What would the collapse of civilization look like?
We might immediately think of cutoff utilities, disruptions in the supply chain, violence in the streets, and the lack of functional government. While it’s true these might serve as external indicators of a functioning modern society, they do not constitute the essence of civilization. A civilized person doesn’t just live in the city (the civitas that gives civilization its name) but conforms to an ideal of culture. A barbarian lives for immediate needs and wants, while a civilized person thinks and acts according to higher standards of decency and nobility, recognizing higher goods within the soul and in society.
Great civilizations have identified goals that transcend everyday concerns, such as the refinement of the mind, the cultivation of the arts, and the fostering of a life of virtue. The barbarian cannot grasp the essence or purpose of these ends, thinking them impractical or pointless, which is why they were often known for destroying the achievements of civilization. Those who worked to build up an inheritance of culture often understood its fragility and the constant need to transmit and defend it.
While the barbarians normally stood outside the gates as a visible threat, today they stand firmly within them. We are the barbarians. We have slowly undermined the achievements of the last two and a half thousand years, casting them off while refusing to hand them on to our children. The way we speak, dress, think, act, and, perhaps most of all, entertain ourselves reflects a lack of civilized soul. And this interior corruption has already manifested itself exteriorly, as we discard human life casually, corrupt children with ideology in schools, and allow mobs to cause chaos.
Western Civilization has faced the threat of extinction numerous times. When the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, overrun by a succession of Germanic tribes, the work of Boethius and Cassiodorus ensured that classical learning would survive through their textbooks and translations, copied by generations of monastic scribes. When that flood of barbarians finally became Catholic and began to restore order under Charlemagne, a new wave of invasions destroyed much of what had been accomplished. Alfred the Great, while fighting the Great Heathen Army, personally began translating important works from Latin into Old English to shore up the culture of his besieged kingdom.
And in modern times, Dom Prosper Guéranger reestablished Benedictine life in France after Napoleon shuttered monasteries, making his monastery, Solesmes, a symbol of Christian resurgence as a center for the collection of manuscripts that stimulated study of the Church Fathers and a renewal of Gregorian chant.
“The West has failed,” Denethor declared in his despair in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Even if the West has returned to barbarism in many ways, we are, by no means, doomed to remain there. It will be hard to recover the legacy of our civilization, however, if we remain in ignorance of it. We need greater cultural literacy of the deeds, works, and ideals of Western Civilization to form our minds and inspire a revival of a civilized society. For those just beginning, it helps to pick up a travel guide, designed to help us know where to look so we can begin experiencing the great legacy of the West for ourselves.
A new two-volume text aims to do precisely this: The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, written by eminent scholars Allen Guelzo and James Hankins (Golden Thread Academics is an imprint of Encounter Books). This massive work, following the narrative of the West from Ancient Greece through the twentieth century, runs over two thousand pages in both volumes combined (which did cramp my hand while reading it!).
It’s beautifully produced as well, lavishly illustrated with works of art, portraits, timelines, and many maps, and also includes short selections from primary sources and “threads” that offer additional context and engagement in cultural works. I appreciate its interdisciplinary approach, which, though primarily historical, includes serious attention to philosophy, art, religion, law, literature, and science.
And, unlike many other works, it does not gloss over medieval Christendom; rather, it devotes ample attention to the rise of Christian Rome and the development of a distinctively Christian culture in the West.
We may have lost our way, but we have not failed yet. We can find our path again, picking up the golden thread of our tradition. The image of the golden thread goes back to Theseus, who used it to navigate the labyrinth in his quest to slay the Minotaur. If this mythical beast represented a destructive darkness that lurks beneath the surface of civilization, it has reappeared and taken a new technological form. Our own creation threatens to overwhelm us, making this no time for existential confusion.
To face this challenge, we need to think more, not less, rediscover the beauty of sacrificial love, and become cultural creators rather than sliding into passivity.
