https://mereorthodoxy.com/once-more-church-and-culture/
Christendom is the name we give to
Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and
worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.
Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began
to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle
ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the
American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many
places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in
Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s
passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will
always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a
lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is
indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was.
Christendom is no
more.
To ask about the church’s place in
society while living in Christendom is redundant. The question answers itself.
The question is genuinely new, however, when posed after Christendom. For that reason it has been posed continually in the
past few centuries, especially in the last 75 years. H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, published in
1951, is a reliable touchstone. The postwar period up to the present has seen
American Protestants in particular eager, and sometimes anxious, to clarify, to
solidify, and, if necessary, to resituate their relationship to the nation: its
legal and political operations, its respectable professions, its educational
institutions, its means of cultural production. The conversation is no closer to
being resolved today than when Niebuhr first gave the lectures in Austin,
Texas, that would later become his book.
…
Alan
Jacobs saw that article and had a relatively pithy reply. The title of his piece is “Christianity and …
?” For the TL:DR era, Jacobs points out that for all Brad East’s erudition his
post begs the question of what culture actually is, which is not something that
earlier writers and philosophers, particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, took as
given. A sampler:
https://blog.ayjay.org/christianity-and/
This essay by Brad
East is
very smart, and takes the Christianity-and-culture conversation usefully beyond
H. Richard Niebuhr’s categories. But I have one big question: What is
“culture”?
Almost everyone who writes on this subject treats it
as unproblematic, yet it is anything but. In the late 18th century Herder wrote
of Cultur (the German spelling would
only later become Kultur): “Nothing is more indeterminate than this
word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and
periods.”
I suspect that (a) when most people use the term
they have only the haziest sense of what they mean by it, and (b) no two
writers on this subject are likely to have a substantially similar
understanding of it.
…
Brad’s essay, for all its virtues, suffers from its
reluctance to dismiss the eminently dismissable Niebuhr. He doesn’t
straightforwardly say what he means by “culture,“ but he begins his essay thus:
“Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society,
culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s
influence and informed by its authority.” This suggests that culture is
something distinct from the other items in the list, but if culture does not
include “society, … law, art, family, politics, and worship” I’m not sure
what’s left over for it to be.
…
Now the
invocation of Herder interests me because I’ve been reading Richard Taruskin’s last
book and have also been reading a recent translation of Herder’s writings about
music.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520234956/song-loves-the-masses
Song
Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
by
Johann Gottfried Herder (Author), Philip V. Bohlman (Author), Philip V. Bohlman
(Translator)
January
2017 First Edition
Pages:
336
ISBN:
9780520234956
One of
the things I have kept running into from the Future
Symphony Institute
neck of the internet is something I keep running into from the Current
Affairs, The Baffler, Jacobin and similar publications. It’s a very simple ad hominem tradition of
poisoning the well. John Borstlap trafficked in all over The Classical Revolution. It’s possible to share Borstlap’s affection for
classical music and find is foundational approach to music history and
historiography unpersuasive.
Theodor Adorno rejected tonality and endorsed twelve-tone and that was
construed by Borstlap as endorsing integral serialism and sonic art. Herder, in Borstlap’s telling kinda sorta
unleashed awful nationalism on the world.
If it
turns out that Herder the German Lutheran was a pluralist that’s immaterial to
Borstlap’s narrative in which Herder and Adorno are the bad guys who ruined the
West in different ways. The late Richard
Taruskin, who was as sensitive to anti-semitic and anti-Jewish trends in German
writing as just about anyone in musicology, nonetheless argued we should by all
means read Herder because, in a phrase, what people did with Herder’s work is
not the same as what we can do with his work in our time. The Lutheran pluralist Herder could be
recovered and rehabilitated without forgetting the damaging jingoistic strains
in Herder’s reception history. That task will hardly be easy but that is a task
that can keep scholars busy for generations.
As for
Adorno, had I not taken the immense trouble to slog through half a dozen of
Adorno’s books myself I could have been fooled by Borstlap’s well-poisoning
tactic into thinking that Adorno himself didn’t damn stochastic, aleatoric and
integral serialist musics in the mid-1950s.
Adorno lambasted Boulez, Stockhausen, and Cage more than half a century
ago. If Borstlap and the late Roger Scruton have merely (or even inadvertently)
replicated criticisms of serialism and aleatoric musics that repeat arguments
Adorno made previously, then even ostensibly conservative and “defending
tradition” arguments for classical music have drawn on the work of a man who
has been considered the intellectual godfather of “cultural Marxism”.
That
woke and New Left thought are not even explicable in terms of Frankfurt School
thought is a point that could be taken up at some other time but even
self-identified paleo-conservative Paul Gottfried has pointed out that it’s
specious in the extreme to say that the woke are Marxists. It doesn’t get more
direct than “Marx Was Note Woke” but if in contemporary
right-wing and center-right punditry everything is “Marxist” then those sorts
of pundits will reveal they can’t be bothered to read primary source
materials.
