Here’s one response from a source beloved by those who created this (un-despised) website, W. H. Auden:

Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Dante was exiled from his city, of course. Like Socrates’ most loving son, he “returned” to make “a city in thought-words (logoi).” I think we must think the (im)possible first, before it can ever be a global politics, but how can we think it, unless we have experienced it (unless it is fore-given”)? Something at least of the communions and exchanges that always “are” the heavenly city?

In the icy deep of the City of Dis, the pilgrim Dante gives way to railing against the frozen devourings of one another he watches there. But satire and invective is the wrong key in which to respond — the pilgrim is still young in grace.

You (I mean all of you) live that politics that P.J. invokes in the arts and in every sacramental venture. The most audacious of you never responds with invective, but with tears and sighs. That’s why you are all such a blessing. (Thanks.)

“…In the course of the 19th century, there emerged of of this romantic spirit that radicalized consciousness of modernity which freed itself from all specific historical ties. This most recent modernism simply makes an abstract opposition between tradition and the present; and we are, in a way, still the contemporaries of that kind of aesthetic modernity which first appeared in the midst of the 19th century. Since then, the distinguishing mark of works which count as modern is ‘the new,’ which will be overcome and made obsolete through the novelty of the next style. But, while that which is merely stylish will soon become outmoded, that which is modern preserves a secret tie to the classical… Our sense of modernity creates its own self-enclosed canons of being classioc. In this sense we speak, e.g., in view of the history of modern art, of classical modernity. The relation between ‘modern’ and ‘classical’ has definitely lost a fixed historical reference.”

from “Modernity-An Incomplete Project” by Jürgen Habermas in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster.

By the way, this is comment #666!

In my teaching, I found that students from the conservative or Evangelical background often ARE ready for some way to grasp the hardness and move into it. They responded deeply to the Rule of Saint Benedict, for exammple, and I think it was because it made sense to them that the hardness of being a Christian might be lived out ascetically and fideistically, in opposition to the culture. But they didn’t really get Benedict, because the Rule is “just a bittle book for beginners” and not about the ecstatic joys and struggles of deeper union with Christ for which the rules were merely clearing a way and making time for. They didn’t get that spiritual growth is an essentially hedonistic experience that is aimed at transforming us sacramentally — as is the monastic life, a life of delighting in love through the liturgy.

Personally, I think the problem is the inability to think symbolically or mythically in our current culture. Lewis and Tolkien used to attract kids with their mythopoietic medium, which is more than a medium because it really is the message: what is real about history is what is mythic in it — its deep structures and not its mere accidents. But today we have the reduction of reality to actuality per se. But what I think about day in and day out is this kind of thing…. This is what fascinates me.

The mimesis and the poiesis that Paul speaks of are based on powerfully mediative and mythic paradigms — we don’t see anything like that about mimesis today because we reduce the being of things to their “concreteness,” and hence mimesis means making a concrete copy of an original (re[roduction). For Plato and Aristotle it meant re-enacting something in another medium, translating, carrying over what is essential instead of merely carrying over the incidental concreteness of the original’s instantiation. I don’t mean that the historicity of the original doesn’t matter: Christ’s historicity. “Myth become Fact.” But it doesn’t matter as mere fact, alone. It matters for the power with which it reveals a deeper reality, caoable of being manifested as itself in very different “concretes” elsewhere and at other times.

So, sounding like a broken record, I think what we need most fundamentally right now is an experience of a really powerful and vibrant new (old) model of knowing, a paradigm that will make manifest by contrast how the old literalism and reductionism is unfaithful. (But still, if I am right, and lots of people seem to be working on dis-covering this text, it will still remain only the intervention we need right NOW. And if it succeeds, it will hollow out into the opposite of itself in time (a parody because it will then be easy and not hard-won) — unless the next generations engage in the struggle to deconstruct and re-invent it all over again, within the state of affairs that has come to exist then (in part because of the new paradigm).

There is something out there in the students, hungering — although my son is not so sure of that as I am, and I have never taught his current generation. He says it is unrecognizably different from my world. But still, what is needful is to forge by trial and error the paradigms that will make sense to them and free them to learn and growth in Christ again. Just as the Church has always done.

I echo Davis — what is it that they DO care deeply about? Emptiness and hollowness are very good things, and so are materialism and shallowness, as teachers, because they can teach us to long for what is missing. Where do they look for what is missing? Where do they find themselves wounded and at a loss?

Dare I offer American Idol as an attraction because it is in some respects a medium of liberation, in that it offers epic exemplars of how persons strive to go deeper into the depths of a discipline and experience growth and change and fulfilment even in their limitations, and how tricky it can be to distinguish real engagement from mere show — and how HARD and ongoing real learning is. (If we could offer as gritty a paradigm for growth in the spiritual disciplines….)

Actually, you’d be suprised how often I’ve heard the Jesus-overturning-the-tables = we need not scrutinize violent military action. It’s popped up so often recently in some of the most theologically interested but theologically weak people I know. Shoddy hermeneutics is the root of all evil;)

I think the problem with the youth (and I am one of them) is more broadly the great “Modern condition.” It simply limits at every turn one’s ability to conform to spiritual realities without a great deal of effort. We have inherited so many presuppositions, so many shaped horizons that implicitly make spiritual realities and faith related things appear to us as impossible, as something entirely “unreal”. Ideas like the Resurrection don’t stick because when that enters the modern ear it rings with a certain static, and certain conceptual ugliness that must be explained away as, surely, something other than what it seems to mean. We live in a “life-world” in which the very language, the word-game, of Christianity no longer has currency. The way modern experience is structured does not fill it out with any meaning.

I mean, just think of how the average student would try to process a statement like “the Spirit cries to the Father with many groans” in me, or “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me”; or even something like “the Cross is the sign of God’s love?” We are simply predisposed to think that our horizons of meaning have advanced beyond a time when these could have been truly meaningful, coherent statements.

So, to be a pessimist, unless the student’s “life-world” is brokendown and recrafted, built up again in such a way as to embody the “language” of Christian existence; unless one is able to comprehensively change the way that things appear to them; and unless this sticks: then, well, chances are the birds will feed on the seed.

Did I mention that truly being a Christian is also really HARD?

Pax Christi,