By Dr. R. R. Reno
These are a few excerpts from the article, edited to fit in our limited format. Be mindful that Luther’s inspiration came from St. Augustine, one of the Church Fathers as he sought renewal for the church. Perhaps it is in times like these that we do well to look back to see the future more clearly.
I teach at a Catholic university that employs humdreds of professors, and the evidence is plain to see. Only two or three scientists seem willing or able to speak about the relation between the truths of faith and the hypothesis of science. Nobody studies or teaches Dante. The extensive modern tradition of Catholic social teaching has no role to play in political science. The history department employs no one to teach the Middle Ages. Administrative initiatives consistently emphasize “diversity,” and the practical effect, whether intended or not, is a slow reorientation of faculty and curriculum away from a collective focus on Western Christian intellectual tradition. The retiring professor who specialized in Dryden and Pope is replaced by a young Ph.D. whose interests run to gender studies and post-colonial theory.
If this is happening at a self-consciously Catholic university, imagine what the situation is like at Yale and UCLA. Intellectual life is now dominated by the first truly post-Christian generation. A friend of mine at Yale two decades ago wrote his senior paper on James Joyce’s use of Trinitarian language. Ignorant of Christian doctrine, he set out to find a faculty member who might provide guidance. I remember his dismay when he told me that he could not find anyone who could explain to him the classical Christian doctrine of Trinity.
The situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years. A student at Princeton and Harvard – or Georgetown and Boston College, for that matter – now studies with teachers who have no knowledge of Christianity other than crude caricatures long retailed by progressive illuminati. Christianity no longer exists as an integrated world view that shapes the education and mental habits of modern people in the West.
It is not the case, however, that we must live alone in the ruins of Christendom. The poverty of the present need not cut us off from the wealth of the past. The Church Fathers are returning as agents of renewal, guiding us toward the biblical source of a truly Christian culture.
The Church Fathers return, but what do they bring with them? Any student who picks up a treatise by one of the Fathers cannot but notice the intensely Scriptural focus. A first-time reader, however, will find ideas imbedded in what seems endless arguments about how to read specific biblical passages. Heresy is not, finally, about doctrine; it is about reading the Bible in the wrong way.
The basic patristic project was simple: to take all things captive to Christ. The Fathers did so by saturating their ideas, their lives, and their communities with Scripture. But as they return, they do not simply bring us Scripture as an undifferentiated mass of text, nor do they thrust the Bible into our hands without instructions for use. All the power of Christian truth may reside in the biblical text, but, as the Church Fathers recognized, we need to organize our minds and sanctify our lives so that the Word of God might live in us. This requires the rule of faith.
Later councils and creeds give precision to aspects of the rule of faith, but its overall shape remains fluid. Yet this no more hinders the patristic project than the lack of a unified theory limits modern science. Under the guidance of the rule of faith, Irenaeus argues, we can avoid childish errors and simplistic solutions.
According to Augustine, the problem is not that we have bodies and live in a finite world. Sin is not ontological, as if being a finite, embodied creature were the root of our problem. Instead, the problem rests in our will and personality. We can either love and enjoy finite reality, taking it to be the sum total of what makes life worth living, or we can use that reality in such a way that we make spiritual progress toward the infinite and eternal truth that is the Holy Trinity. The latter is the way of sanctification, for it requires us to discipline our finite loves so that they might serve rather than impede a crowning love of God. “The mind should be cleansed,” as Augustine writes, so that we can see the divine light. This cleansing is not speculative or abstract. It involves the specific moral and spiritual disciplines of the Christian life.
The issues preoccupying editorial pages and the evening news are not trivial or unimportant. We have a duty to fight for moral truth in a Western culture increasingly committed to a velvet barbarism. This will certainly involve defending and buttressing fragments of a Christian culture now being eroded. But we should not confuse what we must do for the defense of life and social sanity with the deeper task of renewing Christian culture in the West.
We must do what we can to limit the damage done by the barbarians of our time, but the renewal of the culture they now control will require the revolutionary power of people whose lives are immersed in Scripture. Men and women saturated in Scripture are as explosive as rags soaked in gasoline, but, unlike Molotov cocktails, the fire of divine love transforms and perfects rather than destroys and consumes. This the Father knew, and this they teach us as they return.