Surveying the Rubble: A Hard Look at Cultural Decay

Transcript (edited for readability).

The event here today is something we've been planning for a long time — even before our district planned their pastors' conference on top of us. Anyway, we live in interesting times. That was, I think, a blessing that somebody presented — "May you live in interesting times." Well, that's us.

Dr. Anthony Esolen is one of the real treasures, I think, to Christians of all faiths, all communions, in that he is able to point us to the lasting things that belong to our Christian heritage. And he does it from his unique perspective as a scholar in the humanities. I noted, by the way, Tony, that your college has changed its name from Northeast Catholic College to Magdalen College. So you don't use the British "Maudlin" there? No, not Maudlin. Magdalen College has a heritage from C.S. Lewis, I know, and I thought to myself, how appropriate — because C.S. Lewis, as he gave his inaugural address at Magdalen College in Cambridge, stood before his audience as a living dinosaur, an example from the past. "Take a good look," he said — it's like a paleontologist getting to see a living dinosaur, because he lived and breathed in the classics. Well, that's Professor Esolen. He's not really a dinosaur, but he is a classics expert — you'll see his credentials in the bio, so I won't repeat them, other than to say we had the privilege once before, I think five or six years ago, of hosting him in St. Louis, and here he is now in Elm Grove. With that, please welcome Dr. Anthony Esolen.

Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you, Pastor Cinquebile. Thank you all for coming here. I gave a much more informal talk last night, and one of the students afterward came up to me and said, "Dr. Esolen, I've read your writings — I kind of figured you were smart, but I didn't know you were also so funny. Have you ever thought of doing stand-up comedy and impersonations?" And I thought that was one of the best compliments I've ever gotten in my life. I wish I could say today that I'm going to do stand-up comedy and impersonations — I'm not, unfortunately. Maybe I'll do some voices somehow in here, but I have rather serious talk for you today. Such as it is, okay?

When I first speak here, I'm going to speak about the collapse — what we face right now around us. Now, anytime anybody speaks about the collapse of a culture or a civilization, they're going to meet this charge. It's a very old charge — you'll hear it said that the same thing was said by other people in other places and other times. This is a common thing to say — things are collapsing around you, yet we're still here. The sun rises in the east — anybody here gone to public school? The east is in fact where the sun rises every day. It sets in the west, believe it or not — I've had a couple of college students who did not know that. Children are born and grow to adulthood, men and women marry — at least I hope they do — they have children, they grow old, they die. Nothing is new under the sun, okay? We've heard it all before, they'll say. You might hear it too.

For instance, we hear it from Livy, that historian of the Roman people during the time of Augustus Caesar. Livy said that he intended for his reader — now I'm quoting him, in English translation — "to trace the process of our moral decline" — he's talking about Rome there, first-century-BC Rome, under the rule of Augustus Caesar — "to watch first the sinking of the foundations of morality, as the old teaching was allowed to lapse." That old teaching had to do with quintessentially Roman virtues, such as piety — the duty you owe to the gods, to your ancestors, who are now your household gods, to your mother, your father, your country. "Then the rapidly increasing degeneration," he says, "then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day, when we can" — it's a famous phrase — "neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them." That's how bad off we are — we can't endure the sickness we're in, but we're also too weak to endure the remedies, or too cowardly to face them.

Still, now, when Livy wrote these words, Rome the Republic was a thing of the past. Rome was reconstituted as an empire. It still had some strong and effective features of the old republic. It was on the verge of about two hundred years of relative peace and prosperity. So shouldn't we dismiss the grumbling of old men — old men like me? Old men, after all, remember, and sometimes even enhance, the good things of their youth. This is a typical old-man thing to say — "When I was young, I walked five miles to school uphill, and walked home uphill too." Old men are like that. Nestor in the Iliad and the Odyssey is like that — you get him talking, and, "Well, you ought to have seen me in my younger days, we had enemies back then, not like these sissies we've got now." Old men will naturally miss what is no longer in their midst. They treat good things that are new with some suspicion, maybe scorn, and they exaggerate the sins of the generations who have risen to take their place. That is a common feature of human history, human cultures — I won't deny it.

Now there are three ways to address this objection, and I'm going to go through all three right now.