In
Borstlap’s approach what he tells you Adorno and Herder accomplished is more or
less what there is to know about them, somewhat like contributors at Current
Affairs or who write for Los Angeles Review of Books will tell you what to
think about Edmund Burke so you don’t have to trouble yourself with ever
reading his actual work. There are left, right and center variations of
poisoning the well and it seems we live in an era in which it’s not just
populist anti-intellectual demagogues poisoning any and every well they can
find, it’s scholars themselves.
Criticism has reached a meta-critical phase and that can lead to crises
of purpose. Now that the Cold War has
been over for close to half a century Western scholars have interrogated the
assumptions and privileges of Western academia.
There’s a place for that, of course, but sometimes it seems that for
those inside the academy they have not always realized how many of the branches
they’ve been sitting on they’re cutting off.
Take The Limits of Critique by Rita Felski; Permanent Crisis: The Humanities
in a Disenchanted Age
by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon; and Professing Criticism: Essays on
the Organization of Literary Study
by John Guillory. We are living in an
era in which there are crises in the humanities and the crises are related to
method, purpose and legitimacy. Samuel
W. Franklin has a book out now called The Cult of Creativity: A
Surprisingly Recent History. Louis Menand has a few things to
say about it in The New Yorker.
But if promoting creativity has turned out to be a grand strategy to promote
business productivity and not the domain of the artistic genius then are we led
to conclude that all of the push to creativity is just for the sake of market
success? There are certainly writers and
scholars who seem persuaded of it enough they need to persuade us.
We live
in an era of crises, mere one of which is the crisis of artists having an
easier time publishing and a more impossible time monetizing the art in William
Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist: How
Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. But, as noted a paragraph ago, there are
crises of purpose in the humanities and arts education. The crisis of purpose can be construed as a
crisis of faith in what criticism is actually supposed to do. Or, as some have begun to put it, crisis has
always been with us, at least in the modern era. Criticism needs something to critique and if
Western criticism has taken a meta-critical internal turn and found itself
wanting, well … there were people who felt obliged to point out that critics
have not been with us, not in the way critics have been since the 18th
century.
Jacques
Ellul was not the only one to point out that the critic is a recent invention
and a product of the bourgeois era, nor was he the only one to highlight that the
arts critic is the broker for the arts, as he put it in The Empire of Non-Sense. But Ellul’s polemic against
technocratic tendencies in the arts indicted both sides of the Iron Curtain,
whereas in contemporary polemics the crises that beset the humanities and the
arts tend to be settled into laments that capitalism is the central harm. You’d think Zhdanov-inspired socialist
realism never made life hard for any Soviet era artists, writers, poets,
film-makers and musicians to read many a thinkpiece on the state of the arts in
the West these days.
In the
early 21st century we have Western academics discussing the Cold War
as the context within which the humanities were manifestations of Western
imperialism or, to put it more kindly, the liberal arts were seized upon as
realms in which the value of individuals and their liberties was considered
paramount to offer alternatives to socialist realism. Thus Workshops of Empire: Stegner,
Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett; The Program Era: Postwar Fiction
and the Rise of Creative Writing
by Mark McGurl; and a bit more infamously The Cultural Cold War: The CIA
and the World of Arts and Letters
by Frances Stonor Saunders, made cases that the liberal arts in the West during
the Cold War served the imperial interests of the United States. That the United States backed non-Marxist
forms of socialism would seem to be scandalous to some folks in the last thirty
years. Everything about Western liberal arts university education has been in
the service of some empire or another and it may be both inevitable and
necessary that scholars point this out as a kind of scandal.
Sure,
why wouldn’t they? The difference
between a neo-conservative and a New Leftist might be as simple as the former
admitting that all state-managed educational systems are supposed to be in the
service of empires while the latter are ensconced in those systems that they
denigrate. A center-right publication can
grant easily that a national arts policy is going to serve a national interest,
whether that policy is chiefly domestic or foreign. Phillip Jeffery pointed out in "A Cultural Agenda for Our Time" that the crisis in the
humanities in the United States after the Cold War is at least partly, if not
mainly, explicable in light of the fact that the United States from the Johnson
administration onward, if not earlier, was so set on defining the aim and
purpose of the arts in terms of anti-communist polemics the end of the Cold War
brought about multiple crises of purposes in United States arts education. What was it for if communism faltered? There hasn’t been a coherent answer
since.
John
Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation
floated the idea that the canon wars were not just about the canons themselves
but the status-vetting means and ends to which those canons are used in higher
education. More recently he has proposed
that the core crisis in English studies as literature is that writing is
something amateurs can do and that the great critics of the long 19th
century were not tenured academics. Now
perhaps Ellul would still say the critics of yore were the brokers of the arts
but they had real audiences. Their
platforms were newspapers rather than college classrooms.
