Living in a Different Age

Did the people in late antiquity or a few hundred years later in the 'early medieval' ages realize that they were in a society that was on the cusp of change and evolving towards a new civilization? A person of Roman heritage living in lower Gaul (modern France) in 500 AD could look back less than a couple of hundred of years to the age of Constantine the Great or less than four decades to St. Augustine. But now he realizes that things have changed in his region and he no longer is ruled from Rome but must now show allegiance to a semi-barbarian Merovingian king.  His grandfather had studied in Rome but he had to be content studying locally since Roman academies had ceased to exist.  Fashions were changing rapidly and life was in a flux.  His family was Catholic but gone were the old rules of conduct and society...........these were being replaced rapidly in his own lifetime and his children were becoming alien to him as they adopt the customs and mores of the new Frankish overlords.  He asks himself very often....am I still a Roman......even if Rome no longer exists?

We live in a similar time to the late antiquity Roman...... in an era of immense change.  The old civilization is falling apart but our memories and identities hearken back to a era that lasted over a thousand years but has been in slow disintegration for the past five hundred years.  Rome was consolidating in Italy around the same time that Alexander the Great was conquering Asia.  The Greco-Roman civilization lasted almost a millennium.  Our Christian age lasted almost 1500 years but now is in its final death throes........or are we like the Roman in 500 AD and do not realize that we are already in the start of a new civilization or culture?  I believe the latter is a more correct view.

I have been thinking about this more and more.  I recently reread Christopher Dawson's classic, The Making of Europe, in light of the euro crisis on the ongoing disintegration of Christian culture in our time.   Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was most likely the most penetrating student of the relationship of religion and culture who has ever written. "Every culture," he wrote, "is like a plant. It must have its roots in the earth, and for sunlight it needs to be open to the spiritual. At the present moment we are busy cutting its roots and shutting out all light from above." In order to address this situation, he proposed the study of Christian culture. He believed this study to be essential to the secularist and Christian alike, because it is the key to the understanding of the historical development of Western civilization.


Mr. Dawson has been dead for over forty years and I wonder what he would have thought of our current age.  I think he would have been dismayed not to see Christian revival but only accelerating decay........it is hard to believe that there is the ability (or desire) of society or culture to regenerate itself.  This can only happen with our society returning to its spiritual roots and a wholesale return of society to the belief in God.  This will take a miracle.  Dawson also wisely remarked, "It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture."  We are seeing this today in Europe and the rest of the western world.


The secularist sees religion not as the foundation of society as Mr. Dawson claims but as the enemy and the residue of a bygone culture and time that must be relegated to museums and academic study.  The 'Man in the Sky' is just a gigantic fairy tale that continues to impede the progress of mankind towards a new and better future.  Christian values of love, hope and charity are old fashioned and have been replaced with selfishness, despair and hate.  We celebrate the seven deadly sins as virtues.   These are the antithesis of the Christian ideal.


Maybe a thousand years from now this current age will be called the the Decline of the West  or the Age of Nihilism or something to that effect.  The removal or disavowal of the spiritual or religious origins of culture will have devastating and tragic effects upon the world.  I  read today in a London newspaper that there is controversy over placing a statue of Jesus on Primrose Hill in London to celebrate the closing of the Olympic games this summer in London and the 2016 games in Brazil.  I would expect controversy in the US over a similar proposal given our secular foundations.  Here in San Diego there has been a fight over a cross at a war memorial on Mt. Soledad.  It appears that the sight of a simple white cross has a nightmarish effect upon some people in the area.  But it is hard to believe that a statue of Christ in a nominally Christian country would provoke similar controversy.  


Perhaps it is true, in fighting a rear guard action against such obvious evils such as abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia, pornography and the teaching of secular humanism (atheism) in schools, Christians are really fighting the tenets of a new civilization based upon the absence of the spiritual.


We Catholics are a people who have lost our home and are now forced to live in an alien culture that is seeking to claim our children and grandchildren.  Although different in methodology, Christians are in retreat not only from the Middle East but also in the West.  


The best weapon is prayer and to not to give up hope.  "Do not be afraid", said Pope John Paul II.  This is all we can do and we should not give up the fight.