November 19, 2009
For Andrew
“Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they did not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.”
Rose Macauley, The Towers of Trebizond.
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3 Responses to “For Andrew”
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yes. yes. yes. a thousand times yes.
This is a wonderful demonstration of the power of concession in argument: much talk of “the stupid Christians” who tragically got it all wrong in their ignorant zeal, coupled with praise of the inadvertent glory and kindness of saints who “flowered up” as an answer to incivility and barbarity and nonsense. Now there’s a Plan. Doesn’t it seem, though, that this argument is cut in layers that neatly factors out cause and effect? Here we have a kind of gradualism in which the nasty parts are conveniently located in the interstices, leaving only the sublime–the “yes those people had to be burned but Look at the cathedrals we got!” And then there’s the second little concession that occurs so quickly as to most likely go unnoticed–in the statement that “kindness and goodness have [of course] freely occured outside this grand provisioning of opportunities for greatness. I wonder: might it have been possible for that “outside” kindness and goodness to produce saints, had they not been struck down as heretics? Who knows. Many Gods have died, but we forget that we have forgotten them.
[...] I head out to church this morning, I share this with you. Found at Clusterflock: Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at [...]