D. M. Hoven
Jul 16, 2023
Prologue,
I am the strange sort of fool who has the unfortunate habit of writing books that have already been written. This is, I believe, a mere echo of the state of our own most contradictory ‘information age’. Having lost contact with the river of ideas flowing into our own present estuary, not only are we unaware of our skeptics, we do not even know our dearest allies. The once lush and livid oasis fueled by the slowing waters of a headless river, uniting ourselves with the uncountable towns and communities speckling that river from the living past, has slowed to a stop. The dams of progress having reached their final height, the remaining swamp now consumes all life in it’s own decaying broth. I believe I have spent the passing minutes of consciousness allotted to my own thoughts seeking any flow of water still running in this modern bog, but have been relegated to chasing the miniature currents left by my own paddle. This habit of confusing my own motion with the flow of water surrounding me has halted the progress of every thought I have tried to express, both in writing and speaking. No sooner do I cease rowing to call a good friend’s attention to the lethargic current, than my momentum dies, and I am left attempting to convince by sheer might of poetic words that flowing water really exists, each time my own faith dwindling lower, and lower, until I am all but ready to toss the paddle into the muck altogether, and take up a life of crabbing, in waters where there once were fish.
Another prologue,
I have always been a dreadful sinner. I do not mean that my sins have been particularly monstrous, rather the opposite. A certain cowardice has always marked my career of misdeeds. Despite being presented with manifold temptations, I have often declined to accept the Devil’s gifts on the grounds of being simply too inept in the actual act of sin. I once had a lusty woman splayed before me, available in every sense of the word, and did nothing deserving of even a disapproving letter in my celestial file. My sins have been of the most pitiful sort. The behind closed doors, lied about, hidden kind, and even were they to be revealed before the world on some judgement day, I imagine an embarrassed Devil shrugging his shoulders at the Great Arbiter with a tired look that says, “yes, he really gave up eternity for that… don’t look at me, he’ll be no fun in hell either.” I’d be convicted on some technicality, and Hell’s lawyers would have to make use of the most boring and utterly pedantic bylaws, reading out my prosecution with loud yawns. I may even slip through the pearly gates as the Great Cherub, nodding himself to sleep, wouldn’t even notice my passage. In fact I wholeheartedly admit to having committed certain crimes merely to prove the capability. To close out an already too long joke, I believe this jocular dreadfulness in the art of mortal sin spurs from a place in my soul that, since my first memories as a child, has been sensitive in the utmost to the irreversibility of certain actions. The plight of tomorrow has been my dearest guardian angel, and a devil of the basest complacency.
Logue,
I shall resurrect the prior thinly stretched monologue by putting forward my real reason for writing. On the one hand, the above passage has been rattling around in my head for some time, and I needed the excuse for its extrication. Secondly, and more to the point, I wish to communicate why, after two decades in a certain religious vein, I have determined to begin life anew, starting as it were, from theological scratch. I will not here provide a complete and satisfying argument in favor of this decision, but rather a rough sketch of the problems it has resolved. In preceding years and months, I turned over the question of Christianity in every way conceivable. I began with a wholesale rejection of the faith, and, in time, allowed myself to accept certain crumbs and appetizers, on the condition of their still being useful in the ‘real’ world of secular philosophy. It was the usual pelf that spews from a young man in the agony of agnosticism: anthropology, psychology, biology, philology, theology, (though of course from at best a universalist to a blatantly pagan lens). I shall spare the details of the thundering nonsense proceeding from this confused state, and leave it to an older and wiser version of myself to attempt reconstruction of the journey, and for the present, will merely say that it led me after long denial and manifold micro-concessions, as C.S. Lewis wittily noted, to find Christianity (despite it’s Christianity… ) a plausibly sensible enterprise.