First: when somebody says that your culture or civilization is in decline, that may be valid, even though it doesn't touch upon every single feature of the civilization. So Livy is talking about moral degeneracy — maybe it applied to the aristocrats in Rome, it applied to the higher-ups in all the large cities, but it didn't apply to everybody universally. It didn't apply particularly to small farmers in the countryside. Anybody here know the word in Latin for a small farmer in the countryside — basically the Latin equivalent of the English "redneck" or "hillbilly"? Paganus. A paganus is a guy who lives out in the countryside — paganos, from which we get our word "pagan." Because the Christians, naturally, when they went to bring the good news of Christ to people, went where they could find the most people — that was the cities, which were also easy of access. But in the countryside, people still stuck doggedly to their old ways. They were the hardest to convert, for a couple of reasons. One is that they were still practicing the old virtues, especially the virtue of piety, which I've described. Those people were rather stubborn in their relative poverty and the healthy habits of manual labor outdoors. They were the last to be brought around to the Christian faith — hence our word "pagan." Hillbillies.

But in the large cities, especially in Rome, and among the upper classes, the moral tenor of those people lay somewhere between — and forgive me for being blunt — whore, swindler, and assassin. In other words, it was roughly equivalent to the moral tenor of Washington, D.C. right now, and New York. Rome had really undergone a century in which assassination had become a political hobby. Rome under the Republic — I tell my students this — for almost four hundred years, though it teetered on the brink of civil war several times, and though Romans, being Italians, could hate each other with a passion, there was not a single political assassination during all that time, until the assassination of the Gracchi brothers in the late second century BC. Then for the next eighty or ninety years, assassination was a way of life.

I think here of Cicero, the aged Cicero, traveling in a litter toward Rome, as the whole republic seemed to be falling around his ears. He was hated by Mark Antony, and Mark Antony had his henchmen stop the coach on the way to Rome. Cicero knew it was Mark Antony and his thugs, and he stuck his neck out of the side of the litter, bared it, pulled his cloak down, and said, "Get it over with fast, boys," and they cut his head off right then and there.

This was a time when armies loyal to their commanders, not to the Roman state, fought against one another. Think of Caesar crossing the little Rubicon River, which marked the boundary between the territory called "this side of the Alps," Gaul on this side of the Alps, and the territory under the direct governance of the Senate. He crossed with his army — this even makes sense to people today; in the older days it would not have made sense. "What do you mean, his army?" But it was his army — it wasn't Rome's army. They were loyal to him, not to the state.

It was a time when the lives of the upper class were sinkholes of luxury and vice. And that remained the case long after Livy had died, even with the state itself on an even keel. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in the late second century AD — he was the last of the so-called five good emperors — Rome would be pitched into political chaos for a hundred years, one emperor rapidly succeeding another, most of them murdered, often by members of their own guard. Only two or three out of the next twenty-five emperors died of natural causes; most were assassinated.

So if I point out our cultural decline, I don't have to deny that we have good things in our midst, like antibiotics. It's typical — I say we're in the midst of cultural decline, and someone says, "Well, you know, if you looked a hundred years ago and stubbed your toe, you might have died from infection." Well, so what? I am not talking about that. Cultural decline is seldom universal, so you can usually point out some regard in which things have not collapsed, and sometimes even in which things have gotten better. For instance, if you were a slave at the end of the first century AD, under the rule of Domitian, who was a basket case of cruelty, you probably had a better time of it, and more legal protection, than you would have had in the time of Scipio Africanus — the great Scipio who defeated Hannibal a couple hundred years before. But Domitian was cruel and insane, and the great poet Juvenal, writing in the time of Domitian, said of the rabble in Rome — you've probably all heard this phrase — that all it took to keep them from rebellion was "bread and circuses." A circus is a contest held in a circus, a circular arena — horse racing, gladiatorial combat, that's what he's thinking of.

Cato the Elder — stern old moralist — he lived in better times. He sweated in the fields alongside his slaves; he was a farmer. On the other hand, he sold them off, like worn-out horses, when they were no longer of financial use to him. So in that one regard, things had gotten better. We can note, in our time, that black people need not suffer the indignity of having to drink from a different water fountain. Fine — that's true, that's good, we're glad of that. But most of their children suffer the greater and irremediable harm of growing up without a father in the home, and that was not the case in 1900. It was not the case even as late as 1950 or 1960. In fact, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks in America in 1900 was considerably less than ten percent. That was in horrible times, okay — the family was strong. Now the family is weak. There are various reasons for that.