It’s time to take up the golden thread of the West so that we can continue this great and noble tradition, drawing from its profound depths to overcome our shallowness and repair its broken length by passing it down to the next generation.
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“To face this challenge, we need to think more, not less, rediscover the beauty of sacrificial love, and become cultural creators rather than sliding into passivity.”
Ah, yes, this is true, and yet we are being exposed to this contradiction:
“The cardinals also heard a meditation by Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, OP, who said that Lord calls the Church to sail through the “storms” of “sexual abuse and ideological divisions”, from one who denies the sin of Sodom, even if consensual, is sexual abuse because these acts deny the inherent Dignity of our beloved sons and daughters.
https://biblehub.com/1_john/2-26.htm
26These things have I written to you, concerning them that seduce you. 27And as for you, let the unction, which you have received from Him, abide in you.”
“8Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh, even now there are become many Antichrists: whereby we know that it is the last hour. 19They went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would no doubt have remained with us; but that they may be manifest, that they are not all of us.”
They who blasphemy The Holy Ghost, and thus deny The Sacramental Essence Of The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, are not of us.
“Penance, Penance, Penance”
They who have accommodated this blasphemy of The Holy Ghost, have ipso facto defected from Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, unless they declare this blasphemy of The Holy Ghost anathema, and reunite themselves to Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost.
Canon 750 1. Those things are to be believed by divine and catholic faith which are contained in the word of God as it has been written or handed down by tradition, that is, in the single deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, and which are at the same time proposed as divinely revealed either by the solemn Magisterium of the Church, or by its ordinary and universal Magisterium, which in fact is manifested by the common adherence of Christ’s faithful under the guidance of the sacred Magisterium. All are therefore bound to avoid any contrary doctrines. 2. Furthermore, each and everything set forth definitively by the Magisterium of the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals must be firmly accepted and held; namely those things required for the holy keeping and faithful exposition of the deposit of faith; therefore, anyone who rejects propositions which are to be held definitively sets himself against the teaching of the Catholic Church.[new]” “Canon 751 of the Code of Canon Law states that schism is “the refusal of submission to the supreme pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” Canon 1364 stipulates that the penalty for this crime is excommunication “latae sententiae,” i.e., automatically upon the commission of the offense.” Furthermore, “Canon 188 §4 states that among the actions which automatically (ipso facto) cause any cleric to lose his office, even without any declaration on the part of a superior, is that of “defect[ing] publicly from the Catholic faith” (” A fide catholica publice defecerit“).
Regarding schism, this applies if and only if the man elected to The Papacy, is not in schism with every previous validly elected Pope, least Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church ends up following that schismatic, who, being in a state of schism, cannot possibly be a True Vicar Of Christ.
The fly in the ointment for America is this lingering half-truth…that we are, at our most basic selves, a nation founded by frigid, racist, capitalist. The civil rights movement and its accompanying legislative solutions were classic examples of “the FAILED warmth of collectiveism.” THE REAL SOLUTION? “Warm capitalism and frigid collectivism.” Take the log out of our own eye, and we will see CLEARLY a path forward. Admit the truth that America (not white people) but Americans were racist and did great and lingering harm to its black citizens. Set up a multi-trillion-dollar capital fund for them, managed by those whom they determine are qualified, and let them participate in the privatizing of 90% of the federal government. THEN we will have a basis for returning to the Judeo/Christian definitions and ideas of sphere sovereignty and limited self-rule envisioned in the Constitution.
Only someone who is profoundly ignorant of American history and trapped in his own bigotries would reduce the complexities of our national history into a simple binary of racist or non-racist. As Elie Weisel wisely put it, “Only the guilty are guilty, not their children.” We have already spent trillions of dollars on welfare programs since the late 1960’s, and overall poverty rates are no different now then they were then. Reparations are both impractical and evil, operating as they do under the false assumption that modern people are responsible for the sins of their ancestors. So your progressive ideology and its “solution” are actually non-starters.
