Department of History, University of Chicago
Rachel Fulton Brown is an Associate Professor of Medieval History, Fundamentals, and the College at the University of Chicago. Her academic homepage begins:
Welcome! I am the professor your other professors warned you about. I love Christianity, America, and the Western tradition of theology, art, philosophy, music, letters, and education. I believe in the reality of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. I teach history as an exercise in empathy, rethinking the thoughts of the past so as to shed light on our common humanity. I judge people by what they say and do, not by what others say about them. I worship Jesus Christ as Lord and honor Mary as Mother of God.
Professor Fulton Brown is a renowned medievalist, poet, and fencer.
To answer this question, we first have to deal with the problem of pride and shame as invented in modernity by nationalism in the wake of the wars of religion and the Napoleonic conquests. In the nineteenth century, Europe re-invented itself as a system of nations, often drawing on the history of particular regions and peoples going back to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the expansion of European power in the 16th and 17th centuries. That re-invention has since become a site of challenge, because this earlier period (a.k.a. the Middle Ages) was also the period in which Europe recognized itself as Christendom (Christianitas). Following the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it became hard for Europeans to think of themselves as Christians first. This self-identification was further complicated by the Enlightenment and its rejection of mystery, which rejection was only intensified in the nineteenth century by the Romantic effort to define peoples according to something other than a shared faith. On top of these efforts at regional imagination, the 19th century added the problem of empire, particularly in the form of corporate globalism associated with the East India Company and its underpinning of the British Empire. The clash of these competing claims at identity and power was further exacerbated by the entry of the United States of America into the World Wars—particularly given that the United States was invented and then re-invented by settlers and refugees from the conflicts of the 17th century onward, who migrated to America specifically to get away from the conflicts at home.
It was at this point that the medieval historian Charles Homer Haskins famously argued that European history was American history—the Medieval Academy of America was founded in the wake of efforts to restore the cathedral at Reims after the bombing in World War I—leaving everyone with the problem of defining ‘the West’ as something that could be exported but also something that had a particular geographical home. If Europe is ashamed of its past, it is as much because the European tradition is one of self-examination and critique as that it has anything particular to be ashamed of, any more than any other region of the world. That said, what we are experiencing now in the West is a contraction of that power founded on the original maritime and imperial expansion of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a curious after-effect of the Enlightenment that we have been taught to blame the Middle Ages for its failures ever since, when the image that we have of the Middle Ages as ‘dark’ was invented as a justification for the ‘enlightened’ expansion of empire in the first place. Recovering Europe’s Christian foundations first and foremost means recognizing the layers of narrative reframing through which we see the past, why we have been taught to see some people as enemies (think how the Elizabethan English were taught to hate Hapsburg Spain, for example, or how German Americans were taught to hate their relatives at home during the first World War), and what powers those narratives have served.
How might Europeans recover their confidence in their tradition, after so much turmoil? Many now point to the fall of the Roman Empire as precedent for the current disruptions, particularly the massive movements of peoples occasioned by the migrations from Africa and Asia. Perhaps comfort may come now as it did then from the north of Africa, where Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) lamented the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Visigoths in AD 410. Famously, Augustine blamed the sack not on the rejection of Rome’s pagan traditions, but on a misunderstanding of history: if the Romans believed that their empire would endure thanks to the worship they offered the gods, they were doubly mistaken, both in thinking that the gods, who were actually demons, cared about them, and in thinking that what mattered was the power of earthly kingdoms. Christians are empowered, Augustine argued, not because worshipping Our Lord Jesus Christ brings earthly glory and riches, but because His Incarnation makes human history meaningful as something other than a competition of worldly powers. Seen from this perspective, history becomes not a chronicle of victories and defeats, but a cautionary tale against defining ourselves through sin, particularly that cardinal of all sins, pride. Ironically, as Augustine showed, the more the Romans attempted to hold onto earthly glory, the harder they fell, when by recognizing themselves as creatures of a loving God who became incarnate in history to save them, they were empowered to praise Him in number (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) and word (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), giving rise over the centuries to the glories of Christian art, literature, music, and architecture—like the cathedral at Reims—on which Europe as a tourist destination still bases its pride.
If, at this point, we in the West feel ashamed of our culture, then it behooves us to consider the source of our pride: is it the power of our earthly nations and empires, or is it the Kingdom that is not of this world?
