Christ Is The Only Firm Foundation For Western Civilization

Given the crisis surrounding the current influx of refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries into Europe, it seems Worth Revisiting this post from August 12th, 2014 (originally titled "If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”). To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks relatively distant to those of us in the United States; it seems a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population  is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of secularism and “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States the threat of islamism, although real, still seems remote.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History course [article here] that ignores great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions, or religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  
     As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down seems to be the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  Very often, they don’t even seem to pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq and Syria.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t so much destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire as it “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

    

A Christmas Hobbit, part 5

     In my previous post I was examining ways in which the first installment of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit undermined the sub-story of the original work by having the characters behave in ways they would not, and events happen in ways they could not, in J.R.R. Tolkien's original novel.  I suggested that, despite the surface similarities, these changes make them fundamentally different characters in a fundamentally different world.  I also promised there was worse to come and that I would share with you one (but by no means the only) example.
     It is important at this point to recall that Tolkien was a committed Catholic Christian (through much of his life he was a daily communicant).  He professed to disdain allegory, and avoided any overt Christian references or symbolism, but nevertheless imbued his Middle Earth novels with a very pronounced Catholic world view.  His stories take place within a sort of spiritual and moral economy (my term, not his) where no events are truly random, moral choices have profound significance and, as we have seen, all is overseen by Providence.  Let's return for a moment to "The shadow of the Past" from The Fellowship of the Ring. Gandalf is explaining to the hobbit Frodo how his uncle Bilbo had come to have the Ring of Power previously in the possession of the murderous creature Gollum.  Bilbo, protected by the power of invisibility conferred by the ring, passed up an opportunity to kill Gollum (who was trying to kill him).  Frodo says: "What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"  Gandalf replies: "Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand.  Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.  And he has been well rewarded, Frodo.  Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil [i.e., the evil power of the ring], and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the ring so.  With pity."  It is clear that the moral choice Bilbo makes in that one moment of time saves him from the evil power of the ring that corrupts Gollum and, as we saw earlier, nearly destroys Boromir. Not only that, it is plain at the end of The Lord of the Rings that Bilbo's one act of mercy has saved all of Middle Earth.

     The incident to which Gandalf refers takes place in The Hobbit.  To their credit, the movie makers depict Bilbo's sparing of Gollum faithfully.  They make a profound error, however, in how they represent Bilbo's finding of the ring.  In Tolkien's telling, Bilbo awakes in a dark goblin tunnel where he had been knocked unconscious, puts his hand on a ring in the dark and unthinkingly puts it in his pocket.  He shortly encounters Gollum, with whom he engages in a riddle contest in which the penalty for losing is that he becomes the creature's next meal, and from which he barely escapes.  It doesn't occur to him that the ring had been lost by Gollum until the point at which he knows it's power of invisibility is his only means of remaining uneaten.  He comes by it honestly, in other words, and later, when under it's evil influence he conceals the ring from his companions and is evasive about his experiences, Gandalf is troubled because he knows that Bilbo is an honest hobbit, but also that he's hiding something. In the movie, however, Bilbo sees Gollum drop the ring, and takes it knowing that it belongs to someone else, before Gollum presents any threat to him; when he meets Gollum he makes no effort to return it.  In other words,  his ownership of the ring begins with an intentional theft, whose baleful effects, at least in Tolkien's Middle Earth, can't help but pollute everything that follows.  The movie Bilbo is a different hobbit, living in a different world.
     My wife and I have always enjoyed sharing J.R.R. Tolkien's books with our children: they are exciting adventures and beautifully written (read The Hobbit aloud sometime and just listen to the flow of words); they also present a very Christian view of a world in which our actions have consequences, a virtuous character is rewarded in the end  (even if it seems unlikely at first), doing right is better than doing what is expedient, and all is under the watchful eye of a kindly Providence.  Sadly, none of those things are true of Peter Jackson's film, which is why The Hobbit a bad movie.
   
   

A Christmas Hobbit, part 4

     In my previous posts we saw that while the 1951 A Christmas Carol diverged from the original book in some places, and made some fairly sizable additions, the changes did not fundamentally alter the course of the plot.  More importantly, they did not alter the sub-story by changing the character or personality of the major players or the moral universe which undergirds the story.  I next looked at the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films, which likewise did not alter the surface story in a really significant way (although too much for my taste), but did show a disturbing tendency to misread at least some of the characters, and seemed blind to the moral dimensions of the universe author J.R.R. Tolkien had created.  One had the impression that Jackson and his crew just didn’t understand what Tolkien was about.
     Which brings us to Jackson’s current project, his Hobbit series, the first of which my family and I watched over the Christmas holiday.  On the plus side, the sets look good, the scenery is magnificent and the fellow who plays Bilbo does a very nice job. There are also a couple very well-done (if all too brief) segments, especially the riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum. The flaws in the Lord of the Ring films, however, are back, on steroids, and in a full-throttle ‘roid rage.  There are more additions this time around, many of which are intended to add background information found elsewhere in Tolkien’s writings, or at least hinted at in the text. There is also a character not found in the book (although not strictly speaking a “gopher” because he is mentioned in other places by Tolkien, playing a much smaller role than he does here): this is the so-called “Pale Orc” Azog, who  is trying to destroy Thorin, the leader of the dwarves whose company Bilbo joins.
      While some of these changes are irritating, they aren’t enough to ruin the movie, and some do make cinematic sense.  Many changes, on the other hand, seem to have been made solely for the purpose of ramping up the action, to such a degree that large parts of the movie look like a video game: hundreds of orcs, seemingly, are slaughtered without ever doing serious harm to the  main characters, who themselves fall hundreds of feet down a mineshaft with a wooden bridge and the body of a 300 pound Goblin king landing on top of them, after which they walk away unharmed.  The cartoonishness of these action sequences undermines the believability that still must be present, even in a fantasy world, if the story is to be taken seriously.  In other words, we are now encroaching on the sub-story, where a careless film-maker can disfigure a book beyond recognition.
     There are countless other instances of gross distortion of the background story, the
characters, or the way things work in Middle Earth: when the elf-king Thranduil is shown giving homage to the Dwarf-king (“No! No!” I scream at the television screen); when the dwarves at the Unexpected Party engage in a belching contest (“H@*& no!”); when the powerful wizard Gandalf is almost obsequious to Thorin (at this point I’m at a loss words).  I could go on, but you get the idea.  Jackson and company really don’t understand Tolkien, and the result is a story that the author would barely recognize.
     In the next and final post on this topic, we’ll look at one final detail from The Hobbit, one that seems ridiculously small but which completely overturns the entire moral structure not just of The Hobbit, but of The Lord of the Rings as well.