The second answer we give is to say bluntly — it is a point of historical fact — cultures do decline and die. That is true. It happens. By the time Livy was writing, what was left of Sparta, which had its glory days around 400 BC, defeating Athens in the great Peloponnesian War? Sparta was a pigsty with a broken fence. That's what Sparta was. Sparta could not even replace its own generations — the Spartans weren't getting married, weren't having kids. Sparta was a thing of the past.

What was left of Athens? I call it the groveling schoolmaster of the world. Athens had no political power, still had some cultural influence, but its glory days had passed, long past. The days of the great playwrights of Athens — the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — they were four hundred years before. They're gone, and long gone, hardly more than a memory. Whatever Athens had to give the world in philosophy, statesmanship, she had already given — she had no more to give, not much more. She was little more, culturally and politically, than an old lady trussed up in dresses out of fashion, who shows up to visit her rich cousins and somehow manages never to go back home.

It was said, not that long ago, that the sun never set on the British Empire. That sun has set, and it will not rise again. England hardly even knows anymore what it is to be English. I was told many years ago, by an old lady from England, that if I thought the English people generally knew anything about the world's greatest literary genius, their own Shakespeare, I was much mistaken — they didn't know anything about him. In 1980, when I was a college student, I heard people at Princeton say it was stupid for Ronald Reagan to suggest that the Soviet Union would ever fall apart — of course it was here to stay. In ten years, the Soviet Union was dead.

Where are the bones of Fabricius, the old poets used to ask — where the heck are they? Who is even Fabricius? Ask a student to give you three facts about Grover Cleveland, who was, in fact, a very fine president who served two terms — they won't be able to tell you anything. These things are gone. Where's Prussia, the Prussia of Frederick the Great? Where's the emperor of Japan? "Heaven and earth shall pass away," Jesus says. We suppose that the United States will not pass away? Jesus did not say, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but America will remain" — we forgot to say that.

So that's the second response: it's a historical fact — cultures do decline, and civilizations collapse. That has happened; in fact it is a rule in history. It happens all the time.

The third response, I think, is the most powerful one, and the one I'm going to suggest to you today and talk about at some length. The third response is, in fact, to show the decline. Now, there are many ways to do this. I pick the ways that are most congenial to me — other people, social scientists, will go to the statistics. I don't have statistics at my fingertips, and I'm not a social scientist — I'm a guy who studies the humanities. Show the decline in its failures and in its shame. Show it, and be specific.

For instance, after the Goths had taken control of the Roman Empire in the West, the little emperor — he was like eighteen, nineteen years old, his name was Romulus Augustulus — the big German warlord comes up to him and says, "Son, don't you think you'd rather live in a monastery than rule this western state?" And he said, "Yes, sir, I guess I would." "Go ahead, get lost then, kid — we Goths are taking over." Central Europe really was pitched into a dark age for a few centuries. In some backwater places — like, you know, the Iowa of the Western Empire, sorry, Iowa — I am told they even lost a well-known technological invention called the wheel. When you have lost the wheel, I think we can safely say you have declined.

Pope Gregory the Great was quite aware that his Latin could not match the Latin of the authors in the days of Cicero, and we can now tell when a thing was written in Latin by its grammatical errors and the constriction of its vocabulary — a vulgarized vocabulary and dumbed-down grammar — we say that's sixth century, that's seventh century, not second century, as we see the decline.

Periods of decline are notable for shoddy workmanship in arts and crafts. Think about this for a second — if you want, today, in the United States, to buy a piece of furniture that will still be around fifty years from now, that won't have fallen apart, where do you go? The Amish, that's right. If you don't have Amish around — we don't have Amish in New Hampshire — you go to antique stores. You pick a piece of furniture that was made a hundred years ago — that piece of furniture will still be around a hundred years from now. You pick up a piece of furniture from a modern furniture store, you're lucky if it lasts twenty years — it's made out of glue and sawdust.

