Be careful, things fall apart

David Brooks observes today (behind TimesSelect) that the once widely-held belief in goodness as the natural state of mankind has faded. Too much reality. Here's Brooks:

This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.

[Emphasis mine.]

Amy Welborn makes a similar point I've bolded in her long "Theory of Everything" post. Here's what you might call Welborn's Law:

Everything will eventually go haywire.

Therefore, it is safest to have deeply-rooted, concrete, content-rich, standards and reference points expressive of tradition as our framework in order to keep us even within shouting distance of the original vision, aka The Truth.

She goes on to explain that human nature is always going to take the easy way out, to go with the flow, to adapt itself to the spirit of the age. No matter how well we mean, when we cut ourselves off from tradition -- and those institutions and practices that embody and convey the tradition -- we will go wherever the wind blows us, even in spite of ourselves. And given our nature, we will go toward darkness, disorder, violence, sensuality. Like the song says, "Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable/And lightness has a call that's hard to hear." Here's Amy:

In that context, I am thinking more and more that since things go haywire, and that darkness within and without is so pervasive, that it just makes sense - and is not a matter of "liberal" or "conservative" to let the Church be the place where things are clearly stated, and where worship is structured so the temptations of the egos that run it are not given any room to be served - we are free to take it all or leave it - but at least we will know where we stand.

Amen and amen. One thing I appreciate about the Orthodox Church is that for all its problems -- and every church has problems -- nobody's going to spring any liturgical surprises on you. As Hugh O'Beirne, who left RCism for Odoxy, says in "Crunchy Cons," "I used to fight the intra-church battles in the Catholic church as much as I'd fight against Protestants. But there's no war footing within Orthodoxy. You can go that way, and I've seen it happen, but it's not there in the same waqy as it is in Catholicism." In my short time in the Orthodox Church, that has also been my experience, though I must say that my experience has been almost entirely of one OCA parish. Orthodox readers of this blog should feel free to correct me, but I sense that there is far less of a spirit of individualism present in Orthodoxy, in the sense that any one individual feels free to mess with the liturgy, or the teachings of the church. There is an unspoken understanding that this is something we are supposed to conform to, in part because it's so much older and bigger than we, and we have no right to tinker with it. Of course as Fr. Schmemann memorably observed, this sort of thing can turn into a worship not of the living God, but of Tradition. Wrote the great Orthodox theologian: “What used to be an organic, natural style became stylization, spiritually weak, harmful. The main problem of Orthodoxy is the constraint due to style, and its inability to revise it; a prevalent absence of self-criticism, of checking the tradition of the elders by Tradition, by love of Truth. A growing idolatry.”

Still, one is grateful for a community that at least stands foursquare against the modernist dogma that we should be free of all constraints imposed by tradition. I thought about that the other day when talking to a friend whose mainline Protestant parish is undergoing a small revolution wrought by its new pastor. The new pastor has decided that the old way of doing things there had to go. They sing different hymns now, and pretty much are conforming to every trend in pop Evangelicalism. My friend hates it, and tells me lots of the old guard in the parish hate it ... but there are lots of new people there who don't remember what it was like before, and who are going along with the new changes for lack of a better idea. Judging from my friend's admittedly biased account, it doesn't sound like the old guard would have opposed any changes at all, but what they're having thrust upon them is a radical break from the traditions in this parish, and it's alienating a lot of people. People who won't stand up for themselves, it appears to me, because they don't want to be in the position of bucking the parish leadership. It does sound like the new pastor considers this parish his own personal stage, and the people and their local traditions merely clay for molding. This will not end well, because either this pastor will move on to a bigger church and career, or will be dismissed. In either case, he will have left behind a parish broken at some level and embittered because it was dragged along so radically from its roots, and ... for what?

I was thinking about all this yesterday while reading further into the deeply pleasurable "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism and the Sacred," that collection of essay's by Notre Dame architecture department head Philip Bess that I was raving about here recently. One of his essays speaks of Catholic church architecture, and the radical architectural break with the Catholic past that occurred around 1950. Bess observes that in their architecture and design, modern Catholic parish churches have by and large abandoned the role they have always played in conveying the Church's teaching through symbol. He speaks of the "evangelical" role church architecture has (and when I read this, I instantly thought about how I began my journey into Catholicism quite unexpectedly at age 17, when on my first trip to Europe, I visited Chartres Cathedral, and with every fiber of my being wanted to be part of the tradition that could erect something so complex and overwhelmingly beautiful to God; what must they know about the nature of our God to allow them to have built something that made me feel so small in the presence of His majesty, but also so ennobled by being in its presence?). Bess says that traditionally, church architects have understood that the way you built a temple to God says something about God's nature. If that's true, what do you suppose this parish church tells worshipers and passers-by about God? That he owns a nuclear power plant (God as C. Montgomery Burns)? Or this Brazilian cathedral -- that God is a medieval court jester? Actually what they both say is precisely nothing about God, and everything about the architect and those who hired him. What they, and churches like it, convey is a sense of complete discontinuity with the past, and in turn a sense that the people of the present time have no natural connection to what came before, and therefore no responsibility to honor and preserve it.

Think about it: there's a reason people prefer to get married in beautiful old churches, no matter how humble, instead of these modernist churchatoriums. Why do you suppose that is? Why do you suppose that for the really important stuff, like marriage, they want to be inside a building that conveys the gravity of the occasion, but for the stuff that really doesn't count -- like, oh, the daily and weekly religious life of the parish community -- they settle for crap?

But I digress. Here's what I wanted to quote from Bess:

All architecture that endures shares a concern for what architects call "tectonics," the basic constructional principles and elements of all building. "Styles," however, differ, as do modes of architectural expression. The Church has always recognized this. Nevertheless, architectural styles -- a shared aesthetic sensibility embodied in buildings and extended over time -- depend upon healthy traditions for their transmission and development.

Modernism, the dominant ideology of 20th-century architecture, was anti-traditional; and continues to be so in the early 21st century, lacking any aesthetic principle for sustaining itself other than an incessant search for novelty. Only from sheer cultural habit does neo-modernism remain abstract, adversarial, utopian, and uninterested in materiality; in its gnosticism simultaneously "spiritual" and positivist; insistent upon emphasizing and symbolizing discontinuity rather than continuity in both architecture and culture. ...The qualitative trajectory of contemporary modern architecture, both intellectually and as buildings, is downward. If the Church occasionally embraces a modernist aesthetic, she should do so cautiously -- and certainly not as a substitute for her many well-tested and well-established aesthetic traditions.

I suppose there's no way to quantify this, but I'd bet that the one lesson we teach our young by the way we build churches and, well, most everything today is: none of this matters, it's all take-or-leave as you like, you have no obligation to the past or the future, only the Everlasting Now. It's most culturally and spiritually disabling when the church (by which I mean all Christian churches) yields to this modernist worldview, not only in its architecture, but in its liturgy and its theology, because like Amy says, when the entire world is in such flux, the one place that should be a rock of stability and changelessness should be the house of the eternal God.