A Realist Outline of History, Part Two

Editor’s note: Part One of this essay can be read here.

The First Apocalypse: The Blessings of Anarchy

In the fifth century, the Western Church suffered its First Apocalypse, losing its demographic race to revive the dispirited, depopulated Western Empire. For its next 500 years, with occasional lulls, it was swamped by waves of brutal Germans, Huns, Muslims, and worst of all, Vikings. Communications and trade died. Pax Romana shrunk into crumbling cities and isolated villages. Yet, providentially, tiny societies of love do not require a State. They survive even where only “two or three gather together.” Floating above the chaos, a shattered Church shrank to isolated bands of what Christopher Dawson described as “silent men…clearing forests and draining swamps”—models of productive, self-sustaining free association, regardless of their nasty warrior chieftains.

The Rule of St. Benedict, voluntarily embraced, united ora et labora, eight hours of work and eight of prayer. Its mandate was hospitality, with Pax carved over each rough gate. Any hungry soul, any Imago Dei, could freely enter, eat in the refectory, sleep on a cot, and worship in the chapel. If sick, they were nursed in the infirmary. If healthy, they’d work the fields alongside the monks. These monasteries survived the political rule of brutal warrior chiefs by freely offering their learned service as “clerks” to their illiterate bosses.

With loving service—voluntary, personal and sacrificial—the monasteries implanted deeply into the culture the axiom of personal human dignity, and norms of voluntary association, personal ingenuity, and subsidiarity—the proper autonomy of even peasant families and menial trades. Working their fields, learned monks modelled the nobility of manual labor, upending Antiquity’s aristocratic contempt for real work. Unlike the Ancients, they valued “matter” as such—material Creation—inspiring technological innovation like crop rotation, stock breeding, water power, and clocks. Most bizarrely, they eventually taught reverence for women and chastity as a manly virtue to the sons of brutal warriors—totally mind-boggling to an Achilles or Apache warrior, and disgusting to a Nietzsche.

Starting around 1050, the socially unified Church, firmly grounded in its worship and free education, inspired an explosion of historically unprecedented free cities, guilds, universities, cathedrals, pilgrimages, music, art, and the first experimental science. This was the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Charles Homer Haskins), or what Kenneth Clark (Civilization) called the Great Thaw. Its moral authority and Peace of God ran from Portugal to Prussia, restraining (a little) its princes’ cheerful brutality. So, the States were finally able to get their act together, princes defending borders, enforcing justice, fostering commerce, and gathering taxes. Between the princes and bishops, there were constant, bitter squabbles over episcopal appointments, legal jurisdiction, and taxation—such endless quarrels, prophetic versus pragmatic, being the cost of a free society.

This was Christendom, from the First Crusade (1094) to the first imperial pope (1294). The universal call to love—tailored for warriors as chivalry—overshadowed tribal antipathy. There was always a tension between the North and South, German mysticism versus Latin naturalism, personal inspiration versus communal consecration, and the perennial needs for both reform and authority. Yet the alliance between Northern reformers and Southern governance endured.

For those two centuries of the High Gothic, popes were weak, yet holy; princes rowdy, yet subdued; and the people, devout and confident, with the confidence needed to build a glorious civilization.

The Second Apocalypse: The Love of One’s Folk

Emerging from the anarchy, though, Europe was a mare’s nest of haphazard loyalties (like the warrior-monk Templars), begging for rational administration. Growing prosperity inevitably tempted ambition, clerical and aristocratic. Princes, merchants, and poets justly became partisans of native tongues and customs, pushing back the Latin, and the Crusading spirit waned. Bishops and abbots had become feudal lords, and lords likewise brokered clerical offices or benefices, confusing secular and sacred authority. Kings enlisted their own ambitious civil servants, and the revenue demands of both a newly imperial Church and newly impertinent States could not be reconciled. In 1303, two-hundred years of ecclesial chaos were inaugurated by the kidnapping and death of the first imperial pope, Boniface VIII, by France’s Prime Minister Nogaret. Though an age of intense popular piety, the loving Christian Society frayed at the top—typically.

The Roman hierarchy, now hugely wealthy, engaged in power politics in Italy and Germany, thus squandering its real moral authority. So in 1525, a religious and political schism tore the West, splitting the Latin Renaissance and German Reformation, tragically crippling the Church’s universal call to love. National societies asserted their real Christian freedom in discipleship, but drew their wagons into circles, refusing fellowship to other Christians, condemned as idolaters and blasphemers. Ever since, divided witness has crippled the Church’s universal witness with theological tribalism.