But how to get people to read, to care, when numbed by devices?
It seems to me that the solution to our problems is found in the individual rather than in programs or ideologies. Rather than trying to organize or implement, we need to help people change one at a time. We must begin with ourselves and work outward, first in family then congregation and finally community. Grass root conversion working upward, rather than top down. We need another “ great awakening “ , a spiritual revival of dead bones being put back together. We need to preach and practice the liberating power of Christ and his Gospel. We must learn to love our enemies and do good to those who dislike us. We must get back to living the Sermon on the Mount.
This is rather rich for somebody that demonizes “billionaires”.
And “climate deniers.”
How so “rich”? Isn’t repentance and holiness always in order?
It’s rich because you write “must learn to love our enemies and do good to those who dislike us.” while making enemies of above a magic threshold of wealth without the slightest attempt to identify actual expressed hostility to you.
Is demonizing people based upon their wealth (and I harbor no delusions about people like Ackman or far worse-Soros) repentance and holiness. There are 800-1000 billionaires based on estimates. Some may be your “enemy”, but you express no love.
Ironically every Somali fraudster and their political enablers have criminally expressed their contempt, but their wealth-indisputably ill-gotten-is off your radar as an “enemy”.
Yes, but also, the Church is neither ideologically top-down nor bottom-up, but rather: Eucharistic. Fully ourselves because also universal, and vice versa.
So, about rejuvenating (Western) Civilization in a barbaric world, what a great time to consider the ambiguity of some prominent leaders of “synodality,” blended not only within the perennial Catholic Church but also in league with the “world.”
Consider the synodal Shinto Master who framed Christian anthropology and moral theology as simply a matter of harmonizing opposites or polarities, as with the invasive homosexual lifestyle. In an interview with The Pillar, Cardinal Hollerich further explained: “In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the European logic of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites in Japan without changing your point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich
From this zeitgeist novelty, an open rupture of the Church itself, as fondled by yet another well-placed cardinal in his harmonizing “Fiducia Supplicans”. Happily opposed, publicly, by all of continental (non-Western!) Africa, plus Poland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Peru, Ukraine, the Netherlands, the Coptic Church, and parts of Argentina, France and Spain.
Perhaps the synodal Church—with, yes, all its needed benefits toward elementary interpersonal human respect—will also rediscover (Western) Civilization’s philosophical and non-demonstrable first principle of non-contradiction? And, with this, the wisdom and common sense of the Magisterium’s “Veritatis Splendor” defending moral absolutes. Ever heard of it?
SUMMARY: So, yes, “begin with ourselves”—solidly grounded philosophically and morally–and even sacramentally incorporated into the universal Mystical Body of Christ! We are not alone.
Consider the error of Aristotle who claimed Virtue is a means between two extremes when, in fact, in essence, Virtue requires the fullness of Truth And Love, and the fullness of Truth And Love are not extremes.
James: I think it’s both/ and, not either/ or
We are the barbarians. Dr R Jared Staudt channeling famed sage Pogo’s We found the enemy. It is us!
But isn’t all cultural deterioration a self destructive form of moral madness? And is it not a dark assent to kill oneself. When life offers little more than self aggrandizing and brief moments of sensual exaltation. For the brave to go out with a crash, the timid lingering in hopeless fear.
Staudt’s argument is of course necessary. How do we repair the golden thread when it no longer exists. At times we find answers in listening to the enemy, what it is that they impugn in our remorseful behavior. The places in the soul where Boethius and Cassiodorus, that man from Nazareth can still be heard while living in exile.
We have The Deposit Of Faith, From The Father, Through, With, And In His Only Son, Jesus The Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost and all The Faithful, who recognize Christ In The Breaking Of The Bread!
But if we continue to accommodate the counterfeit magisterium that has been made visible , In The Light Of Christ, we are guilty of not desiring Salvation for our beloved.
Woe then, to us!