Periods of decline are notable by the disappearance of entire fields of art and thought. People will sometimes say to me, "Dr. Esolen, you're under an illusion here, because when you look at the poetry of the past, you're looking only at the really good stuff that has survived. Most of what was done was garbage then, and you're looking at the general stuff done now and most of it is garbage too, but you don't know what will last." And I say — uh-uh, don't even go there — because I know what popular poetry was like in that century, the stuff that isn't anthologized, the stuff that isn't collected. I know what it's like, I've seen it. It is not garbage. At worst it's workmanlike; usually it's very good. It is not trash — don't talk to me about it. And besides, I am not just talking about quality within a certain genre or field — I'm talking about the disappearance entirely of certain kinds of art, certain kinds of poetry. We could go right across all the fields of arts and letters — the disappearance, not just of bad quality in a field, but of the field itself.

It's also true that periods of decline are notable for weakness and frailty in the important social institutions, even supposing the institutions survive at all — schools, families, neighborhoods, beneficent organizations, all kinds of things people used to do, getting together to pursue the common good. Very often, and maybe in our time more than ever, these periods are notable for a loss of any transcendent purpose — a loss of any sense that you are part of a story that spans the generations, a story that has a meaning and an aim, the loss of anything for which you would lay down your life. Oh, all kinds of people in our time seem willing to kill other people for the sake of something, but to die for the sake of something — uh-uh. The Spartans lost that; they had no more reason to exist. The Athenians lost that. I suggest that we Americans have lost that.

Now let me point out what's in front of my eyes as far as the decline is concerned — let me get into specifics. I collect — this is why I say I know what was popularly produced in my line of work, because I read it, I see it, I examine it — I collect magazines from the nineteenth century. They're actually not expensive to get. I get them in volumes bound up six months' worth, in a book this thick, maybe about twelve or thirteen hundred pages. My favorite is called The Century Magazine. In its heyday, The Century printed two hundred fifty thousand copies, for a nation of eighty million people. So what would be comparable now would be a magazine printing a million copies, with small font — there's a lot of stuff in one issue.

What kind of stuff was in there? Listen — you want to read Huckleberry Finn, and follow along the story with all your pals? Huck is going down the river on a raft with Jim, the runaway slave — what's going to happen? You had to read it in The Century Magazine, because that's where it was printed, in serial form. You get a couple of chapters one month, you wait till the next month for a couple more. That's how it was published, before you could ever buy the book. Mark Twain hadn't even finished it when he started printing it in The Century. That's where he had to go — magazines like The Century, that's where he published. If you liked the novels of Henry James, you had to find him in The Century first. Everything is in these magazines — it shows what intelligent audiences were like in that time.

Sophisticated articles on theology and interpretation of the Bible are right next to the latest installment of Huckleberry Finn. Poetry is in there, including comic poetry, short stories are in there, articles on science, articles on politics, articles about history, travelogues — exploring the world, exploring glaciers, an account of John Muir, the great Arctic explorer, his life saved by a stray dog, a mongrel dog, when he got lost on a foggy day and evening on a glacier out in Alaska, and would certainly have pitched headlong to his death because he couldn't see five feet in front of him. All kinds of wonderful stuff like this — ordinary people picking this up, even kids.

So in The Century Magazine, I turned to a report from something called the International Exhibition in Paris — this is 1889, an exhibition of art and technology. The author is a lady — get this for a high-class New York lady's name — Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, otherwise known as Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. Great Dutch name — I don't know if they were Lutherans, the Van Rensselaers, they might have been Episcopalians, I'm not sure. She was the first woman admitted to the American Society of Architects. She was one of the leaders in the battle over women's suffrage — that is to say, she was one of the leaders against it. She led the opposition.

So she's writing from Paris at the time. France is the place to go if you were in the arts — France was at the peak of her fame for painters and sculptors, and it was a well-deserved fame — but Americans were trying their hand at the arts too, and Mrs. Van Rensselaer was a patriotic American. So she goes into the room where the Americans are exhibiting their works, and she reports this back to The Century, to the readers. I'm going to read a paragraph, and I want you to be thinking, while I'm reading it, in how many ways this paragraph could not be written now, or even, frankly, understood.