This Second Apocalypse was sparked by Luther’s 1520 Letter to the German Princes, urging them to seize their local churches. They were delighted to obey. The blood flowed for over a century, in the Schmalkaldic War, Dutch Eighty Years War, Spanish Armada, English Civil War, Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and Thirty Years War, killing (among others) over five million Germans. Called the Wars of Religion, they were truly Wars of Nationalism. Alliances cut across any theology, Catholic-Lutheran-Calvinist-Zwinglian, each prince stoking fanaticism in his own service. The bleeding ended with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, enshrining Cuius regno, illius religio, “Whose reign, his religion.” The princes, later styled Enlightened Despots, were happily put in command of their local splinters of the universal Church.

Across Europe, the Reformation might have been a fraternal debate within a socially unified Church, but it plunged into tribal political warfare. Christians were long accustomed to balancing parallel demands from sacred and secular authorities, given duties to both. But political fealty was secured by solemn oaths, so few could imagine even trivial diversity in creed. The sole exception was the United States, founded largely by dissenting sects, given their diversity and weakness.

As the blood dried, the ascendant State attracted a new class of public intellectuals like John Locke, faux-clergy buzzing, “Religion is too fanatical to be allowed out in public.” Ordinary pastors and priests still served sacrificially in teaching, nursing, and sheltering, but their hierarchies became agents of the State, compromising the Church’s universal social authority. Humble clergy launched spectacular global missions, seeding the future abroad, but across Europe, prostrate before the local political authorities, national sects began a slow death spiral.

Within 150 years, turncoat French bishops (like the vile Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord) were evangelizing the French Revolution’s religion of Reason. A century later, Lutheran bishops, seduced by Hegelian nationalism, marched their flock into two world wars with Aztec docility. In contrast, given its enduring, unfashionable dissenters, England enjoyed a brief Methodist revival, a powerless witness that shamed wealthy oligarchs into outlawing the slave trade. Embattled nations like Ireland or the Netherlands clung to sacrificial churches, with an impressive though unsustainable fraternity of political and ecclesial authority.

But gradually, Europe’s stormy marriage of universal charity and local patriotism, as cooperative spouses, was corrupted by domestic abuse.

The Third Apocalypse: The New Tower of Babel

The Church’s third Apocalypse is called the twentieth-century. The First Apocalypse (850-950) was the Crucible of Anarchy; the Second (1520-1638) the Crucible of Nationalism; and the Third (1914-present) a Crucible of Globalism. In suicidal ambition, a Cult of the Universal State has sought to supplant the Christian mandate of a universal Society of Love with artificial ideology. Nazi racism was a mere blip in this slide toward a ubiquitous, homogenous bureaucratic culture, the ambition for a global Oriental Despotism.

And globally, so far, a hundred million defenseless civilians have been slaughtered by their own governments in their lust to build Heaven on Earth.

Global progress in population, trade, and communications meant an inevitable growth of bureaucratic government, importing—to some degree—its implicit cosmology of mechanical fatalism. Some were more vulnerable, like Orthodox Russia or Confucian China. America’s constitutional federalism has proven more resilient in taming it, but ultimately, an amelioration of our current mischief depends on the voluntary, personal, and sacrificial witness of Christian families, servant families, and a renewed social visibility of their faith, particularly among teachers, nurses, and social workers in the bureaucratic bubble.

American Exceptionalism and the Temptation of Power

The one exception in this age of national churches was the West’s youngest shoot, the United States: American Exceptionalism within Western Exceptionalism.

The American Republic was founded largely by dissenting denominations, deeply suspicious of state power (though often inflicting confessional authority on their local colonies): Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and especially breakaway Methodists. One now-forgotten colonial grievance was the failure of the king’s Anglican Church to provide missionary bishops, inciting both Methodist and Episcopalian schisms. The confessional states soon conformed to the federal model of benign neglect, as in Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Jews of Newport. Yet it was unimaginable that the new republic might not be generically Christian (however stylish its Freemasonic fringe elite).