Perhaps,
since I’m speculating on a weekend, we could say that there is a crisis in art
religions in the West taking place within scholarship that could map out as a
tension between apophatic and cataphatic disciplinary stances? If that doesn’t make any sense to you I can’t
promise these links will necessarily help, but I found them interesting reading
this last week.
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-eclipse-of-the-word-five-theses-on-apophaticism/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/christian-cataphaticism/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/fear-desire-and-perplexity/
Criticism
as a discipline may still be having a crisis of purpose; liberal arts majors
are seeing receding enrollments; the very purpose of criticism is enough in
doubt that John Guillory has a book about the history of an avocation that was
sometimes a vocation that has never quite congealed into a discipline; and
amidst all this there are, unsurprisingly, Christian writers who propose that
what Christians should be doing now is talking about what Christendom looks
like after Christendom has ended.
How
many of the New Testament authors devoted time to promoting a theory of
Christendom? We know the answer to this
question. Zero. How many Christians were
known for formulating theories of political sovereignty in the apostolic
period? I think we know the answer to
that question, too. Scholars can and
have debated how anti-imperial the Apostle Paul was and I’ve read a fun book by
Christoph Heilig about how scholars have read and overlooked allusions to
imperial conquest in Pauline literature.
It’s not that the authors of the New Testament had nothing to say about
empires, it’s that what they had to say was not necessarily direct and not
necessarily what biblical scholars looking for anti-GOP applications in NT
scholarship might say is latent in the text.
The Apostle and the Empire is a worthwhile and at times bitingly
funny read.
In a paradoxical
way, as Jed Esty has pointed out in The Future of Decline, even left and
liberal and progressive writers in the United States have a declinist
fixation. It’s been a while since I
breezed through the book but he made a kind of case that Aaron Sorkin’s TV
shows were blue state MAGA sentimentality before Trump supporters started
wearing MAGA hats.
When I
was an impressionable teen-ager I read Francis Schaeffer’s trilogy and apparently
came to the wrong conclusion so many other readers came to. When Schaeffer said in the 1960s that United
States had become a post-Christian society I took it to mean that it was
pointless to talk about the U.S. as a “Christian nation” and that it was also
pointless to attempt to re-Christianize it.
Apparently lots of other people too Schaeffer’s trilogy as a summons
(especially on the basis of all his other work and Frank being Frank in his
right-wing phase before he went blue), that Christians were supposed to do
everything possible to revive Christendom.
Nadia
Bolz-Weber and any and everyone who identifies with the religious left or
progressive evangelicalism is basically doing the same thing with a different
set of nationalistic tropes. That stuff
has not interested me, no, let me put it another way, I read about these kinds
of things but not as someone who can muster enthusiasm for them. I am struck by something John Neville Figgis
wrote about liberty and individuals.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924020347351
John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State
(1911 lectures given in Gloucester)
... In the seventeenth century it was not the
isolated individual but the religious body, the sect with its passionate
assertion of its own right to be, which finally won toleration from the State.
By himself apart from religious discords the individual would have secured no
freedom. The orgy of State-autocracy which set in with the Renaissance and was
developed by the Reformation would have gone on unchecked, as, indeed, it did
in those States like France or the German principalities in which uniformity in
religion was enforced. It was the competing claims of religious bodies, and the
inability of any single one to destroy the others, which finally secured
liberty. The rights of man were their recognition of the sense of his duties
towards God. Political liberty is the fruit of ecclesiastical animosities.
Lecture III. THE CIVIC STANDPOINT, Page 101
Individuals
didn’t get liberties because some unified theory of political sovereignty got
formulated, whether by integralist Catholics or Protestants defending the
divine right of kings or some kind of postmillennialist theocratic
libertarianism (which might as well be the married bachelor of political theory
so far as I can tell). Figgis pointed out that religious liberties developed
because groups were not powerful enough to both gain and keep state power on
the one hand or to consistently enforce it upon the populace on the other. As he put it, political liberty is the fruit
of ecclesiastical animosities. You can
have a set of by-laws and a governing document that distributes power on paper
and still have an autocracy. This was
something John Neville Figgis worried about, whether it was a single king or a
parliament capable as acting in the place of a king. I learned from years at the former Mars Hill Church
in Seattle that an organization can look like it has all manner of checks and
balances that mean nothing at all if the leadership culture is conformist and
punitive.
As I
get older I am struck by how Christians in the United States are obsessed with
talking about theories of sovereignty and cultural engagement and yet Mark Noll
nailed it saying that evangelicals have not displayed much of a mind. What can be too easily forgotten is he had
that to say about progressive evangelicals as much as conservative
evangelicals. The sun set on the British
Empire generations ago and it’s been setting on the United States but people,
religious or otherwise, seem invested in the idea that if Christian nationalism
prevails or the United States is magically transformed into a democratically
socialist state the empire can be salvaged.