A Christmas Hobbit, part 3

     As I explained in my previous post, the 1951 A Christmas Carol, although it contained a number of changes to the surface story (not all of them small), did not alter the trajectory of the plot.  More importantly, the major characters in the film had the same personalities and moral qualities they had in the book, and the underlying meaning was the same.

     Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is a different kettle of fish altogether.  First of all, the sub-story behind The Hobbit is much more complicated than that of Dickens’s tale.  It takes place within an invented reality (“sub-created”, as he himself put it) that Tolkien had already spent many years creating, and which he was at great pains to make both internally consistent (he criticized his friend C.S. Lewis for details such as the incongruous London streetlamp in the woods of Narnia in his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) but also consistent enough with what he called “the primary world” to make it believable.  That is a difficult enough feat in a written work, but much more difficult to pull off in a drama. I don’t know if Peter Jackson has ever read Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”; if he has, he didn’t take seriously enough the author’s contention such believability in a fantasy story is extremely difficult in a dramatic format. 

     Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories also take place in a world that, while it contains little or no explicit religious practice, is nevertheless bound together by a very Christian moral sensibility and an inescapable sense of Divine Providence.  In the chapter from The Fellowship of the Ring called “The Shadow of the Past” (to which we shall return before we're finished) Gandalf says: “I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker.  In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”  We can also see the moral dimension in The Lord of the Rings in the two brothers Boromir and Faramir. Boromir is a type of the Utilitarian, to whom the “good” he can do with the power of the ring outweighs any moral considerations, and whose lust for it drives him mad; he redeems himself only with the sacrifice of his own life.  Faramir, on the other hand, is the Man of Principle, who says "I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood" and, speaking of the Ring of Power, "I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory.”  When he realizes that the ring is in fact within his power, he stands by his word and resists temptation.

      These two personify the moral choices each of the characters in the novel faces: to assert his own will, or to follow the seemingly more difficult path of duty and right.  Peter Jackson, in a foretaste of things to come, makes a hash of these two characters in his film version of The Lord of the Rings: here,  Faramir is a somewhat milder version of his amoral brother, and his main motivation seems to be that Boromir is his father’s favorite. This failing and some others (My wife was particularly struck by the movie scene where Eowyn, proud shield-maiden of the royal house of Rohan, was trying to make soup for Aragorn) are not enough to sink his The Lord of the Rings series completely, but they leave the impression that Peter Jackson and his crew just don’t “get” Tolkien.  He didn’t understand at least some of the characters, and he seemed blind to an important part of the moral dimension of the Tolkien’s invented universe.  I found these (and a few other) distortions of the sub story distasteful enough that I haven’t wished to see the movies again.   

      As we shall see in my next post, these flaws and more loom even larger in Jackson’s The Hobbit.

A Christmas Hobbit, part 2

      Why do I say that the 1951 A Christmas Carol is a Good Movie, and The Hobbit is a bad movie? 

      Glad you asked.  Let’s start with movie rendition of the Dickens Christmas classic.  Many people say
that they like this particular version because it’s close “in spirit” to the original.  And so it is, even though there are a number of changes to the surface story, some of them substantial. The role of Scrooge’s housemaid is expanded, for instance, and her name belonged to a different character in the original; Scrooge’s younger sister becomes his older sister in the film, who dies giving birth to his nephew as his mother died giving birth to him, both non-Dickensian additions.  The movie makers add a fairly large amount of their own material to the section with the ghost of Christmas past, even inventing an entirely new character, Mr. Jorkin (in my family such characters are known as “gophers” after a particularly irritating character Disney Studios created for their adaptation of Winnie the Pooh).  There are a number of other relatively minor changes as well.

      The key here is that none of these changes and additions alter the sub-story.  The invented biographical information seems to have been included to provide some psychological background to “explain” why Scrooge is the sort of man he is (apparently the movie makers believed that a mid-twentieth century audience would expect this, even if Dickens’s readers did not); none of it contradicts or changes the character of Scrooge as found in Dickens, or the moral fabric of the story.  Most of the film very closely follows the course of the original book (albeit with some omissions and minor alterations), and large parts of the dialogue are taken verbatim from the text.  While I myself would prefer sticking even closer to the original (I suppose I’m a bit of a purist, after all), it is still very clearly the same tale of the redemption of the same old sinner.

     In my next post, why I'm not so fond of The Hobbit.