Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth?

     Over at What I Saw in America, Patrick Deneen, stalwart Catholic at the aggressively secular college known as Georgetown, takes David Brooks to task for buying the supposed "conservatism" of President Obama's economic policies.  It's Deneen's opinion that both parties have consistently sold out the small community and the possibilities for a thriving local life.  Both, that is, are in the grip of the mad worship of "progress," whose goal is always left conveniently vague.  Neither party understands that it is good for human beings to do what they can to govern themselves locally, not simply because they will do a better job of it than will distant bureaucrats, but because it is essential to their dignity as human beings that they make law (or custom, more integral to human life and more venerable), rather than, like everlasting adolescents, merely comply with it. 

    Neither party, in other words, has anything kind to say about Nazareth.  I am not saying that it ought to be a matter of indifference for the Christian choosing between a party utterly committed to the Anticulture of Death and a party too stupid to understand what the choice for life implies.  All I mean is that if Nazareth isn't going to be saved by mass politics and mass entertainment and the undermining of sexual morality and the mass welfare state that that undermining requires, it sure is not going to be saved by a technocracy that is also perfectly comfortable with perfectly comfortable masses.  And yet not only do good things come from Nazareth.  The very thing we need most can only come from Nazareth.  For what comes from Nazareth is not an economic program, or a way to build a "smarter planet" (to cite the loathsome cliche), but a Person.  Who comes from Nazareth is, of course, the central thing, but for us now in our slough of impersonalism, it is important to note that any Person at all comes from there -- that the life of the Nazareths of the world is first of all a Personal life, wherein we enounter not a What in human form, but someone deeply mysterious named Joe or Martha; not nature to stretch on a rack to render up her secrets, but a being to love, who can love in turn.

     We cannot be saved by science, and especially not by the signal failure known as social science, because science deals in what, not who, and in generality, not in the particular as such.  That's not a criticism of science, only an acknowledgment of its limitations.  It cannot save me, because it has nothing to say to me as who I am in myself; it can heal an arm or a leg, only because my arm or my leg resembles the arms and legs of other people.  It reaches me insofar as I am an example of a generality, but otherwise it must hold its peace.  It can tell me why I might be attracted to women, and why women might be attracted to me, but it must keep silent when I ask, "Why should I love this woman in particular, and marry her?"  For then the answer requires knowledge of my whole being, what makes me myself and not Anybody, and what makes my wife herself, and some notion of the Good that escapes the rules on How Water Flows Through a Pipe.  As for modern social science (as opposed to classical political thinking), not only can it not save me, it can only treat me by reducing me to a cipher within some larger social phenomenon; in other words, it is the sort of intellectual endeavor that helps to produce the "mass" that it attempts to analyze.  It misses what is scandalously particular -- both Nazareth, and the Nazorean.

     But our Christian faith revels in the particular.  The good shepherd seeks the one lost sheep, apparently not content with the generality of ninety nine safe out of a hundred.  God chooses Israel to bear the truth to the world that He Is Who Is.  The Son is born to a particular woman, at a particular place and time.  "There are no impersonal laws in the universe," said a friend of mine, a Dominican priest.  The wisdom is what is treasured up in the name Immanuel: God indeed is with us, not just above us or alongside us, but closer to us than we are to ourselves.  All the history of the universe revolves around what happens to that one lost sheep.  It is the center of the world, and as the angels sing at the end of Lewis's Perelandra, let none gainsay it.  Our faith is not in a force, or in the solution to a metaphysical dilemma, or in a name like "progress" to conjure voters by, but in that three-Personed God whose life itself is love.  And that faith raises up saints, sharp and distinct, who strike the old humdrum world as mad or foolish, but who take that world by storm.  Who is the burlap-wearing lunatic from Assisi?  Who is that small Albanian nun in the black hole of Calcutta?  Who is that tentmaker from Tarsus with the poor voice?  Our politics and economics, by contrast, treat man as a lump, or a collectivity, and therefore do not treat men at all.   

    

Comments

[Rob G]

"All I mean is that if Nazareth isn't going to be saved by mass politics and mass entertainment and the undermining of sexual morality and the mass welfare state that that undermining requires, it sure is not going to be saved by a technocracy that is also perfectly comfortable with perfectly comfortable masses."

Hear, hear, Tony! I've just read Booth Tarkington's novel "The Turmoil" and William Cavanaugh's book "Theopolitical Imagination" and both speak, in their own distinct ways, to the very issues you raise here. The answers do not lie in 'bigness,' in 'fastness,' in 'smartness,' or in any other humanly-manufactured quality, and to the degree that we Christians mistakenly succumb to any notion, or fragment of a notion, that they do, we are not providing solutions but creating more problems.

[Benighted Savage]

>>> Neither party understands that it is good for human beings to do what they can to govern themselves locally, not simply because they will do a better job of it than will distant bureaucrats, but because it is essential to their dignity as human beings that they make law (or custom, more integral to human life and more venerable), rather than, like everlasting adolescents, merely comply with it. <<<

It may be that the judicial, bureaucratic and political elites that presume to govern our country under federalism understand full well what they are doing with the powers at their disposal. And could care less about the question of human dignity (cf. legal abortion). It may also be the case that the USA, along with the interstate system and world-wide capitalist system which it has long been a part, has become so big that it is no longer under anyone's effective control.

Unfortunately, the federal government that could defeat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany overseas, outlast and outspend the Soviet Union, and destroy segregation and Jim Crow, can do whatever it wants to without local interference. Who are we to deny them? It's easy to chide one's fellow Americans as being "everlasting adolescents," but why should anyone bother to make a local law that is against the grain of the reigning progressivism when you know that some federal appeals court will soon eliminate it by ruling it unconstitutional?

>>> Our politics and economics, by contrast, treat man as a lump, or a collectivity, and therefore do not treat men at all. <<<

However, our political system is quite adept at providing specialized and individual attention when necessary: just go ask Gov. Sara Palin and "Joe the Plumber."

[Kamilla]

Tony,

Briliant!

One thing absolutely fascinates me about medicine - the placebo effect. Medicine can never explain the power of the human mind, the human will, the human soul to heal. Or even to refuse to heal, as it often does in those who expect to feel poorly.

Kamilla

[Albion]

Thanks for this, Dr Esolen - must be read 2-3 times to absorb properly. Must be the poet in you.
OT - have just finished reading your trans. of Inferno - thanks for all I learn from your writings.

[Bill R]

I'm fascinated by the fact that God is Trinity: not a lonely unity, nor a diverse 3000, but the basic, minimum community.

I've also noted that public speaking to a crowd is, in a sense, much easier than persuading a single person. The crowd has trouble looking you in the eye.