The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (20 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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You might, in your old age, have said that you too were raised from the dead on that day. So were Greece and Rome. It was a miracle, and all the more wondrous, in that it took centuries to accomplish.
 
How Christianity saved the West
 
God made the victory possible; so a Christian will say. But the Jewish Scriptures had been preparing for it all along. Typical is what Isaiah says of the glory of Zion: “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” (Is. 60:3). Granted, the Law is rooted in the traditions of the Jews, their feasts, their dressings for the altar, and their regulations regarding purity. Yet there is in the Old Testament a wild crosscurrent threatening to burst the bonds of culture and spill out among all peoples, making them
all
sons of Abraham. The mysterious Melchizedek, king of Salem, is a priest of the Lord, but he is not among Abraham’s people (Gen. 14:17–20). Job the just sufferer dwells in Ur of the Chaldees. Many were the lepers in the days of Elisha the prophet, says Jesus, but only Naaman the Syrian did he heal (cf. 2 K. 5).
 
 
 
The Strength and Manliness of the Early Church
 
“I write to the Churches, and impress on them all, that I shall willingly die for God, unless you hinder me. I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable good-will towards me. Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep [in death], I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Entreat Christ for me, that by these instruments I may be found a sacrifice [to God].”
St. Ignatius of Antioch
, from his letter to the Romans (4:6)
 
 
The early Christian martyrs are a fine contradiction to the modern notion that Christianity and moral conviction are reserved for effeminate men and hysterical women.
 
 
So far from being embedded in any one culture, God seems, if you’ll forgive the jest, to shake free of it. He commands the Jews to burn holocausts, and then says through Isaiah that he has no delight in holocausts, but only in the sacrifice of a humble heart. He commands the males to be circumcised, then says through Jeremiah that such circumcision in itself has no significance. He requires the circumcision of the heart. He does
not
command the building of the great Temple of Solomon, the center of Jewish worship (whose master-builder comes from Phoenicia; cf. 2 Chr. 2:13). Centuries after the Babylonians have destroyed that Temple and the Jews under Zerubbabel have rebuilt it (Ezr. 3), Jesus would say, referring to himself as the true holy of holies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2:19). In his resurrection and in the preaching of his church, he carries the Temple everywhere. All nations shall come to Jerusalem, says the prophet, bringing “gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord” (Is. 60:6). But Jerusalem too goes forth to all the nations, “for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Is. 2:3).
 
In other words, there is in the Old Testament a seed of the mad notion that the Jews are the Chosen People not for themselves, but for everyone else. There can be only two ways for such a thing to be true. One, as in Islam, is to believe that the whole world will eventually accept circumcision and the laws of kosher and the passover meal and the Holy of Holies. That is, the religion is inextricable from the state and culture, and dominates the world by obliterating its human variety. That is the way of the world. Its inclination, as the last miserable century testifies, is to unite by reduction, to turn men into a manageable and homogeneous mass. It is political correctness on a global scale. Something of this falsely conservative tendency confronted the first generation of Christians. Must Gentile converts keep the dietary restrictions of the Jewish law? Must they keep the rules of ritual purity? Must the males be circumcised?
 
The answer of the Church, as reported by Luke in Acts and by Paul himself, is
no
. It is a stunning answer. Converts to Judaism, after all, signaled their conversion precisely by their adherence to the Jewish law. But Jesus proclaimed himself as the fulfillment of the Law, by his sacrificial death on the Cross, and his resurrection. Baptism replaces circumcision now and forever, by the commandment of the Lord (Matt. 28:19–20). That is not simply the substitution of one ritual for another, but a re-centering of law and worship upon the person of Jesus Christ. In baptism, the believer is united to Christ’s death, that he may also rise with him again. It is the prime act of faith, transcending time and place and culture:
 
Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster
to bring us
unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
 
But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
 
For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
 
For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
 
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
 
And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
 
(Gal. 3:24–29)
 
