immerse oneself in authentic accounts of the history of Christendom, especially thirteenth century France and Italy, the high point of Christendom when the social reign of Christ the King was recognized and established. Of course pilgrimages to Chartres and other vestigial locales of a once Catholic Europe are an excellent way to get a more visceral sense of the ethos and spirit of Christendom.