Conservatives need to stop letting the Adversary define the terms of the debate, starting with the concept of sin. The very concept of sin is anathema to modern feminism, convinced as it is that men are to blame for all the woes of human existence. I exaggerate, but only slightly. The gender debate, such as it is, is a debate about where to place blame for the differences between the sexes, with women claiming that they should be able to behave like men sexually while at the same time blaming men for behaving like men. The upshot is that everyone is unhappy, blaming each other for not being empathetic enough to anticipate each other’s every need. There is no antidote because nobody is willing to acknowledge his or her role in creating the situation, famously encapsulated in that moment in a certain garden when, convinced it would give them power to overcome their own nature, the first woman and the first man ate of the fruit they had been forbidden to eat thinking it would make them “as Gods” (Gen. 3:5). This original sin of disobedience has, according to Christian teaching following the Apostle Paul, defined human nature ever since: women being persuaded that God lied to them about who they are, and men going along with the women like so many Macbeths.
And yet, into this tale of sorrow comes the Virgin Mary, our second Eve, who rather than fighting God’s will for her, consents to become the Mother of God. Mary’s obedience presents modern feminism with an insurmountable challenge. Was this not rape, as so many have argued; after all, how could Mary have possibly said, “No”? Everything hinges on this question. In the 12th century, Mary’s consent would become axiomatic for the sacramental definition of marriage: just as God would not have taken flesh from the Virgin without her consent, so both the bride and the bridegroom must make verbal consent (“I do”) to their marriage. Ironically (our story is filled with irony), from a Christian perspective, the feminist rejection of patriarchal marriage is a rejection of the one institution founded on a woman’s God-given right to say, “No,” precisely because God did not rape the Virgin Mary, but rather sent his messenger to obtain her consent (“Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” “Let it be to me according to your word,” Luke 1:38).
But why did Mary say, ‘Yes’? ‘She was special, alone of all her sex; nobody could be as perfect as she,’ reply her feminist sisters. ‘She sets an impossible ideal.’ To me, as a daughter of Eve, this has always sounded like envy: ‘I wish I could be as beautiful and beloved as she.’ Modern women will deny it, but their taste in romance literature suggests otherwise; likewise, the sorrow they express at not being able to find the man of their dreams who will treat them like the queen they know (and tell each other) they are. As I have tried to show in my scholarship, what they fail to appreciate is how much their fantasies depend on stories told about the Virgin Mary, specifically, stories told about the Virgin Mary through commentaries on the Song of Songs in which stories Mary is given the role of the bride pursued by the bridegroom to become his beloved queen. “You are all beautiful, O my love, and there is no spot in thee,” the bridegroom tells her (Song 4:7). “My soul melted when he spoke,” she tells her companions (Song 5:6). “One is my dove, my perfect one is but one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her,” he tells his associates (Song 6:8). Every modern romance novel that casts the hero as elusive, strangely powerful, ancient and brooding draws on this tradition; every woman who imagines herself pursued by a loving God-man is heiress to the medieval tradition of mystical longing.
Once upon a time, this mystical imagining was translated into fairy tales which, by the 19th century, became unmoored from their spiritual underpinnings, and yet, every Disney princess still carries the trace of the soul’s longing for her heavenly bridegroom, Prince Charming. The gender debate at root is a debate about our relationship with God and our sorrow at being separated from Him, even as we fall yet again into sin. Devotion to Mary offers every soul a way out, precisely because she models so perfectly what it is like to be utterly absorbed by His love. Our envy of her is a clue that we still want to be loved as much as God loves her. And guess what? He does.
People constantly romanticize history, finding in it clear good guys and bad guys. ‘Our’ side vs. ‘their’ side is the default frame. The gritty reality is that things are rarely, if ever, so clear cut, particularly in situations about which historians are motivated to write: times of social upheaval, war, economic crisis, political contest, moral collapse. Some periods have more of these crises than others and thus attract more attention from historians—the fall of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the first and second World Wars—but the analytic is fractal. The more deeply you dig, the more you find the same contests constantly playing out. What were the Middle Ages but one long feud—between the Anglo-Saxons and Normans or, if you will, the English and French; between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, subdivided into the Black Guelphs and White Guelphs by the time of Dante; between the Franks and the Greeks in Constantinople, assisted by the Venetians and Genoese, themselves rivals for control of the sea?
