Christianity As Pollution

I labor under a couple of disabilities, but I have compensating advantages! I mean this in respect of relating to churches and what you might call formal Christianity.

I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!

But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.

Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.

Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.

But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.

For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.

“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.

It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.

Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.

It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.

So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?

Tony