Our contemporary pathologists, diagnosing the etiology of our distemper, seem to have ignored the real distinction between legislators and ideologues. The Founding Fathers did not gather in Philadelphia as a debating club, arguing abstract anthropology. They were not propagandists. They were gentlemen, mostly Christian, hammering out a structure of sovereign offices so they might live together in peace, liberty, and mutual service. Believers like Adams saw utility in Locke’s vocabulary, oblivious to his crass anthropology. Deists like Jefferson knew America’s political freedoms rested entirely on a Christian Society and that education in self-government.

Since then, Christians like Lord Acton, Cardinal Newman, and Orestes Brownson have seen a narrowly political liberal state as friendly to Christian society, open to—and always needing—re-evangelization.

The Founders owed their inventions more to the realist Montesquieu, drawing his lessons from the evolution of the British constitution. Most saw their offices as an echo of Aristotle’s “mixed regime.” However, they leavened this classical intention with the Good News of Original Sin, which they implemented with their enduring system of “checks and balances.” This did not reduce the Common Good to a bourgeois “cage match,” as some allege, but recognized that no one can be trusted with unchecked coercion—that the real Common Good resides in the Society, and not the State’s coercive offices. Historically, in fact, Aristotle’s “practical ideal,” however attractive, had no traction whatsoever in the culture of Antiquity. Only a Christian culture, subordinating local, coercive political necessity to universal, divine love, could bring it to life.

Blaming the American State for the eventual apostasy of American Society is idealistic impatience. The American Founding endowed the Body of Christ not only the duty of evangelizing Society, generation after generation, but more importantly, resisting the temptation to enact its own moral imperatives with State coercion. By any practical measure, its political offices stayed behind the lines of religious repression and religious opportunism, and their resilience became manifest within fourscore years. A sacrificial Abolition crusade prophesized the Imago Dei in black slaves, but its political appeal was the Declaration. Its more important cultural appeal was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So ultimately, the war was fought to preserve the Union—a healthy ambiguity.

In contrast, forty years later, elite mainline Protestant churches backed a coercive Prohibition movement. They were so powerful, they eventually imposed a constitutional amendment on the entire country, criminalizing not merely drunkenness, but alcohol. This violated the Christian principle that not all sins should be proscribed as crimes (assuming alcohol is a sin). Wielding such power, they squandered their moral authority and succeeded only in supplanting relatively benign beer halls and backyard vineyards with bootleg gin, speakeasies, the Mafia, and Roaring Twenties. By 1933, popular culture was dead drunk (scan the “classic cinema” of the 1930s and ’40s, awash in cocktails).

Since Christian Society has humanized so many diverse, coercive States—theocratic, warrior, oligarchic, or parliamentary—why now are we challenged by a bureaucratic regime? Plato teaches that regimes fall only when their own officers betray their faith. America’s Christian society was betrayed by Progressive clerics of the mainline denominations, downloading their charitable duty, first and fatally in education (1900), onto the public administration, in the name of the State’s greater expertise and revenue. State-ruled schools were the camel’s nose of the bureaucratic culture into Christian Society.

Faced with massive Irish, Mediterranean, and Slavic migration, by the late-1800s, mainline Protestant clergy-politicians turned to government to solve the problem of educating the benighted Orthodox, Catholics, and Anabaptists. Through the lens of Reformation tribalism, they saw the newcomers not as fellow Christians with diverse devotions, but as pagan aliens, an unwashed urban mass, unequipped for citizenship and industrial labor.

They might have respected the autonomy of Christian families by empowering parent-ruled schools. Instead, they argued, “Citizens have a right to education,” so schools are “crucial public works.” In that ambition, they boosted Progressive pedagogues like Horace Mann, Egerton Ryerson, and John Dewey, then rode the wave of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, son of the founder of the segregationist Presbyterian Church USA, and former president of Presbyterian Princeton. The Founding’s Christian dissidents became the elite Apostles of oxymoronic State Social Services.

Proving its resilience, Christian culture endured four generations of bureaucratic schools, even while cities, industries, cinemas, and taxes burgeoned (proving that parents remain the primary educators of their own children, even in their neglect). But progressive State pedagogy could never rest content with Abraham Lincoln’s poetic education in civic virtue—Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Dewey’s goal was never educating self-governing citizens, but skill-training a docile levy for the industrial economy. Public schools gave no thought to the Imago Dei—though, as homeschoolers always rediscover, youth nurtured in Christian self-government can easily pick up any needed skills themselves.