Look closer, and you find more feuds, more local rivalries, more stories about the good guys (‘us’) and the bad guys (‘them’). It has taken a good two centuries of careful scholarship in the history of this period for scholars to realize the complexities—who was really to blame for the Fourth Crusade?—all the while fighting the rivalries set up in the scholarship by later historians caught up in their own feuds and using their narratives about the past to fix blame in their own day. Insisting that the Middle Ages were peculiarly ‘dark’ or ‘gritty’ is, of course, one of these ongoing effects: ‘Everyone agrees that the Second World War was horrific, but it’s the fault of the Middle Ages, after all.’ (I’m not kidding—read R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 for the now classic version of this argument.) The sad reality is that there is no period in human history not riven by feuds, even if today we label them differently: communists vs. fascists, conservatives vs. liberals, feminists vs. traditionalists, Northerners vs. Southerners, globalists vs. nationalists, blacks vs. whites. It is almost as if human beings were predisposed to set themselves in groups against each other and rile each other up to murderous frenzy by giving speeches.
Is there a way out? According to G.K. Chesterton, yes, but only if we are able to imagine ourselves into the minds of the murderers, as Chesterton has his detecting priest Father Brown explain. “Don’t you think,” the Bostonian Mr. Chace demands of the priest one night in a remote Spanish château, “that this notion of yours, of a man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of crime?” Father Brown replies: “I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand.” In historiographical terms: the more we study history and try to imagine ourselves into the minds of the past, the more we realize that we share the same failings as our ancestors, their ignorance and hubris, their conviction that they are the only ones to have gotten the analytic right and to have identified their (human) enemies infallibly. The horror only hits in full when we recognize that our ancestors are us—and we are all descended from Cain.
“I am the professor your other professors warned you about!”—I have made it my tagline on my academic homepage, but in truth I never expected to become so controversial. I honestly thought that what I was doing in pushing the boundaries of our knowledge about medieval Christianity by engaging with questions of practice through practice (my fencing, my own prayer life) was what we were supposed to be doing as scholars: finding ways to empathize with the past, ”rethink the thoughts,” as R.G. Collingwood put it, by paying careful attention to the images and metaphors through which people talked about their experience of the world, so as to test our own assumptions about reality against theirs and perhaps learn to see something that we might not have otherwise. I based my method on what I learned from my doctoral advisor Caroline Walker Bynum about reading for metaphors and from Augustine on the difficulties of communication across the boundary of faith, and I started fencing as a way of participating by analogy in the kinds of metaphors medieval monks and nuns typically used to describe their own life of prayer: agonistic, but also self-reflective, wrestling with the texts of Scripture as well as with one’s own vices in service to the “true king, Christ the Lord” (as it says in the prologue to the Rule of St. Benedict).
Some might say I learned too well, going native, as it were, rather than maintaining my disciplinarily-appropriate objectivity—meaning, keeping the object of my studies distinct from my own purposes in studying—but this is an intellectual sleight-of-hand. Scholarship is always interested. As Dorothy Sayers put it, arguing against the claim that it is dangerous to talk about God using human metaphors: “To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.” Likewise, historians come to their scholarship always from their own experience, asking questions of previous human experience on the basis of their own. Nor, as we have already noted, have they ever maintained appropriate scholarly distance from their objects of study, not only when engaging with the Middle Ages (a.k.a. Dark Ages), but indeed every time they break up the narrative of the past into periods, whether to celebrate or to blame. This is human—our first parents did, after all, eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—but it is also perilous, as how are we to know whether we have chosen the Good?
We need external criteria, something to test ourselves against. And we need standards, yardsticks by which to measure. In academia for the past century or so, this has meant peer review; but for medievalists, this has almost meant confronting the lies modernity tells about its past, particularly the European Christian past. The more we learn about the Middle Ages—their commitment to order and beauty, their high level of material and intellectual skills, their own self-reflection and consciousness of sin—the more hollow modernity’s self-aggrandizement at their expense becomes. Perhaps, after all, it was the so-called Enlightenment that threw Europe into darkness with its secularizing worship of Reason, Objectivity, and Science at the expense of God; certainly, we have been experiencing its effects in the loss that we feel of purpose and meaning. The paradox is that the more proud we in the West have become at throwing off the weight of superstition, the more empty our own culture feels. Perhaps it is time to return, with humility, to the prayerful discipline of the monks, along with their embrace of manual labor, and discover with them, yet again, our true purpose: to sing praises to the Creator in whose image and likeness we are made and by whose loving yardstick we are inevitably measured.
