The Fool on the Hillsdale
What Makes Some Catholics Great and Some Catholics Horrible?
I am a fan of the writing of Flannery O’Connor and JRR Tolkien. Of course, their works are not for everybody, but something happens in their books: the reader somehow encounters what Eric Voegelin would call “the Divine Ground of our Being”. The encounter can be a confrontation, as it is in most of Flannery’s works, or it can be a slow seduction into an atmosphere, something like a breath of enchantment or a kind of vaguely perceived musical theme, as it is in Tolkien’s mythology.
And both Tolkien and O’Connor are Catholic writers, whose faith infused everything they wrote.
Here’s what I’m wondering: how is it, then, that the faith of these two artists produced such good literary fictional fruit, while the faith of my former friends in the Super Catholic world has produced such toxic real-life fruit?
It’s the same Catholic Church, isn’t it?
If, as Christ tells us, “ye shall know them by their fruits” (Mat. 7:16), then we can compare the fruits of both groups and “know them”.
The fruits of the Christian Right (whom I also call Super Catholics, Evangelicals with Rosaries, Revivalists) include, but are not limited to, the following …
The support of an attempted violent coup against American democracy
The refusal to constrain their behavior in order to protect health care workers and the most vulnerable among us during COVID
The flouting of truth and contempt for facts, in their endorsement of the Big Lie and other ridiculous conspiracy theories
Their endorsement (sometimes overt, often covert) of the most vulgar and dangerous human being who has ever been elected (and is currently running for) president
Their growing display of their formerly hidden antisemitism, racism and sexism
Such “Christian” fruits are enough to make even a fervent Christian renounce Christianity entirely; these fruits of the EWTN-Catholic-Answers laity are as rotten as the fruits of the Catholic bishops, who have long enabled and been accessories to child abuse.
The fruit of the Catholic writers I read, by contrast, are such that I am drawn closer to the mystery of Jesus.
How can reading Flannery and JRRT connect me viscerally and mysteriously to the Spirit that broods upon the waters, while the behavior of my former friends - ostentatious Christians, all of them - often makes me never want to hear the word “church” again? Again, both groups are “Catholic”, right?
How can the witness of the one group be so antithetical to the witness of the other?
Well, I’ll use Eric Voegelin’s insights to try to answer this question, but my answer is preliminary, as the mystery remains - so I’m open to corrections and suggestions. I want to be clear here that I am not claiming that my former friends alone are guilty of what follows; I have been this way and worse myself. It’s the spiritual sickness I’m trying to diagnose, not the sick I’m trying to condemn; and it’s a sickness we’re all prone to, including me.
Here’s a scene from the first chapter of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. It’s about how the main character, Hazel Motes, plans to resist temptation even while serving in the army …
After a few weeks in the camp, when he had some friends—they were not actually friends but he had to live with them—he was offered the chance he had been waiting for; the invitation. He took his mother’s glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he told them he wouldn’t go with them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie on; he said he was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he was not going to have his soul damned by the government or any foreign place they . . . but his voice cracked and he didn’t finish. He only stared at them, trying to steel his face. His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn’t have any soul and left for their brothel.
They told him he didn’t have any soul and left for their brothel is one of the best lines in literature. It could be a line from a poem - a modern poem, of course.
The irony in this story is that Hazel Motes comes to a point where he tries very hard to be an atheist. But the Christians he encounters out-atheist him in a heartbeat.
As I wrote to a friend …
It's a deeper atheism, you see.
Probably every soldier who said to Hazel Motes, "You don't have a soul" and who went into town to screw whores was "Christian" - and yet deeply atheistic, much more free from Jesus than Motes, who is haunted by Him.
As for atheism, Eric Voegelin speaks of a “spiritual dullness” that is a kind of “deeper atheism”. Using Psalm 14 …
"The fool [Hebrew: nabal] hath said in his heart, There is no God." … These fools, "they are corrupt, they have done abominable works … they eat up my people as they eat bread."