However I did not realize then that a fatal shift had occurred in my perspective that would produce more misery still upon an attempted return to the Church of my childhood. One fact that utterly terrified me, coming as a resurrected specter from the darkness of infancy, was the utter and hopeless reality of sin. The irreversibility of it. I had at this point surveyed enough history to know that goodness is a rare art, virtue, rarer still. Yet the masses that thronged the city churches seemed to be in a kind of moral trance. Convinced of the eternal position of their immortal souls, they took to the kind of self-actualizing mindset of the post-modern age like it was a second skin, repeating the ‘truths’ of the same culture that was utterly bent on the eradication of their kind, with no realization of their mortal conflict with the Doctrines of Christ. Pastors, the ones not caught in the skirts of an attractive worship leader, relied on powerful oratory, and swaying arguments that, while emotionally captivating, had the persistent character of passing between the ears while leaving the traversed medium utterly unchanged. More pastors still uttered the most indefensibly bland and uninspired monologues to which mankind has ever been subjected, (except perhaps in the lecture halls of contemporary Humanities Departments, which speeches at least have the excuse of being wrong). Worse still, my exhaustive exposure to the spread of teachings within the American church, from hard-core political bent towards left and right, to an almost Eastern charismatic mysticism, to resurrected puritanical prudishness at ‘the state of things’, left me despairing that I could ever find a set of doctrines that was even self-coherent, let alone capable of guarding the Light of Men from the deceit of culture and the bullhorn of ideology. If the Bible were the rock of truth it was supposed to be, than how come every new day brought twice as many new ‘scriptural’ teachings, the which any thinking person would find conflicting, all from the same mouths? The only answer I could obtain from those mouthpieces of this chaos was that ‘rationality was a barrier to Christianity’, and that of course was the very claim made by every atheist since David Hume. Why was it, that the defenders of the faith were arm in arm in league with it’s most fervent enemies? The aftertaste of such Gnostic dualism (without any of the spirit of that ancient heresy) ate at the corners of my mouth. So I gave up the doctrinal approach, and set out to erect from mere knowledge of human nature, and the history of religions, a theological foundation that could do what such teaching could not.
My prior discovery of Paganism was an excellent step in this direction. To know what Christianity brought into the world requires knowledge of what it replaced. With renewed passion I fell deeply in love with Greek Wisdom: the very practical philosophies of mediation, self-control, and piety that seemed a necessary backbone for any metaphysical system. I loved the love of place and heritage that animated the Roman religious spirit. My own ancestry called to me in the forgotten echoes of the Northmen - those mighty and world shaking worshippers of the Northern sky. The old world came alive, far more livid than the world of today, and reached from the pages of Homer, Hesiod, and Virgil. It peeked out from between the lines of the Eddas and Sagas of the north, and sang in the supple language of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Ovid. In comparison with the old pagan agnostics, even the fervent faithful of today seemed small, and unbelieving. How could it be, that the Light that came into the world was so dim?
I shall attempt here an argument in favor of Classical paganism, the very argument that was, to my sanity-starved mind, most compelling. To illustrate the same, I draw on a recent experience that best framed the distance between the modern view, and that of 2 millennia in the past. I was reviewing an article in recent psychological literature describing a study in which physical exercise was found to improve nearly every dimension of mental health. The authors seemed proud of this conclusion, pointing ecstatically at upward trending graphs, and multivariate analyses of the most state-of-the-art kind. They even went so far as to make predictions as to how much exercise of which kind would activate the neuro-chemical pathways that ‘led to an improvement in focus, decrease in negative emotion, increase in motivation, and expansion of memory.’ The point seemed to be that the authors of this vast and detailed study were of the belief that their finding was notable. I suppose that it never occurred to them that an increase in ‘health’ would improve ‘mental health,’ as though the mind were a mysteriously isolated metaphysical entity, loosely connected with the body in some dark and unknown way that their findings had just illuminated. This is the modern man at his finest, creating a new sub-definition of a previous term, and being shocked to find, on further investigation, that the words are related. Yes, health improves health… a linguist might have saved them the many millions in public and private money spent in proof of that statement.