Again, I wasn’t expecting outrage when I made my “three cheers,” although I was obviously being provocative cheering for “white men” at all. In making my cheers, I simply wanted to remind women in the West that we enjoy the protection of men, so much so that we often aren’t even conscious of it. My cheers were for chivalry (meaning, the impulse to protect women and put effort into courting them for marriage and having children), consensual marriage (see question 2, above), and women’s suffrage (something for which men in the West themselves voted). For those who disagreed with me that these were good things, I invited them to remember the protection that we, in the United States at least, enjoy under the First Amendment to disagree publicly on matters of heated political discourse, also invented by “white men.” My purpose was to challenge the attacks that feminists and others had been making on our Western tradition more broadly (“Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go,” as the students had been chanting at Stanford); I certainly did not expect to be called a misogynist for celebrating the way in which Western men have recognized women as co-creators of their civilization.
But the rot, of course, goes deeper than this. Even as we in the West look nostalgically to previous periods in our cultural history, we get caught up in the chanting. Which “Western civ” do we want to eradicate: the “Western civ” of monarchy, nations, towns and communal government, maritime trade, and Christian missionizing, or the “Western civ” of empire, corporate piracy, ideological polarization, industrialization, and universal values? Yes, I did that on purpose: these are two sides of the same coin. Modernity likes to claim that it carries everything good in the tradition, while eradicating the bad, but some of the things that modernity has brought have been very bad indeed. Question: was the British Empire good or bad for human flourishing? What about the East India Company? You see the problem. The world has been global since there was a world; what we are experiencing now is a crisis in the balance of power between one major axis of that world (the land empires of the Silk Road, a.k.a. the East) and the other (the control of the seas and access to ports, a.k.a. the West). Seen from this perspective, Western civilization contains both the desire to bring all human beings to Christ and the piratical lust to capture and control as much treasure (typically, mineral resources and human labor) as possible.
God, gold, and slaves—our Western trinity. And yet, here I was cheering for “white men.” What was I thinking?! Since posting my three cheers, I have been reading a good deal of René Girard on scapegoating and mimetic desire, and I think I understand the mechanism of the outrage better, as well as the need for Christ. Human desire is mimetic—we want what we see others wanting—but when we become conscious of our twinned desire, we become rivals, often to the point of forgetting the object of our mutual desire altogether. The twinned rivalry spins up to the point where it becomes deadly and we become locked in the conflict simply because it is there. Such conflicts—or feuds—can persist for generations, much as our feuds in the West have carried on, becoming more and more polarized the longer they persist, even as they fracture and redouble and take on new grief. The only way out, as Girard has shown, is through sacrifice; more particularly, through sacrificing a scapegoat onto which the rivals can cast all their sins. The scapegoat is then driven off into the desert, exiled from the community, and the rivalries—for the moment, at least—die down.
“White men” have become the West’s scapegoats—responsible for all the woes we experience, with the corollary premise that, if only we could get rid of them, all the conflict would cease. But it wouldn’t. Because desire is mimetic and once one scapegoat is gone, there will still be conflict over the gold and the products of human labor and the women and the prestige and the ports and the land. If only there were another option. And guess what? There is, if only we can identify him correctly.
There is a tendency in modern scholarship to think of religion as primarily about defining society, which, to be sure, religious practices tend to do: people who share a common focus of worship see each other as belonging to an identifiable group. But which comes first: the desire to belong and be accepted by others as part of the in-group, or the desire to be in relationship with the object of worship? In recent years, we have seen groups use this desire for belonging against their own members, as one social media platform after another erupts into scapegoating and shaming, while those who fear being excluded rush to signal their identity with the group. Christians (so-called “little Christs”) are as susceptible to this dynamic as any others. If you do not believe me, try posting on any platform about your devotion to the Virgin Mary; instantly, you will be surrounded by ridicule and accusations of idolatry, of not understanding the Scriptures and of being in a cult that worships the pope. Start patiently explaining how the Scriptures show forth Our Lady just as they show forth Our Lord, and you will be slammed for promoting doctrines that the Orthodox do not acknowledge, and before you know it, you are in a church of one, alone before the mob, all disagreeing with you and certain that they are the only ones who know the truth.