So, quoting from Mrs. Van Rensselaer: "Here" — that is, in the American room — "a better foundation has been laid than we see in any other foreign room. Here, more than elsewhere, we read a belief that a painter's first task is to learn how to paint. The general level is already good, showing a number of capable painters, well-endowed, well-trained, and seriously ambitious, a few of exceptional talent and accomplishment — one, John Singer Sargent, who, in his own line, need fear no living rival. The foundation is well laid, and the prospects for further development seem good, at least in certain directions. Portraiture promises extremely well. Genre painting only needs to be more national in subject matter to show its strength and individuality better. And landscape gives sure signs of incarnating those very qualities which, in the French school, it threatens to lose — those personal, poetic qualities which made the glory of the French generation just extinct" — that is, the French generation that has just recently passed away.

You're going to find a paragraph like that in the New York Times right now? No. In the Atlantic Monthly, or anywhere? This is in a magazine next to Huckleberry Finn. A passage like that is a gold mine, if you know what you're looking for. Mrs. Van Rensselaer expected her readers to care about the arts, and to know how to distinguish between what is workmanlike and what is fine, and between what is fine and what is a masterpiece. The painters she's talking about are all working in a vital tradition — they're not tired old traditionalists, but they're also not hacks and frauds who hide their shallow thinking and narrow hearts and inept hands behind what is ghastly, hideous, incoherent, simplistic, or obscene. They know what they're doing. She expects American painters to be American, expressing our peculiar national character, because we're supposed to have one, and showing the world scenes you might find only in, say, the Hudson Valley or the Shenandoah Mountains. She affirms standards of excellence that transcend time and place, and she expects her readers will do so too. She goes to Gloucester Cathedral — it's a thousand years old, but it is more present to her, more a part of her life, a part of her soul, than the latest blundering heap of ecclesiastical sticks and stones is to us. Think of that.

Now we may apply to all the arts what she says about Americans who have learned, quote, "how to paint." A thousand techniques — I know this because of my line, which is teaching English poetry to students, that's my fundamental line — a thousand techniques, discoveries hard-won, passed down from teacher to pupil over the centuries, have been lost. The bonds of tradition have been severed. I know this is true of English poetry written in meter — I know people who attempt now to write English poetry in the old meters, and I cheer them on, but they still do not really know what they're doing. They're like people who try to chisel marble after several generations when nobody was really doing that anymore — you can look at the old results, but you don't really know how the artists got there, because all the techniques were lost in between.

Meanwhile, the people themselves have wandered away. An illiterate peasant who goes to Mass in a medieval church had a more intimate connection to great art than most graduates of our universities have. That is absolutely a fact — it's an unavoidable fact. The peasant goes to his local church, sees what is at worst workmanlike paintings on the walls, or stained glass windows — he sees art, he's in the presence of art that ranges from really solid to absolutely sublime, and this is true wherever you happen to be in Europe, everywhere. He's got this intimate connection with great art. We don't have that. But what do we expect — art is going to be stunted when it wanders from the wellsprings of the divine.

So I go to another article in this magazine — it's the third installment in a series. Now get this — a series, and again, think, this is a popular magazine, this is where you read Huckleberry Finn, this is where you read Tom Sawyer. This is the third installment in a series called "The Nature and Method of Revelation," by a fellow named George Fisher, who was an ordained minister and a professor of divinity at Yale — he's a theologian and historian of great accomplishment. This particular article is called "The Differentiating of Christianity from Judaism." Please remember, again, this is in the magazine where you're reading Huckleberry Finn.

Fisher writes as a liberal man of broad education, who still believes — I don't think this is impossible in our time either — he's a liberal man of broad education who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God, the second person of the Trinity. Now, this issue of the splitting of Christianity from Judaism is sensitive. "Jesus," says Fisher, quote — and again, think of how many ways what I'm about to read is inconceivable now, that anybody should write these words, or that the general public would want to read them — quote, "did not decree the subversion of the Jewish cultus, that ancient fabric which had sheltered religious faith in the days of its immaturity, when the community of God was waiting for a full disclosure of the purpose of mercy and of deliverance of the race. He" — that is, Jesus — "did not by one sudden stroke demolish that system, but he put gunpowder under it. And yet this is not an apposite simile — we should rather say that he prepared the way for the gradual, intelligent abandonment of it. There might be temporary confusion and even occasional contests, but on the whole the change was to be, in a true sense, natural, like the melting of the winter snows and the coming out of the leaves and blossoms under the increasing warmth of the vernal sun."

