As a teenager, I lived in the picturesque market town of Gaming, in Lower Austria. At the time, the town’s grocery store was housed in an unremarkable but pleasant building on the town square—its stuccoed stone walls and steep roof were typical of the vernacular architecture of the region. A few years ago, however, the old grocery store was replaced with a new one. A nearby building on the main street was torn down, and a not-quite-symmetrical box of glass and aluminium was put up, surrounded by a tarmac parking lot. “Why on earth would they do such a thing?” I asked myself on my first visit to Gaming after this ugly gash was sliced into the fabric of the town. On reflection, I didn’t particularly blame the people who made the decision. They were simply trying to do the best they could to conform to the generally accepted standards of their profession and time. I would be surprised if it had even occurred to them that they could have built something less ugly. Why is an ugly glass box the default? Surely, it’s not much cheaper than a brick and stucco building in harmony with the place. And even if it is cheaper to construct, it must be more expensive to heat and maintain. A flat roof in a place with so much rain and snow must be a continual headache.
Looking at the new store’s glass façade, through which I could see advertisements for products on sale, I was reminded of nothing so much as a flatscreen TV. The idea of the flat-screen made me think of Max Picard’s 1934 book The Flight from God. Picard writes of how, in the modern secular world (“the world of the Flight,” as he calls it), things are rendered porous and transparent, like the abstract outlines of things, rather than real things: “one wants to glance rapidly from one thing to another and to flee from the emptiness in one thing to the emptiness in another.” There are no places in the world of the Flight, only spaces: “This emptiness, the work of abstraction, is an unreal space, for nothing can remain within it, everything is in motion through it … more and more emptiness is being created; an atmosphere exists within which things of themself become insubstantial.”
For Picard, the modern secular world is an institutionalisation—almost an hypostatisation—of flight from God. Certainly, as Picard writes, “In every age, man has been in flight from God,” but the difference in the modern world is that the flight from God is built into the structures of society. The modern world is a world which is constantly on the run. Once, there was a “world of Faith” that existed objectively, “prior to the individual,” a common world towards which the individual had to situate himself. To flee from God required a decision. But, in the modern world, it is instead the world of the Flight which exists as a common, objective reality. Man flees automatically, by default, simply by being a part of the world of the Flight. Of course, it is still possible to resist the Flight—to stand still and know that God is God. “But this is hard; and even if one individual should tear himself away from the world of the Flight into the world of Faith, he succeeds only for himself, as an individual.”
The difference between the modern, secular world and the world of Christendom, against which it arose, can be delineated using Picard’s terms. The secular world is a world on the run. It is a world in which the Flight from God has been institutionalised, so that it is the objective social reality, the default setting. This may be contrasted with the world of Christendom, which is a world devoted to standing still.
This difference is well illustrated by the contrast between the new cuboid supermarket in Gaming and the old Carthusian monastery, the Charterhouse, just a few minutes’ walk away. The Charterhouse was founded in the year 1330 by Albert the Wise, Duke of Austria. Albert endowed the Gaming Charterhouse with an extensive feudal domain around the Ötscher mountain, and northward, between the rivers Ybbs and Erlauf. There were certainly temporal reasons for Duke Albert’s gift—he expected the monks to build roads, clear forests, and administer justice in their domain, thus bringing cultivation to the rugged region. And yet, his primary reasons were spiritual. The foundation was the fulfilment of an oath that Albert had made after the battle of Mühldorf in 1322—that he would found a monastery if his brother Frederick the Fair were released from captivity. Moreover, by 1330, Albert was confined to a portable chair by paralysis in his hands and feet, and he wanted to prepare a burial place for himself and his wife, where contemplative monks would pray for his soul. In choosing the Carthusians, Albert chose the most strictly contemplative order in the Church. His foundation was a clear sign of the priority of contemplation in mediaeval Christendom. The whole apparatus of the feudal domain of Gaming—the forests and fields, the various rivers and the lake at Lunz, the many villages and the town of Scheibbs—all were visibly ordered to the contemplative life of the 24 Carthusian hermits whose duty was to stand still and bear the presence of God.
If Albert’s foundation of Gaming was a sign of the priority of contemplation in Christendom, his descendent Joseph II’s Enlightenment inspired secularisation of the Charterhouse in 1782 was a sign of the primacy of action at the foundation of the modern world. Offended by the apparent ‘uselessness’ of contemplation, Joseph II secularised more than 500 monasteries in the Austrian crown lands.
The mediaeval monks knew that it requires effort for fallen human beings to stand still, to stop fleeing from God. The great enemy of the monastic life is acedia, a lack of joy in spiritual things, which makes the stillness of contemplation feel burdensome. According to the fathers of the Church, acedia is a capital vice from which many ‘daughters’ spring. The greatness of the human soul is found in the ability to attain the spiritual good, high above humanity itself. But the very greatness of this end means that it is hard to attain. For a soul unperfected by virtue, which lacks internal integrity, and in which the passions are unregulated and giving rise to conflicting thoughts, the pursuit of spiritual things is difficult. This difficulty gives rise to the sadness of acedia, leading to despair of ever reaching the good, and sluggishness in rousing oneself to it. It can then lead to indignation against anything or anyone which reminds one of it. Finally, sadness leads to a flight into distraction: uneasiness of mind, curiosity, loquacity, instability of place and of purpose—anything which enables the soul to forget its sadness, to live on the surface of things. Josef Pieper, in his 1935 book On Hope, points out how well the daughters of acedia fit the description of modern consciousness in existential philosophy.
