As in the expression “to leave is to die a little,” exile shares with death the sadness of bereavement, of losing a part of oneself or being drained of the very essence of life. The Merriam-Webster dictionary concisely defines exile as either a forced or voluntary “absence from one’s country or home.” But there remains the question of what it means for a person to have a home, both as an individual and as a member of a family or nation, and what it is that one has lost when being forced into exile. After all, it could mean a rather comfortable existence in another country or on the margins of a far-flung empire.
The story of the Jewish tribes in the Old Testament is woven on the theme of exile and homecoming, paradigmatic narratives for both Judaism and Christianity. But the biblical theme of exile is also common to the whole of humanity by the primordial expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the invitation to a restored and perfect communion with God.
The increasingly acute sense of the loss of Christendom is a source of pain to most Christian believers who take the heavenly Jerusalem seriously and who have not settled in Babylon as their permanent home. But a true Christian civilization is not an empire meant to control as much territory as possible. According to its own principles, it is the good diffused when individuals and groups labour to reach the city built by gold clear as crystal and gleaming with the splendour of God. It cannot be realised on earth, except at the end of times by divine intervention. Empires, kingdoms, and republics are only temporary approximations. Every victory and grand achievement of culture is, therefore, mingled with a particular sense of sadness. The realisation of the fleeting nature of human accomplishments is heightened by the longing for eternal perfection: the true home.
The sadness of the inevitable exile after the Fall intensifies when one is not only reprimanded for desiring what is supernatural—of neglecting the lesser good for the impossible higher good—but also when one is told to be happy with what one has. This is expressed in the first strophes of Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon there we sat weeping when we remembered Zion. On the poplars in its midst we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for the words of a song; Our tormentors, for joy: ‘Sing for us a song of Zion!’ But how could we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?
Two recent Catholic publications that mainly use Old Testament texts for thematizing the Christian understanding of exile are Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley’s Catholics in Exile: Biblical Wisdom for the Journey Home and Michael O’Brien’s latest novel By the Rivers of Babylon. They are, like the earlier Benedict Option by Rod Dreher, signs of the radicalising divorce between the Western world and Christianity, with its seemingly definitive and irretrievable loss of Christendom.
Hahn and McGinley, however, emphasise that exile is positive, in the sense that we do have a home, even though we are not there yet. They use pilgrimage as a metaphor for returning home, as in the long exodus of Israel from Egypt to the promised land.
And so the Exodus takes the form of a sacramental action, a liturgical pilgrimage by which Israel relearns how to act, politically and spiritually, like the family of God.
They even argue for a ‘Jeremiah option,’ meaning that exile from Christendom is, in fact, a blessing, an awakening from complacency. The present Babylonian captivity of Christians is then an opportunity for rebuilding a God-centred civilization.
Recognizing the fact of our exile not just from heaven but from Christendom gives us the opportunity to refocus our lives on the basics from which a new world can be constructed. And this is the situation we find ourselves in today, as we live among the ruins of Christendom and wonder what we are called to next.
According to Hahn and McGinley, we live in a combined spiritual and political diaspora, exiled from both heaven and Christendom. But instead of passive resignation, they bring up the Thomistic principle of the diffusive good, which “goes out, spreads and transforms.” The Jeremiah option is thus a way to thrive in exile by painfully building a new civilization brick by brick.
Michael D. O’Brien’s latest novel about the prophet Ezekiel, By the Rivers of Babylon, is anchored in the physical toil of house building. In the novel, Ezekiel is not yet a prophet in the full sense. Instead, the story focuses on him becoming a bricklayer in Babylon. The Jewish captives are forced to gather mud, form it, and bake it into bricks for building their houses. O’Brien highlights the future prophet’s down-to-earth virtues of perseverance, humility, and purity, but the novel ends before Ezekiel’s prophetic mission begins in earnest.