And Fisher goes on, point by point, to show how Jesus — whose teaching was, quoting him again, "void of sympathy with Jewish exclusiveness" — that Jesus had no sympathy for people who said "We're Jews, get lost" — "fulfilled the law and raised it up to its true spiritual height. Henceforth," he says, quote, "the one condition and source of communion with God was personal communion with him whom God had sent. When this last truth should be fully appreciated, what space would be left for any other priesthood or sacrifice? At the Last Supper, he so connected his death with the forgiveness of sins as virtually to dispense with the need of any other offering or intercession than his own." And I think all Christians, even Catholics, with a Catholic understanding, will agree.

Now, what can we say of passages like these? No trace of professional jargon — it's very sophisticated, and maybe the kid who's reading Huckleberry Finn can't fully understand what's going on, but it's meant for any intelligent reader. No trace of smugness, as if we modern people knew more about God than Jesus did, so we're going to teach Jesus a lesson — in the old sense of the words schoolyard bullies used to use, "I'll teach you a lesson," "we'll teach Jesus a lesson." The author assumes his readers are familiar with the entirety of Scripture — you don't have to explain things. They're familiar with the old law, with the prophets who prepared the way for Christ, with the person and ministry of Jesus, and with the very reason man engages in religious devotion at all. He assumes all of that.

It's often not what the authors and artists of old said that's important — often it's what they obviously did not need to say. That is most telling. When this fellow, George Fisher, in quick succession, remarks upon the death of Stephen, the preaching of Philip the Deacon to the Samaritans, the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, Peter sitting at the same table with Cornelius the centurion — he does not have to tell his readers who these people were. We would have to do that now. Now, when ignorance of the faith — frankly, ignorance of all things older than yesterday — is as thick and dark as pitch. Most college students — this is no exaggeration, most, and I mean most, not in the sense of fifty-one percent, but quite a large majority — would not be able to identify the Good Samaritan. "I don't know what you're talking about." The Prodigal Son — forget it. Maybe ten, fifteen percent know what you're talking about.

I recall a television newsman from Rhode Island — Rhode Island is the most nominally Catholic state in the country — this guy was Italian-American, and I remember him calling Easter "the day when Christians believe Jesus rose into heaven." That's rather like saying something like, "Yes, Galileo was the man who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered Australia." In some ways, the things people know about our faith don't even rise to the level of being wrong.

Now, a people like this — they're easy prey, easy prey for stupidities, no doubt — stupidities like "Jesus never said anything about" — fill in the blank with your favorite sin, which these days all have to do with, um, taking your pants off, right? You may use this — I hope it's not too crude, but I say the heresy of our time is the pantological heresy: people can't keep their pants on. It's no more sophisticated than that. We can't even get good heresies anymore.

But their situation is even worse than that. The people of our time are stunted spiritually. They have been made by God to seek the face of God, and in seeking him, to find out who they are. That's how we are made. But they don't know where to begin to seek — they don't even know that they should seek, they do not know who they are. So they flail about, they catch at anything for a sorry substitute — they catch at sexual identity, for example. They tremble upon the brink of non-being. They are extraordinarily frail.

Now, the editors of The Century assumed their readers would be interested in Dr. Fisher's series. I use the word "interest" deliberately — they had a stake in it. Their hearts and minds and souls were on the line. Eternal destiny hung in the balance. People of our time have a stake in it too, but they don't know about it. The great battle rages about them — the great battle bids to sweep them to destruction, like seedlings and saplings caught in a flood, but they are blind to lightning and deaf to thunder.

The arts are in a shambles — I use the word advisedly. "Shambles" in the old language is a butchery, a slaughterhouse. Modernism has slaughtered ten healthy forms of art for every rickety and consumptive one it has invented. The churches are in a shambles. My church, the Roman Catholic Church, has slaughtered ten healthy practices of piety for every one it has invented, has closed ten schools or churches for every one it has built. Protestant churches, as you well know, have lurched from orthodoxy to liberalism to Unitarianism to atheism, or worse, to a sub-pagan cult of Jesus, affirming every mind-paralyzing and life-destroying movement of our time — blessing the murder of children, the emancipation of women from womanhood and man from manhood, and the sowing of the seed of life in a sewer. The flood is upon us, and out comes the rainbow, but it's not the one from God — it's the silly one from ourselves, declaring that we know better than our Creator. And if our Creator remembers us, we will deign to accept the gift; but if he doesn't, that's all right too.