… he writes that the nabal, the “fool”, both here, and in the rest of the Old Testament (along with the amethes in Plato and the stultus in Thomas Aquinas), the nabal who says in his heart “there is no God” …
… does not necessarily denote a differentiated phenomenon of dogmatic atheism but rather a state of spiritual dullness that would permit the indulgence of greed, sex, and power without fear of divine judgment. I stress that problem because today usually an atheist is just blandly assumed to be an atheistic person who denies the existence of God. …
When I was an atheist (I became an atheist at the age of nine, after watching Madeline Murray O’Hair on TV), I was “Christ haunted”, as Flannery says the South is, and as her character from Wise Blood, Hazel Motes, is. But that was a superficial atheism. This “deeper atheism” (the atheism of the nabal) bears its own “fruits” by which we will know it …
The personal contempt for God will manifest itself in ruthless conduct toward the weaker man and create general disorder in society. That is all there in the implications of the nabal.
… Voegelin writes. He points out that this “personal contempt for God”, this “turning away from the light”, which creates general disorder in society (attempted coups, gigantic lies, felons running for president) shows itself over and over again in history. And even back in Plato’s day …
… in the Sophistic schools the contempt of the gods had grown into general loss of experiential contact with cosmic divine reality. So the loss of contact. The loss of reality is one of the features of all deformations. First you must have loss of the piece of reality before you can talk nonsense about reality. And this loss of reality is the real problem.
Loss of reality is loss of God. And if you are a “dogmatic atheist”, then I’ll put it this way. Loss of reality is loss of contact with existence, with what is, with truth, and ultimately with sanity. The Christian Right used to accuse the Left of a loss of contact with reality when the Left would advocate for gender bending; but little did I suspect at the time how the Right would far surpass the left in their unified, throaty and hateful denunciation of any reality that threatened their lust for power: the Super Catholics are united in their contempt for truth (if you don’t believe me, ask them who won the 2020 election; ask them if COVID was or was not the greatest disaster in American History; ask them if they watch Fox News).
[Cicero] calls [this spiritual disease] the morbus animi–a disease of the mind, and the disease of the mind is, especially, the rejection of reason. The rejection of reason in the sense of the reason that is willing to explore the faith. That is the primary experience as to its meaning, its limitations, and so on. But if reason is used to reject the primary fides, the primary faith, then it results in mental disturbances, in the morbus animi.
Voegelin is insistent that Faith and Reason go together (he doesn’t mean dogmatic faith; he means what he calls above the “primary fides”, the fides quaerens intellectum, the “faith” seeking understanding, the “fides” seeking reality; he also doesn’t mean “reason” in the sense of logic and rationality alone, but of “reason” as the capacity to see and appreciate and reflect upon the mysteries around us, which includes logic and rational thought, but which also includes art, imagination and all conscious response to what is).
Lose this “faith”, lose this “reason”, and you will reject the soul and make a b-line for your brothel; or you will make a b-line for your favorite fascist and irrational leader.
And what is at stake here, from this spreading virus of morbis animi?
What is at stake for the “fool” who “says in his heart there is no God”?
What is at stake is not God, but Man.
Not the existence of God is at stake, please, but the existence of man and his truth or falsehood. Not the propositions [about the existence of God] standing against each other but the response and the non-response to the divine appeal.
O’Connor and Tolkien illustrate in their stories the divine appeal - as well as the response and the non-response to it.
The lives of the fools around us - and within us - ignore this divine appeal, this mysterious calling from the depth of reality itself.
… and Flannery would love this irony! These quotations from Vogelin are from a speech he made many years ago at what has now become one of the most ideologically driven, nabala-like schools in the U.S. - Hillsdale College! Maybe this was Voegelin doing reparations, fifty years in advance, for the Super Fool, Harrison Butker.
But-ker, I digress …
Let me respectfully suggest that there is a problem with this line from Voeglin: "The personal contempt for God will manifest itself in ruthless conduct toward the weaker man and create general disorder in society. That is all there in the implications of the nabal."
The problem is that the opposite is also true: the belief that one is following God will often do the same. This is, in fact, exactly what we see in some "Traditionalists" and evangelicals: the strictly obey the "rules" (or what they think are the rules) and despise there fellow man, especially the weakest, the least of his brothers.