What philosophers such as Picard and Pieper saw already in the ’30s has only become worse in the nine decades since. David Foster Wallace’s novels are perhaps the most brilliant evocation of the world of the Flight, a world which has institutionalised the daughters of acedia: “A flight from in the form of a plunging-into,” as one of his characters puts it, in his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. The world he describes is a world in which despair, curiosity, indignation, and the greedy plunging into ersatz pleasures that seem to promise a forgetfulness of sorrow have been harnessed in ways “that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.” But it is a wealth that does not satisfy and a freedom that enslaves. The more one plunges into superficial distractions, the less they satisfy, so that the pleasures have to become ever more strange and perverted, and the excitements turn into a perverse flirtation with death and violence. The extraordinary ‘progress’ of sexual liberation in our time is a testimony to this. The more sexual excitement is made a substitute for spiritual goods, the more it is perverted; and the more its perversion is normalised, the less exciting it is—so that ever more barriers have to be broken down in order to provide the next thrill of excitement.
For Picard, the cinema was the preeminent tool of the Flight. But today the cinema seems like a quaint, almost precious form of cultural expression. Now it is the smartphone and the flat-screen TV that enable the endless supply of ersatz worlds with which to distract ourselves. The cuboid ugliness of our architecture is a mirror of the screens with which we hide from the depths of our souls. The indignation that we see in our culture against anything which challenges this reign of ugliness—any attempt at restoring beautiful public architecture, for example—is precisely that daughter of acedia that fights against anything which could slow us down in our Flight from God.
If the world of Christendom made the importance of contemplation visible, formally subordinating practical affairs to the breakthrough towards eternity of which the human soul is capable, then the world of secular consumerist modernity visibly subordinates everything to what is lowest in the human soul— the low impulse to flee from greatness into trivial distractions. So effective is this world of the Flight that it is even able to co-opt reactions against itself. ‘Mindfulness’ and ‘meditation’ become just so many more products to be consumed so that the Flight may be kept going.
In his curious 2020 book The Way of St Benedict, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, notes the significance of the presence of a Benedictine Abbey in Westminster, the place where Parliament deliberates about the law. He sees this as a testimony to the need for political society to be concerned with more than a mere increase in GDP—a testimony “that has to do with the fundamental possibilities of stability and its spiritual fruits.” But, of course, as Williams well knows, Westminster Abbey was shut down at the Reformation, when the world of Christendom was first beginning to break apart. The Abbey still bears the name, but it is no longer the reality of an abbey. The coronation of King Charles in 2023 was a moving reminder of a vanished world of Christendom, but the duties that the Abbot of Westminster would once have performed in the coronation of an English king—including instructing the king in his duties and hearing the king’s confession—were not performed, since there no longer is any abbot at Westminster.
Watching the coronation filled me with a certain melancholy, because it was a remnant of the world of Christendom, but a remnant which no longer mounts any serious challenge to the secular world of the Flight. The authority of God is still nominally recognized, but British politics and law are effectively cut off from any appeal to God’s authority. “We don’t do God,” as Alistair Campbell famously put it. What could be a more succinct expression of the political element of the Flight? The political element is a crucial one in the institutionalisation of the Flight. Man is a political animal, and therefore the secularisation of politics is a key part of making the Flight the default setting for human beings.
There is something deeply sad about a human political order that brackets what is greatest about the human soul. In a retreat preached to priests in the 1980s, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger and future Pope Benedict XVI, described that sadness as follows:
The greatness of soul of the human vocation reaches beyond the individual aspect of human existence and cannot be squashed back into the merely private sphere. A society that turns what is specifically human into something purely private and defines itself in terms of a complete secularity (which moreover inevitably becomes a pseudo-religion and a new all-embracing system that enslaves people)—this kind of society will of its nature be sorrowful, a place of despair: it rests on a diminution of human dignity. A society whose public order is consistently determined by agnosticism is not a society that has become free but a society that has despaired, marked by the sorrow of man who is fleeing from God and in contradiction with himself. A Church that did not have the courage to underline the public status of its image of man would no longer be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the city set on a hill.
This is the key to any conservative politics worthy of the name. Conservatives today should not only strive to preserve what is left of Christendom; they should also strive to move towards a world which publicly recognizes the deepest concerns of the human soul, a world which recognizes the public claims that divine authority makes on human life, a world that recognizes that it is good to stop fleeing from God, that it is good to stand still.
This essay appears in the Spring 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 30:29-31.