We do not live in a post-religious age, so much as a hyper-religious age, every group competing with every other to claim the high ground of identity. It is not so much that medieval Christians knew better how not to succumb to the rivalry, as that they recognized it more clearly for what it was: pride, the desire to feel in command of the group, to have influence and prestige. Insofar as they participated in communal prayer, therefore, throughout the Middle Ages it was on the model of the monks, every brother humbling himself before the group in the service not of the group, but of Christ. The earliest, most heroic monks didn’t even live in community; they were hermits like St. Anthony, who went out into the desert to pray and do battle with demons and their own sins. St. Benedict intended his Rule not for such stalwarts, but for beginners, precisely because he recognized the power of groups to keep their members in order through shaming, but the purpose was not to make the group powerful, quite the reverse. It was to support the individual monks in their training in virtue.
And how did the monks train? By singing the psalms. Here is the key to the power, such as it is, of medieval communal prayer: it was focused on the psalms. And why on the psalms? Because, as every medieval Christian knew, they are focused on Christ the Lord, the Word who is with God and who is God, through whom everything was made (John 1), who set his tabernacle in the sun and came forth as a bridegroom from his wedding chamber (Ps. 18:6), the king of glory mighty in battle (Ps. 23:8) who entered into his temple (Heb.) to rescue his people from their sins (Ps. 21). Religion, properly speaking, is about worship, and it is the object of worship that defines the community. If the community worships itself (as a city, nation, or empire) then its religion is about belonging to the group (see, pagan Rome, and its opposition to Christians). But a community worshipping Christ is defined by Him—and its individual members have strength to stand up against other communities who define themselves by something other than Christ.
Writing in 1951 to Milton Waldman, whom he still hoped would publish The Silmarillion along with The Lord of the Rings (it didn’t happen), Tolkien famously claimed that it had been his life-long ambition to write “a body of more of less connected legend” which he could “dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.” This body of legend would be “redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe …)” while likewise “possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic.” Whereas the peoples of other lands—Greek, Celtic, Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish—had preserved something of their mythology and heroic legend, there was “nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff,” and Tolkien, with his love of languages, wanted something in his mother tongue. But where could he find it, when, as he rightly pointed out, whatever stories of gods and heroes other than Christ and Beowulf that the Anglo-Saxons had told in their own tongue had been lost, never written down, preserved only in etymological hints that it would take a philologist to decipher?
Writing to Fr. Robert Murry, S.J., two years later, who had read part of The Lord of the Rings in galley-proofs, Tolkien told a somewhat different story: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision … I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.” So which was it? Had Tolkien written a body of myth for England based on its lost pre-Christian traditions? Or had Tolkien written a fundamentally Christian story, albeit with the “religious element,” while not explicit, nevertheless ”absorbed into the story and the symbolism”? The answer, of course, is both—because the Anglo-Saxon literature on which he fed his imagination and which he spent his career as a professor teaching was Christian, but Christian in a way most modern Christians have lost the capacity to recognize, so steeped have they become in Enlightenment rejections of Christianity’s own myths, above all, the myth (or history) of the Creation and Fall, with its fairy-tale turn in the Godspel of the Incarnation of the God-man.
Tolkien was more direct about his purpose in writing to his friend C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis, for whom he made a poetic record of a conversation about myth they had one evening on Addison’s Walk, some two decades before the publication of The Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien told the not-yet Christian Lewis, “We make still by the law in which we’re made … Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build / their little arks, though frail and poorly filled, / and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith, / a rumor of a harbour guessed by faith.” Attentive readers of The Lord of the Rings will recognize the mariner, cast on the oceans by the war with the Enemy and guided by the star of the sea in his quest for the blessed realm. Tolkien called him, “Eärendil,” and made him half-Elf, half-Man, the father of Elros and Elrond, but the name in its original Anglo-Saxon was éarendel, and Tolkien found it not in a long-lost mythology of paganism, but in the fifth of the lyrics for Advent written in the tenth-century Exeter Book: ”Eala earendel, engla beorhtast, / ofer middan-geard monnum sended.” In the vulgar tongue: “Hail, morning-star, brightest of angels, over middle-earth to men sent.” If modern readers feel enchanted when reading or listening to Tolkien’s stories, arguably what they are sensing is not a long-lost world without Christ, but the world as it was truly created through Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, the root and stock of David, the bright and morning star (Rev. 22:13, 16). Tolkien’s stories are enchanting because they bear the message of our original making, in the image and likeness of our Maker. They follow the blueprint on whose pattern, fallen as we are, we are invited to sub-create. Does this blueprint offer conservatives a way to re-kindle a sense of heroic purpose? Yes—if that hero is Christ.