The Jeremiah option—of building in a foreign country, brick by brick, a civilisation that is simultaneously old and new—stands in tension with the hope of returning to Jerusalem, the true home. Brick houses are temporary dwellings, even if they last a lifetime. The goal is the temple: the perfection of religion and the human community centred around it. Taking the cue from Hahn’s and McGinley’s idea of a double diaspora, the return to Jerusalem is both a spiritual and a terrestrial homecoming. The spiritual return is a return to the heavenly Jerusalem built by gold and sapphires, while the earthly Jerusalem, with its rebuilt temple, is a symbol both for the Church and for Christian civilization.
There is little doubt about the present realities. If anyone is still wondering, the sociology of religion furnishes ample data about the diminishing societal role and influence of Christianity in the global West. The crucial question is therefore about the proper attitude in this new Babylonian exile: whether it is to be celebrated as a proper awakening from a faulty confusion between spiritual civilisation and political power; and, if so, if churches and individual Christians should accept being just one of many groups and identities within a secular framework, or rather build, brick by brick, new Christian societies.
This is mainly a political question, querying how the human polis, the earthly city, should be organised and what the place of religion is within it. Irrespective of what side one chooses or what kind of home one builds, it is still a terrestrial reality.
Instead, I would like to explore another type of answer. It does not consist in a decisive program of action but in a state of the soul, a form of contemplative nostalgia arising when one is a homeward-bound wayfarer. This is a form of experience that is very hard to explain to those who have not suffered from this combination of love and sadness, of care and the understanding of impermanence.
This form of nostalgia has a clear cognitive element: it is the realisation that I, my family, my friends, my society, and even nature itself are all mortal. Everything suffers from the inescapable pace of time. At the same time, spiritual exile involves a subtle tone of longing for stability and being in one’s right place transcending all those changes. It is a kind of sadness deep in the heart that makes it difficult to wholly join in amusements, but which rejoices when it finds traces, signs, and instantiations of what is beyond the ephemeral.
The nostalgia of spiritual exile also has a particular sense of chaste beauty because it cannot grasp that for which it longs. The opposite is self-assured ownership of goals that can be reached by concentrated effort and discipline or with some money. We are constantly bombarded by advertisements and self-help literature dangling such goals in front of our eyes. Instead, spiritual exilic nostalgia depends on grace, on the sudden revelation of what is hidden beyond darkness, mist, and veils.
Nostalgia in its natural form depends on the memory of something lost, particularly one’s home. Actually, the word was formed in 1688 as a medical term to translate the German word Heimveh, homesickness, by combining the Greek words for sorrow, pain (algia) and homecoming (nostos). Nostalgia is thus the painful longing for one’s lost home. But as Hahn and McGinley write, there is a difference between knowing that one’s true home exists and one is trying to get there, like Odysseus, as opposed to when one’s home, like the summers of childhood, is forever lost, and hence one is merely being sentimental and distracted from reality.
In religion, the chronological aspect of nostalgia is combined with the transcendent. The Garden of Eden at the beginning of time is lost, but also recaptured at the end of all things at an even higher level. Our present situation is therefore that of the traveller on his way home. But the horizontal chronological understanding of nostalgia that looks back and forward simultaneously is in the Christian tradition in tension with the transcendent home. In other words, the new Earth promised in the book of Revelation can either be seen as the perfection of the created cosmos, a terrestrial paradise, or it can be seen as leaving the cosmos behind like a dead body, journeying to the empyrean heaven. As Christians believe in the resurrection of the body, even the loftiest of heavens cannot be a purely spiritual home, but will have a material aspect, even if it is glorified and spiritualized. Somehow, the material home will also find its eternal condition. But the problem is whether this will be a new, more perfect creation, or if it is instead the old home, but perfected. This tension is reflected in discussions of the resurrection of the body: is it a newly created spiritualized body, or is it the old body rising from the grave in a glorified condition?