What has this to do with the subject at hand? Why everything. In the classical view, man is not divisible into mind, soul, will, spirit, body, arms, legs, and spleen. He is all of these things at once. The dissection of the human form was held in the utmost religious contempt, as the disassembly of a form who’s final inspection stamp reads ‘God was here, (warranty void if removed).’ Such men would have hardly been interested in a ‘new idea’ that claimed time spent in the Gymnasium might improve memory. It was obvious to their minds that each aspect of man is part and kin of the whole. It is true that Plato gave eloquent voice to this belief, but it is not from the findings of science that he speaks, but the reason of common sense, common, because everyone knew it to be true.
If Christianity required rejection of reason, and the ejection of the rational mind, it could hardly be superior in practical matters to Paganism, which glorified reason as the greatest gift of the gods, while also supplying man with a system for household life, citizenship, and public and private piety. Even Mystery religions, which gave assurance for those fearing eternal damnation, were sane in the utmost. The wisest and most educated men found them irresistible, not offensive to the intellect. It was clear however that reason was not enough. I forget the author of the following observation, and must therefore plagiarize the point. Marcus Aurelius may have had the stoic moral courage to wake up early in the morning, but not to free the Britons from slavery, or address the corruption of Rome, or end the persecution of the very Christians who worked tirelessly to improve what he could not. Reason, when turned inwardly on the self, is no better than madness.
What gnawed at me further was that the architectonics of all that we consider civilized, advanced, educated, and learned, came not from utter rejection of rational pagans. The Greeks came within a swat of Newtonian physics, but the whole of high European culture, with it’s universities, scholars, laboratories, globe-trotting observers of nature; it’s mathematics and logic; art, music, architecture, and aesthetic sense - these came from Christianity, hardly the products of men who despised reason. In fact, it was in the American colonies, not Europe, that architecture turned from virile European Gothic Majesty to the sterile Roman Neo-Classical structures of our nation’s capital. I would come to later understand this as more than a passing aesthetic note… but I shall leave that for a different essay. In the moment it was the observation of this lost Christian Grandeur that felt to me a loss deeper than the love of Cupid to Psyche, a thing to be lamented with groans too sad to find expression in the words of any language living or dead, and for the restoration of which no trials could be too great, and no journey too long. I began to notice the truly unifying feature of all the churches and disparate teaching I had surveyed in the modern Christian scene, the big, ugly, buildings. It wouldn’t take Our Lord 3 whole days to tear them all down, they might collapse as a house of cards beneath their own weight at a tap, even light as they are. The one thing they succeed in, is the exclusion of their part of habitable space from any object or entity that might remind one of anything remotely eternal, judgmental, and durable. In a word, God.
I pondered this issue of durability. How many years had it been since the Reformation that saved the church from the evils of Pagan Rome? And how long had that redeemed faith held sway over this great nation? 2 centuries? In her own brief history our very United States has had not one, not two, but 4 great awakenings (one could count more if so inclined). Why so quickly did we fall asleep that we required shaking every quarter watch of the night? This could not be the Church of the apostles, against which the Gates of Hell would not prevail! I did not, at the time, pay too close attention to which apostle this promise had been given to…
Then there was the whole issue of community. The Early Church was perhaps the closest thing history has known to a collectivist Utopia. So much so that many writers of that same movement have purloined the language of St. Luke as a description of their own system, in an attempted bow to the moral sensibility of their time. It is true that it was heavily persecuted, torn form within with politically motivated heresies, and simple misunderstandings of over-exhuberent ex-pagans. But despite these truly pestilent times, one marker of that church was unity of Doctrine. I do not mean that all professed doctrines were one and the same, there was a great deal that the Early church Fathers said in error, but it was just that. An error. Knowably so through the organization of councils, deference to church authority, and the teachings of the Apostles. They were one church, confused, small minded at times, but united. And they were the greatest citizens of Rome that walked on her roads. So much so, that even Her pagan persecutors debated amongst themselves the wisdom of eradicating the best elements of their many cities. They were so charitable that they utterly embarrassed the piety of the agnostic pagans of that time. And they were literate! So beautifully, rationally, unassailably literate that they persuaded the most staunchly intellectual pagans to Her cause. And they did all of this with no Bible.