Fencers often describe our sport as ‘physical chess.’ For me, it has also been a form of spiritual bootcamp, on the analogy of the monks’ singing the psalms. Just as the Lord of the psalms is a Lord of armies, so the medieval monks (and nuns!) understood their singing as a battle against demons and sin. If you have practiced any martial art, you know how important it is to discipline your mind not to react to extraneous stimuli; so, likewise, in fencing, you must learn to concentrate on the movements of the other fencer that matter, not letting yourself get distracted by self-talk about what you ought to be able to do (‘She’s a beginner, I ought to beat her!’) or what other people think about you (‘I was supposed to win that bout, I am so embarrassed’). I have a t-shirt that I used to wear in tournaments with a list on the back of fencing’s seven deadly sins, the most deadly of which, just as in medieval prayer practice, is pride (‘the belief your opponent can never win the bout’), but my ruling sin was always envy: seeing other fencers whom I thought I should be able to beat do better in our tournaments than I could. And yet, fencing is of necessity a social sport: we cannot fence without each other. To fall into pride or envy is to destroy the game, not to mention friendships based on our mutual love of the sport.
Scholars are subject to similar temptations. On the one hand, we need competition to test our skills—our thinking about our objects of study, our use of evidence, our ability to explain our ideas—but on the other, just as fencers or monks, we can fall into sin and become more concerned with maintaining our status among our professional peers (note embedded aristocratic metaphor) than with pursuing the truth. As a scholar, I am less familiar with the temptations that political leaders encounter, but based on my experience as a fencer and in academia, I would venture to guess that they are the same temptations that Jesus faced in the desert: the fear of not having enough to eat, the fear of being abandoned, and the hunger for domination over others. Some of us are more affected by the latter temptation than others, but we all to some extent desire control—think back to our first parents and the Tree. The feeling of having been handed that apple and given the thought: ‘You now have the power to control the world,’ must be overwhelming. At which point, if you have not trained yourself in humility, you fall into pride, the belief that your opponent can never win, and you destroy the game.
Having honor means respecting your opponent, even as you purpose to defeat her in the bout. Things get slippery when people start seeing other people not as human beings, but as demons (see above, question 5); here, again, it is important to train. Demons play on our fears, ratchet them up until we see nothing but monsters, ogres, and dragons, rather than fellow warriors in the mimetic feud. How do we defeat the demons? I hope the answer is now obvious: by imitating the monks and taking Christ as our captain. Christ teaches us to recognize the true Enemy, his lies and deceits, while at the same time seeing our neighbors as fellow human beings. Christ warns us against hypocrisy, against pretending to be more virtuous or pious than we are, while at the same time cautioning us against taking the devil’s bait (“Turn the other cheek,” Matt. 5:39). He models courage in standing up against the mob when it comes for us and against the powers that be when they demand our submission at the price of the truth. He gives us the strength to look foolish and the wisdom to know when to strike. Medieval knights took the cross as their banner because it instantiated the paradox: to gain our lives, we must be willing to lose them, but this does not mean giving into the lies.
I embraced Milo because he was saying things that were true, not because I wanted to embrace provocation as such, but I am, after all, a fencer, which means I welcome the debate. The difficulty here is distinguishing between embracing provocation for the purpose of self—becoming an influencer simply to become an influencer—and embracing provocation by standing up for the truth. Crudely put, it is the difference between picking fights to pick fights and being willing to fight if the fight comes to you. And yet, as a teacher, it is my job to raise questions that challenge students to reexamine their preconceptions, which often means challenging frameworks even my colleagues in academia have never put to the test.