What
essays like East’s remind me of is not just Alan Jacob’s question, which is why
the definition of culture doesn’t seem to be settled, but my own question—Christian
charity would seem, as I understand the teachings of Jesus, to be loving your
neighbor as yourself. Within scholastic
or arts contexts I would propose that what keeps happening among theologians
and theologically inclined artists and writers and poets is … it’s like church
people want to solve the self-appraised church people problems of church
life.
I have
a keen interest in something else, what can Christians do with all our history
of theological reflection, musical activity, traditions of promoting aesthetic pluralism
in the last seventy years without conceding aesthetic relativism … couldn’t we
Christians do something to solve some problems that are perceived as problems
by people in “the world”? Are there tensions
in the academy about white and black musical traditions; highbrow and lowbrow
art religions; or an impasse in which capitalist and socialist partisans reduce
music history to battles over which ideology is vindicated by its arts?
I am
not convinced that aesthetic pluralism is the same as aesthetic relativism no
matter how many times highbrow art religion partisans say so. Such assertions are made in the baddest of
bad faith. Frank Burch Brown wrote that
there was a strange and funny irony (tacit, I interpret it as funny)—during the
peak of the arts in Christendom no theologians bothered to delineate even the
most rudimentary theories of aesthetics or even bother much to define what art
is. Yet the cathedrals got built, the
chants were chanted, and music theory treatises did get written but there was
not necessarily some quest for a unified theory of the aesthetic. Then in the eighteenth century aesthetics as
a field was invented and largely ignored church arts and the church, in turn,
spent no large amount of time on aesthetics.
Theologians and philosophers of aesthetics have only belatedly
beguncomparing notes in the last fifty years, it seems.
So in a
way Brad East’s writing seems to take as given that if Christians just
theorized clearly enough about culture that good culture would be made … ? Do we know that will happen? I love reading music theory books,
particularly the recent turn to formal analysis and galant practice. But I see people having turf wars over whose
theory explains the music of the past better.
One theory doesn’t account for Bruckner.
Alright, someone has to like Bruckner and I just didn’t turn out to be
that person. I am fine with a theory
that the blues scales can be explained as the overtone series from I and IV
both because it’s plausible and because it fits the tuning systems of the
instruments that have been most frequently used to play blues, whether banjo or
guitar or double bass.
But in
a way the crises of academia in the West are circling around a more basic
question of why people should be on the hook for so much student debt when
scholars themselves present their professions as “workshops of empire”. If nation states educate to produce
submissive citizens then are we supposed to regard that as bad? There is a kind of reductio ad absurdum in
some liberal, progressive and leftist thought that can regard law enforcement
itself as something to be abolished rather than reformed. Freddie deBoer had a few things to say about
that by way of a satire lately called “A
Conversation About Crime”. It seems as though where some leftist and
progressives work from an imaginary ground that a society can exist without law
enforcement, culturally conservative Christians in Anglo-American contexts have
a comparable fantasy that if they just formulated the right kind of theory of
political sovereignty and got people to conform to it things would be
comparably ideal to the cop-free socialist utopia. In the right wing variation
if we just abolished all the schools and everyone home-schooled their kids it
would be gravy?
In
neither case do I find those kinds of fantasies amenable to improving the lives
of flesh and blood people.
My YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most challenged and banned books of the last 20 years. According to the American Library Association, my novel was the most banned and challenged book in the United States in the decade 2010-2019. So I have more personal experience with the right wing's vilification of books and writers than just about everybody. But I'm also highly aware of the way the left censors and silences writers. And a lot of this silencing and censoring happens before a book is even published, with sensitivity readers who demand changes based on ever-shifting moral standards and definitions of "triggers" and, more dangerously, by creating an environment where writers silence and censor themselves because they fear professional and personal excommunication. As I've written elsewhere, the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.
Sherman Alexie's comparison is apt indeed. When right wing people push for censorship they do full frontal assaults replete with ad hominems and scare mongering about how civilization itself will crumble before the publication of the book. When left wing censorship occurs ... the seen ninja is a dead ninja for folks not already familiar with genre tropes. To play with the comparison another way, in anime there's a joke that one ninja is a deadly and silent skilled assassin whereas twenty-five ninjas are sword or gun fodder. Left wing censorship is, as described above, more likely to crop up in peer review processes with sensitivity reading and gutting the possibility of publication for a book before it even sees print. Right wing censorship at least waits for the book to hit the market but when you think about it that way, that's consistent with many conservatives who think that the market should be the market. It's only when schools teach books they turn to censorship, so to speak, or boycotts.
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