If, as I had been supposed to believe, the Bible was the sole temporal source of Christian truth, from whence drew the authors, editors, and canonizers of the same the surety of doctrine to do their work? It never occurred to me to read their reasons, 18th century Anglican historians had told me that Christian doctrine was ‘corrupted’ by the growing power of the Catholic Church in the century following the Edict of Milan, and that the true doctrines of Christ had been saved by Luther in his redaction of the Catholic scriptures (which, if he had his way, would have left an even smaller book than the one he did eventually produce). But from whence did this true scripture come that animated the earliest churches? A simple fact I had missed was that Peter, Paul, James, and John wrote to only a small number of the churches of their time, and that after those same churches had enjoyed years of growth. What scriptures did the others have? Not the Old Testament of the Torah and Prophets, that Hebrew tome was all but unknown to the Pagans of the first Century (save for a few scholars throughout the centuries BC, one of whom was almost certainly Plato). Christianity in those early years had but a fraction of the penetration into the Hebrew world that it enjoyed in the Greek and Roman. And all of this, with no Bible*, and largely among illiterate people.
It flew in the face of my experience of what Christianity today was to imagine a world full of hundreds of young, persecuted, and disconnected churches that upheld the unity of the faith, and followed the same doctrines (with some exceptions that were appropriately rebuked), all without a Bible for reference. Why did not the many popular translations of scripture in the 16th and 17th centuries have the same effect of unification on European Christianity? A cursory review of history demonstrates the clear opposite. State churches abounded, some Kings (in France and England particularly) assumed the headship of the church in their nation, and among the common man many eschewed a head at all, meeting privately and secretly in the shadows, fearing persecution from the same Church that translated the very Bible on which they based their hidden faith. Was this not the very fate of the sons of Noah? their language confused as they made attempt with their own hands, or own pair of spectacles, to build that tower into heaven, resulting in their scattering and demise? Their religion was multiplied, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, Nimrod... Men who put their own name and creed as the foundation of a tower, to grow and grow till it seemed to eclipse heaven herself, only to collapse from within**. I struggled to think of a church I’d ever been to that was older than a century, even a few decades. And this not because of an explosive growth in the close of the last century, but rather because the older buildings had been torn down due to lack of attendance. Old buildings smell too much of something eternal.
It was at this point that I began to suspect I had more than a merely aesthetic difference with the Reformed church. The unification of human nature I had learned from my Pagan teachers (and central to the doctrines of the Church Fathers) was at odds with the therapeutic, body hating (or overly-loving), spiritualistic worldview I had associated with the contemporary church. There seemed to be a third option between agnostic Paganism and Protestantism. You guessed it, Greek orthodoxy! Yes, I drank up with delight the icons and religious symbolism of the Greek Orthodox Church, basking in the sanctification of my prior Jungian sense of the unconscious mind. But beyond resolution of aesthetic quibbles with Christianity, there seemed to be a lot of peculiar theologies, mostly stemming from the vast Greek history of schisms and the put down of heresies rather than coming from a unified source. I liked the absence of the Pope, that dreaded figure embodying everything I hated about orthodox history, but didn’t see within the Greek Orthodox scheme the might to withstand modern culture, it seemed more a retreat into a fixed past culture, admirable in it’s own right, but not a living breathing Knight to slay the seven headed Dragon of moral and religious decline so blatant in the West.