Five minutes. Okay — so much for the heights, and what about the valleys? Again, I'm talking about the decline around us — I want to diagnose the situation. What about ordinary life, the local school, the neighborhood, the family? You know the statistics perhaps better than I do. The working-class family has been eviscerated. The middle-class family is weak and of no cultural or political influence. Teachers strive to overcome their ignorance by arrogance — they're proud to work against the parents, they're indeed taught to do so in their teacher-training schools. Nor do they have any strong connection to the neighborhood, which is mostly silent and empty.

Here too, again, I open my copy of The Century Magazine — a man named William Langdon was the chief promoter of the YMCA movement in the United States. He's writing an article here called "The Problems of Modern Society." This is in a series of articles written by a group of progressive Christians — and that was not a contradiction in terms. He warns against depriving the family of its proper fields of action, against severing Christian churches from a deep and pervasive influence upon every area of social and political life. About marriage he says — again, he's writing in 1889 — that it has degenerated into, quote, "a relation to be determined solely by mutual inclination or convenience." But this is wrong, he says — it violates the laws not only of God but of nature, quote, "both of which hold in force quite independently of human sanctions, and create a bond beyond the reach and competence of the laws of man to bind or loose at will." "Our divorce legislation," he says, "the result of our superficial ideas of the social and political significance of the family, is the scandal of Christendom." One of his colleagues among these progressive Christians founded the Divorce Reform League, because divorce in the United States had risen to the dangerous, utterly unacceptable, and shameful level of ten percent.

"As the family, so the school," says Langdon — "you cannot educate in the aggregate." Now, think in how many ways this could not now be written: "in the family alone, and by, or on the immediate responsibility of, those parents by whom were imposed upon each child, from before its birth, the physical, mental, and spiritual conditions on which all true education must be based — only in the family can ideal, early education be conducted. It passes into other hands; they are only to be regarded as the delegates of the parents." You have a plumber come into your home to fix the pipes, not to teach your kids about the latest perversion. What would put your neighbor behind bars for corrupting the morals of a minor is done regularly in our schools, and defiantly — the family be damned.

But how can we form strong families unless we raise boys and girls with that end specifically in mind? Here Langdon suggests we have allowed the political idea, the idea of equality, to crowd out the wisdom of the church and the obvious needs of the family, he says. If only a political conception prevails, then of course you're going to teach boys and girls the same kinds of things. But if you remember — I'm paraphrasing here — that boys are destined to be husbands and fathers, and girls are destined to be mothers and wives, you will try to build up, in some way separately, the intellects of the boys and the moral intuitions and moral sense of the girls, so that they shall be united as one, and, quote, "neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord."

How advanced is our disease, when conservatives — people who call themselves conservatives — could hardly conceive of what Langdon is talking about there. They would greet it with suspicion. But if we look about us, we see men with stunted and unfed intellects, and women with stuffed and overfed moral passions that are undirected, unrestrained by the demands of intellectual coherence or even reality. There is nothing so mad, so squalid, and so vicious that the slack men of our time will not find an excuse for it, and the women will not espouse with sound and fury.

These authors, lining up here, were progressive — not for the time, but in essence, because they held high ideals for mankind. They looked forward to the continued leavening of the world by the Christian faith, which is itself the truth, and which preserves and elevates every measure of truth that the philosophies and religions of the world outside of Christianity have grasped. We fall miles beneath them. I could not assign those articles to undergraduates — they would not be able to make linguistic sense of them. It would be hard for me to ask professors to read them, because in most cases they would not know the subject the authors were even talking about. It would be like trying to explain quantum mechanics to aboriginals in the Australian outback who do not have a word for the number five. That's the intellectual side of it. On the moral side, it would be like trying to preach Jesus in a pagan whorehouse. But that's what the apostles and the missionaries did, isn't it? That's our task, all over again.

That will break. Thanks.