The memory of home is mostly ritualised in religions so that the next generation does not forget whence they came and where they are heading. As Hahn and McKinley write, this can take the form of pilgrimage, which involves leaving one’s home and then returning. Ritualised nostalgia is present, for example, in the Jewish Pesach and Christian Easter, but also in every Sunday high mass. There is therefore a proper attitude of eucharistic nostalgia that a Christian in exile from both heaven and Christendom rightfully can experience and express. In the Christian liturgy, the triumph of resurrection is always commingled with the grim reality of sacrifice. The Christian grand celebrations of Christmas and Easter have joy following so closely upon themes of social marginalisation, poverty, betrayal, and death, that they form one whole. The resurrected Christ still has the holes in his body made by the Roman nails and lance.
For the philosopher Roger Scruton, home was a central concept around which much of this thinking revolved, as noted by his intellectual biographer, Mark Dooley. Scruton’s concept of oikophilia (love of home) refers in a first stage to a pre-political attachment to the local community and its habitat. Home “means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.”
Love of home is probably an evolutionary adaption, Scruton speculates, and therefore a human universal. Significantly, he argues that this instinct as developed by reason extended the boundaries of home to the nation state. The nation is therefore composed of those who have a common home, which beside attachment to people and territory includes also shared “language, institutions, customs and a sense of history.”
Scruton seems to come down strongly on the side of ‘the settled person’ in relation to the ‘nomad.’ Does he then exclude the legitimacy of religious nostalgia that relativizes earthly attachments and communities? The ideas of a heavenly home common to all peoples, and of life as a pilgrimage, might be viewed as a threat to settlers—as some kind of spiritual vagrancy that lessens the first love of the national home.
For Scruton, the political order of national homemaking is different and superior to the sacred order of religion and the kinship relations of tribal society. Religion does not define the nation, but rather the other way around. In his book on a conservative approach to environmental issues, he writes that, “Europe owes some of its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and reattached to the land.”
Importantly for my thesis, Scruton distances himself from accusations of the love of home as utopian and as a nostalgic yearning toward an idealised home set in the golden past. Instead, he emphasises the creation of home as a place of life. As a result, he puts the love of Heimat (homeland) before Heimweh (homesickness), even if he does not completely negate the importance of a “backward-looking invocation of fictitious refuge.”
I do not reject the attachment to a particular piece of land and community. It is fundamentally human and very much present in my own life, but more as absence than in realisation. And this is my main point, the pain of exilic experience makes more palpable, at least potentially, the temporary and fragile nature of all terrestrial homes.
Moreover, as a Catholic—in distinction to, for example, being Anglican or belonging to the Swedish Lutheran church—I have an attachment to the Church as universal, to Christendom above the national church. A nation might apostatise and found its own sectarian form of Christianity, in this way subordinating religion to territory. For a Catholic Christian, this means one has to choose between exile or giving up on Christendom as something supranational. To choose universal Christianity in Sweden after the Reformation meant, for a long time, exile, as in the case of Queen Kristina (1626–1689) who, after her conversion, lived in Rome. Even today, choosing the Christian faith above the political will of the nation, or even a league of nations, often induces suspicion. Transcendent nostalgia, the longing for a heavenly homeland (at least in its universal form), is always a political challenge.
My case for contemplative nostalgia will probably drown in the calamitous din of more powerful attractions and immediate needs. Still, the subtle beauty of chaste longing, even when compared with the attraction of primal desires, might strike a chord with those who recognize its deep poetry. Spiritual nostalgia of the sort that I have in mind cannot consume that for which it strives; instead it looks for and treasures signs and traces of the true home. While in exile, such a person stops and recognises what is happening when a melancholy note draws the soul out of the self, as the Swedish poet Dan Andersson writes in his poem, “Around the Beggar from Luossa”:
There is something beyond the mountains, beyond the flowers and singing; there is something behind the stars, behind my warm heart. Hear: something is going around whispering, moving and calling, asking: Come to us, as this earth is not your land.