So I knew I needed a religion with the following qualities. It must have absolute unification of doctrine, be not subject to the whims of this or that pastor or mystic, and remain timeless - enduring. It must provide law, and freedom. It must be orthodox with respect to the body, giving purpose to all the organs of human nature, not despising them as a thing to be escaped, but rather sanctifying the ordinary, turning each simple act and duty into a worship, and a sacrifice. Only in so doing could the modern apathetic man find sanctification. It must be alive, God-fearing, and humble, but at the same time unapologetic, unyielding, and unashamed. It must be communal, wholistic, providing for the needs of the whole life from marriage to death, from birth to baptism, from eating to exercise, for the miraculous, and the mundane. It must be literate, rationally and spiritually absolute, livid with the almighty power of both, not the failed substitution of one for the other. It must animate both science and literature, give power to the priest and the pen. It must have the power on earth to forgive sins, that what it 'binds on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what it sets free on earth shall be set free in heaven'. But beyond all these things, and most importantly of all, for without such no reason for belief is ultimately defensible, it must be True.
I wish I could say that at this point I walked into my local confessional, and afterwards bowed for First Communion. But no. No in all this time, despite divining from the history of man and the church the exact formulae given us by Our Lord in his departure from this world, I imagined it as a thing not yet born. I set out to compose the renaissance in letters, poems, and stories, that would awaken their readers for the reality of the True Orthodoxy, the Real Religion, the Good God. But composition of this kind requires literacy, a terrific, nearly suffocating, vast literacy. The kind leaving the eye bleeding and the cigars smoked by the pile. And in reading, I crossed the threshold of devastating ecstasy that is G.K Chesterton. I cannot emplasize how careful a protestant who wishes to remain so must be of his reading... I read of the silly explorer who discovered England, thinking it to be some far away land. The young boy, who having searched his whole youth for the body of a great giant, finds that it is the land of his hometown, when viewed from miles away. I learned that not only was my discovery of the perfect religion unoriginal, even my unoriginality was unoriginal.
So, here I sit, having contributed nothing at all to humanity, having said nothing that has not been better said before, and, after years of wandering, having not even taken the first quivering step of the journey who’s scenery I have described in poetry, story, painting, and prose. Perhaps I have always known, that this journey, once begun, is the truly irreversible one…
"The end of all my exploring, was to arrive where I had begun, and to know the place for the first time"
- T. S. Elliot
* I do not here make the claim that the Bible is unimportant to Christian life. Au contraire, it is the single most important written document in the history of mankind, and certainly in the history of the Church. Rather, I draw criticism towards the worship of the Bible, and the insistence that it is the sole foundation of Christian life. It was not for the Church of the early centuries A.D. And though many a reader may object, it is certainly not the sole foundation of any reformed church. Rather it is the culture or National spirit that provides the primary foundation, and the Bible is an icon of worship and regard, but certainly not (as it itself claims incapacity for being) the sole foundation. The believer in Sola Scriptura will be perplexed to find that very doctrine nowhere in 'Scriptura'. Sola Scriptura indeed, and whatever else the pastor brings in the door with him.
** It would be in order at this moment to express the hyperbolic nature of the preceding sentiments. While I have been only honest in their articulation, a mellowing must be attempted in the recognition that the fathers of the Reformation were among the greatest Christian men to ever live. Their faith is undoubtable, and their doctrines sincere. However, it is in this very truth that the essence of the matter is revealed. Many today suppose that the presence of religious fervor, visions, mystic experiences, and intense spiritual feeling are markers of a veritable faith. But these are the most simply discarded proofs of religious truth. The pagans of Carthage had all these, and in a sense far more acutely than any religious man or woman of today. It requires a faith of absolute proportion to cast one’s child into a bronze inferno, and any today who suppose this was not an act of the strongest religious feeling or spirituality has not placed themselves in the shoes and mind of the sort of person capable of doing it. We imagine that such people were savages, utterly unlike us in reason, emotion, and love. Is it not much more the case that these “savages” of history were dislike us only with regards to the magnitude of their faith, All else being more or less indistinguishable? I speak here not of ideas or doctrines, but of human nature. No, what matters not with regards to religion is the finding of a system that satisfies the soul, and brings both fervor and feeling, for pagans possessed all that religion can offer with regards to aesthetics and emotions. What matters, as truly no other thing in this world does, is to find Christ, and it is in this regard, that I believe the reformers to have erred.
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