Christendom and Christianity, Part I

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

… Ambition comes behind and unobservable.

Sin grows with doing good. When I imposed the King’s law

In England, and waged war with him against Toulouse,

I beat the barons at their own game. I

Could then despise the men that thought me most contemptible,

The raw nobility, whose manners matched their fingernails.

While I ate out of the King’s dish

To become servant of God was never my wish.

Servant of God has greater chance of sin

And sorrow, than the man who serves a king.

For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them,

Still doing right: and striving with political men

May make that cause political, not by what they do

But by what they are.

—T. S. Eliot, Murder In the Cathedral

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I grew up in a deeply conservative, pro-life, evangelical household whose breadwinner was a US Naval intelligence officer. Democrats, we were not. Yet the idea of electing a man like Donald Trump as a Republican was not only revolting but baffling to all of us: a man with absolutely no experience, a record on pro-life issues that could be kindly described as spotty [1], a serial adulterer and sexual aggressor, a man with more lawsuits to his name than cells in his body, and one whose fantasticated ego can brook neither limit nor dissent—none of this has anything to do with the GOP my parents signed up for. The adult campaigns run by Kasich, McCain, or Romney (whatever their flaws) make me almost homesick now.

The question has been posed many times about how he could possibly have been elected. It’s been given several intelligent answers, and I think many have an element of truth; but what baffles me is that so many Christians should have supported, and should continue to support, such a grossly unworthy and incompetent figure not only as the President, but as their hero. The tendentious, hysterical, self-appointedly more-Catholic-than-the-Pope rag Lifesite News have declared him their pro-life person of the year for 2017. [2] What the hell happened?

I believe the key lies in the divergence between two superficially similar, historically entangled, yet essentially contrasting and usually inimical ideas. The one is Christendom; the other is Christianity.

By Christianity, I mean the religion taught by Jesus and handed down through his Apostles and the successors they appointed. More specifically, I mean Catholicism, which may be defined by being in full communion with the Bishops of Rome. But the tension between Christianity and Christendom shows up readily in other traditions, too; and there’s a sense in which American history revolves around that tension, and does so more thanks to its Protestant heritage than its Catholic minority.

By Christendom, I mean the attempt to organize civil society on Christian principles, with the express aim of defending Christian truth and promoting Christian faith among the populace. The only objection to doing this is that it cannot be done.

I believe that the Christian imagination has given this truth a magnificent, perhaps unconscious, poetic expression in the famous legend of the Holy Graal. Only a handful of knights—Arthur himself never among them—are said to have attained the relic; and in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the late but ‘canonical’ version of the story, the guardian of the Graal warns Lancelot that the quest will lead to the ruin of Arthur and his realm. C. S. Lewis, commenting on Charles Williams’ Arthurian poems, says the following:

The saints, beginning with Christ Himself, not by failure but by their very sanctity, inevitably cause immense suffering. Christians naturally think more often of what the world has inflicted on the saints; but the saints also inflict much on the world. Mixed with the cry of martyrs, the cry of nature wounded by Grace also ascends—and presumably to heaven. That cry has indeed been legitimized for all believers by the words of the Virgin Mother herself—‘Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.’ To be silent on this point was impossible for Williams. … He felt that the final reconciliation, far from excluding, pre-supposed a full recognition of all that had been valid in the protests. It was, after all, the protesting Job who had been accepted of God, not his plausible comforters. His irony, his skepticism, his pessimism must all be allowed their say. He was sure they were not merely wrong. At the very least, he felt, Grace owes courtesy to the Nature it must so often reject. …

Galahad has caused Lancelot immense sorrow simply by being born. [3] He has caused Lancelot (and the Round Table in general) further sorrow by beginning ‘the adventures of the Sangreal,’ for ‘when this rich thing goeth about the Round Table shall be destroyed.’ His example has led many of them to undertake the quest of the Grail, and for them the quest has ended in humiliation and failure. This is ‘the double misery’ of Logres—to see their lower good destroyed by the higher and then to lose the higher also. … Logres is becoming Britain. The bright cloud which had almost descended to earth is being drawn back into the Land of the Trinity whence it came: the hard, worldly, unambiguous landscape emerges. There is no irony in Mordred, only commonplace cynicism. [4]