 
There we have it, the second way. It had never before been imagined. It is broached by Paul, and would be made manifest in the experience of Christian evangelists over the centuries. It is to believe that each culture might be blessed by the Jews in its own way, becoming more truly itself in the bargain. It unites as it distinguishes—for Paul does
not
say what liberal Christians want him to say, that there will be only trivial differences between Greek and Jew, bond and free, man and woman. He means that in the baptism of Christ there is not one sacrament for a Greek and another for a Jew, one for a man and another for a woman. They are
one,
even as the distinct members of a body are one (cf. 1 Cor. 12:20). What worldly honor the Greek attached to his being Greek, is of no consequence in the baptism of Christ. What spiritual preference the Jewish man attached to his being Jewish and a man, is of no consequence in the baptism of Christ. That insight lay at the heart of the Christian mission to Greece and Rome and, eventually, the rest of the world.
 
Here we see a truth that the Left in America and Europe today find laughable. They ignore it at their peril. Their “tolerance” is based literally on emptiness: we tolerate because we are indifferent, because objective goodness and truth do not exist. Then the State enforces its will anyway. But the forbearance of a Christian is based upon the belief that all good things, including noble traditions and cultures, can be raised up and redeemed in Christ.
 
 
 
Christianity’s Crime against the State: Mercy
 
Volusianus raised the objection that the preaching and teaching of Christ was in no way compatible with the duties and rights of citizens; for, to quote an instance frequently alleged, among its precepts there is found: “Do not repay injury with injury.”... Now, it seems clear that such moral norms could not be put into practice without bringing ruin to a country...Would anyone, thenceforth, refuse to punish according to the laws of war the devastation of a Roman province?
 
 
Etienne Gilson
, introduction to Augustine’s
City of God
 
The Christian Marcellinus, who begs Augustine to respond to these charges, confesses that “it is manifest that very great calamities have befallen the country under the government of emperors practising, for the most part, the Christian religion.” He is referring principally to the weakling Honorius. We commonly hear that Christianity is aggressive and imperialist, but for most of its history, its detractors have decried it as otherworldly and passive. Can’t win.
 
 
This openness is at the heart of Christ’s preaching and life. When he departed from his disciples at Bethany, he instructed them to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19). He said nothing about making them all Greek, Roman, or Hebrew. This promised King of the Jews, after all, was no overlord with marauding armies. He arrived in Jerusalem not on a chariot but on a donkey, with some fishermen in tow. Many of his Jewish countrymen hoped he would help them throw off the yoke of their Roman overlords, and many others hoped he would try to do that and fail, so they might seek occasion against him.
 
But Jesus was set to break the yoke of a more sulfurous tyrant than the one in Rome. So when they asked him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he replied, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” affirming a certain autonomy for temporal government, and making any genuine theocracy a violation of his teaching (Matt. 22:21). Note the irony here. The Left cries “Theocracy!” whenever men of faith have anything to say about how we are to live together. They thus hobble the Christian soldier, heap gold upon Caesar, and leave us vulnerable to the real theocrats amassing their forces, the armies of Mohammed.
 
Instead of enhancing the Jewish hopes for political independence, Jesus consistently appealed to the time before the Jews were a people at all. When he was asked when a man might lawfully divorce his wife (a hot topic at the time), Jesus cites the authority
behind
Moses, the lawgiver and the greatest of the prophets. Moses, he says, granted the people a concession for divorce, because of the hardness of their hearts,
 
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
 
For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife;
 
And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.
 
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Mk. 10:6–9)
 
 
Those who heard him understood his radical claim. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was,
I AM
,” said he (Jn. 8:58), uttering as his own the name of God that could only be spoken once a year, by the chief priest, in the Holy of Holies, within the Temple. He is Himself the Temple, then, and the Chief Priest, as He is one with the Father to whom He prays, for “when ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am
he,
and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things” (Jn. 8:28).

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