The Depression’s welfare revolution arguably kicked a momentary market crash into decade-long stagnation. Having argued, “People have a right to education,” Progressive clerics now argued, “People have a right to food and shelter.” In the 1960s, an ever more ambitious medical industry argued that a healthy labor market was a “public work,” and by the way, “People have a right to health care.” Such “rights” now mean standing in long lines at government wickets or waiting “on hold,” because nobody asked whether Christian duties of education, nursing, and shelter could translate into coerced administration.

The propaganda is so pervasive now that it is hard to realize today that such rights are inherently self-defeating, mutating spontaneous self-government into docile, careless public dependency. Like Renaissance popes and Reformation bishops, the mainline denominations squandered both their creed and moral authority in politics.

The coercive State cannot enact a Christian Society’s loving, familial services of teaching, nursing, and sheltering. To repeat, civic education becomes mechanical training and now propaganda; personal nursing becomes medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter becomes welfare dependency and now tribal patronage. Services once voluntary, personal, and sacrificial—crucially, education—came under public management, mandatory, categorical, and monetary. The Bubble is insulated from the real human costs of its bloating protocols.

In the Sixties, with dozens of administrative and cultural devices, the Bureaucratic dominion of justice began to filter most tragically into the family. This endgame supplanted the happy Christian expectation of loving mutual service with the discontents of a contractual exchange. No-fault divorce was enacted for the convenience of the elite, confident in their stock portfolios. Spouses became increasingly isolated as contracting parties in categorical and monetary relationships, further obscuring the Imago Dei through a lens of justice and cosmic indifference. The marriage covenant became the first contract where the State sided with the defaulter.

The Constitution may well survive this culture war. England’s morally questionable Glorious Revolution, preserving some sort of monarchy, arguably defused the potential for a London Terror. And given that marvelous Constitution, righteous legislators may get their leashes back on the public servants. One challenge is the Bureaucracy’s capture of scientific research with unaccountable public funding. Its totalitarian precautionary principle—any speculative catastrophe justifies the real costs of any hypothetical prevention—corrupts real science into religious Scientism. So our politics is fractured by the rhetoric of “pro-science and anti-science.”

Still, Western science itself shows a remarkable knack for reform—but that is another discussion.

Prescription and Prognosis: Sanctifying the Family

The last three centuries have proven that imposing an ideological vision upon any civilization is cataclysmic. So we must conclude—annoyingly—that no program can resurrect a Christian culture, but only a Christian response to the concrete needs of real people. St. Benedict penned his millennia-old Rule in response to the immediate needs of his brothers.

Today, we see a return to a faux-theocracy, the religion of scientism. Its priests are bureaucrats. Their instinctive ambition is to regulate families, simply because families are unregulated. Thus, the challenge.

Christian families are already sacrificing loving service: teaching, nursing, and sheltering across denominational divides, with homeschool co-ops, parent-run schools, apprenticeship programs, crisis pregnancy centers, midwiferies, hospices, and addiction recovery centers. There’s great potential in the under-the-radar Christian halls network for post-secondary education. Yet, so many kids today suffer from broken homes that the most urgent witness may be an open dinner table—what most annoyed the apostate Emperor Julian.

There’s surely a place for political action in this: pushing back an almost despotic bureaucracy, while a new Christian society grows within. For this humble service, that amazing Constitution and “demographic federalism” are an enormous help. Meanwhile, given urbanization, the complexity of modern finances, industry, and technology, some influence of a regulatory culture will remain a fact of life across all institutions. Every corporate “human resources” department must run on protocols. Every City Hall zoning office must run on protocols. Every college admissions office must run on protocols. The alternative is graft and nepotism.

In the end, the administrative categories of the bureaucracy will arise from the culture of the society itself, as the Christian reverence for mothers turned rape-loving German warriors into chivalrous knights. This past century would have looked very different had progressive “social services” been defined in terms of autonomous families, rather than isolated individuals (education vouchers, health savings plans, family subsidies for shirt-tail relatives). In ages past, the Christian responses to our masters were identified, in retrospect, as the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque Ages.

Optimistically, in the next generations, we may anticipate a Domestic Age, marked by welcoming public architecture, home-made music, front porches, mother-friendly playgrounds, gardens, and home canning, sourdough bread, and the decline of fast-food outlets.