For example, about whether we should see modernity as a Good Thing or Christian teaching as the truth. The default in the academy for the better part of a century has been to agree that all cultures deserve respect, but none except modernity (secular, scientific, liberal) deserves to be taken as truth. Based on the responses of my colleagues to my scholarship, as opposed to my public persona, the most provocative thing I have said came in the acknowledgements to my second major monograph, Mary and the Art of Prayer, where I thanked Our Lady for trusting me, as a cradle Presbyterian, to write on her behalf. (I have since been received into the Church, in March 2017.) I typically point out that I also thanked my dog, Joy, for getting me outside so that I could look at the trees, but it is my recognition of my faith as a Christian that has occasioned the most biting criticisms of my scholarship. “You actually believe the Virgin Mary is alive,” one of my departmental colleagues told me, when I asked him why the department had difficulty with my work. “That is the doctrine of the Catholic Church!” I replied.
As Christians, we will more or less inevitably come up against these kinds of provocations, which, I would argue, are best seen as tests of whether we will throw incense on the brazier in worship of Caesar and his secular pantheon. Again, Christ teaches us what to expect: “Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves” (Matt. 10:16). As many have learned in the past decade, the wolves are very real; to be a sheep in the midst of them is terrifying. One’s instinct, as makes sense for sheep, is to stay with the herd, but then all that happens is the wolves pick off any sheep who stray. The good news is Jesus knew what he was talking about. Christians are meant to study—to be wise as serpents in the knowledge of the world—but we are also meant to be dovelike, to persuade, not bully those who disagree with us. Jesus, of course, was not shy of provoking the authorities, which suggests we should be willing to stand up to the powers of the world as well, but for most Christians, at least in the West, the challenges are more immediate: not wanting to be difficult, not wanting to call our friends and colleagues out on their assumptions with which, as Christians, we disagree.
My advice is to start small: wear a cross pendant or some other visible mark that we are Christians, thank Our Lord for his inspiration in our acknowledgements. It takes practice to build up to saying, ‘three cheers for Our Lord Jesus Christ,’ in public, but it can be done. At which point, it helps to follow the advice Milo gave me the first time I had to walk into a room after defending him against the wolves: “Remember to laugh.” Did I mention I named my dog Joy?
It is a trope online to blame Christianity for the current weakness of the West, which only proves that we live in Edward Gibbon’s wake. The Roman Empire did not fall thanks to the asceticism of the monks, any more than science (the study of the natural, created world) and technology (the making of artificial things with the materials of the natural world) suffered under the desire to exercise them in praise of the Creator. It is likewise fashionable to blame Christianity for the conflicts mass migration necessarily provokes—the Roman Empire fell in the wake of just such a series of migrations—rather than recognizing that it was the conversion of the Germanic barbarians to Christianity that saved the cultures of antiquity for future study and imitation. The battle we face now is the same battle Augustine and his contemporaries faced when the Visigoths, whom the Romans had hired as mercenaries, insisted on being paid.
Even in late antiquity, the Romans had been watching their empire fall into chaos for centuries: one military coup after another brought new dynasties to power, only for the next general to come along and have his guards kill the sitting emperor, all while the most powerful families in the city maneuvered to get their man on the throne. The situation was only exacerbated in 1095, when Emperor Alexios Comnenos, himself the member of a usurping military family, sent West, asking the pope to help recruit more mercenaries for the defense of his realm. If the East remembers the sack of 1204 by the Franks and Venetians as a horror nearly as great as the fall of the City to the Ottomans in 1453, it is questionable which benefitted the West more: the transfer of the wealth of Christendom from Constantinople to the monasteries and churches of the West in the early 13th century, or the arrival of the Greeks bearing manuscripts of Plato, to the great delight of the humanists, in the 15th.
The story is never as simple as the Internet would like to believe. What saved ‘the West’ throughout the Middle Ages was not a focus on itself as such, but on the acquisition of knowledge and skills necessary to rebuild its cities and worship the Lord. Christianity is fundamentally an urban religion—its goal is, after all, the heavenly Jerusalem—and its beauty and joy is in the cultivation of human creativity in the building of cities as places of worship. But cities do not exist of themselves; they rely on the support of the countryside as sources of people, resources, and food. If there is one lesson we might learn from the Middle Ages to recover from the disintegration of the West, it is this vision of the world as an integrated whole: the city in conversation with the countryside, the mathematical arts in conversation with the verbal, the creation in conversation with its Creator. If we mourn the loss of our cities to corruption and decay, this is why. They were founded as places for human creativity, which, ironically, is why they are so appealing now to those who come from outside, whether as visitors or occupiers.
Rome faced the same problem when Alaric showed up in AD 410 with his Goths. But Alaric, having been converted to Christianity, spared the churches—and so Rome, as a city, survived.