My imaginary, literary idea of why relics like the Graal, and the Holy Lance in the story of the Dolorous Blow, cause such destruction despite being explicitly good objects, is that they represent complete fusions of the material with the spiritual, as is proper to sacraments. [5] Hence anything a person does with them is ‘magical,’ in the sense of being not only the act they perform, but also the spiritual thing such an act symbolizes: wound a man with the Holy Lance, and you have not only symbolically but literally used a spiritual thing to injure a fellow man. It is a kind of witchcraft. For hands and hearts unready to handle these things, being given access to them is no kindness: they can use them only for their own ends (however virtuous), and the power they unleash will inevitably be ruinous.

This, then, is the poetic meaning, the meaning at which the story of the Graal was originally written (or so I conjecture—direct analysis of the images of Mediæval art, while great fun, is not my field of expertise). But allegorically, and whether the poets who composed the legends thought so or not, the meaning indicated is that Christendom is at best ill at ease with Christianity, and at worst actively hostile to it. Mordred, the bastard son of Arthur, was a wicked man, but we are not informed that he was an unorthodox one. Camelot is apt to maintain a double poise / of Catholic morals and another kind of catholic mockery. / It is laidly alike to be a wittol and a whore, / and wittoldom and whoredom are alike good cause for war. [6] Using supernatural things for natural ends is always a kind of witchcraft; and using Christian morals and Christian theology to construct a just society, while it is not necessarily using the specifically supernatural for the merely natural, always carries that temptation in itself.

For of course the thing about politics is that it is a game of power, of pragmatism, and of sides. And the thing about political sides is that what they’re after is the civil, financial, or military force to effect their plans; and those kinds of power have no tendency to encourage the love and holiness that our Master’s teaching exclusively consists in. Love and force are opposites.

I want to explore this further over my next few posts; for now, I leave my readers with another quotation from T. S. Eliot’s version of St Thomas Becket, killed in the midst of a Christian nation and a Catholic cathedral:

Peace! be quiet! remember where you are, and what is happening;

No life here is sought for but mine,

And I am not in danger: only near to death.

… The Church shall protect her own, in her own way, not

As oak and stone; stone and oak decay,

Give no stay, but the Church shall endure.

The church shall be open, even to our enemies. Open the door!

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[1] In 1999, Trump described himself as loathing abortion but considering the right to choose paramount, up to and including partial-birth abortion. Now, to do him justice, he seems to have moved away from that viewpoint long before his 2016 campaign. His apparently cavalier attitude toward the lives of the poor and sick, his hostility to refugees (even those that have lived in this country for years or decades, let alone those fleeing the horrors of groups like ISIS), and his alarming readiness to engage in braggadocio with unbalanced communities like North Korea, continue to leave me dissatisfied with any claim that he is pro-life.

[2] That awful sound you’re hearing is me, retching.

[3] Galahad was Lancelot’s illegitimate son, begotten on the Lady Elaine, daughter of the keeper of the Graal and a consecrated virgin; due to an enchantment Lancelot had supposed himself to be sleeping with Queen Guinevere, and when the enchantment faded, he was so horrified at his faithlessness to the Queen, and she in turn was so angry with him, that he went mad for months. The ironies at play in Galahad, the High Prince destined to achieve the Graal, being begotten through such a web of immoralities, is a literary accomplishment of the first order, and a kind of mythologized picture of the ironies at play in the redemption being accomplished through the corruption and weakness of the Apostles, the Jewish priesthood, and the Roman state.

[4] Arthurian Torso pp. 175-177.

[5] Relics are, of course, not sacraments per se, and do not have the intrinsic effects the sacraments do. This is one of several reasons this explanation is imaginative and artistic, rather than philosophical.

[6] From Williams’ poem The Meditation of Mordred, ll. 17-20. Laidly is an Anglo-Scottish dialectal word meaning ‘ugly,’ while wittol is an obsolete synonym for ‘cuckold,’ especially one who knowingly tolerates his wife’s adultery.