Neo-Orthodoxy

 As I was scrolling through the headlines on the New York Times yesterday, the storied paper insisted I pause over one video. The thumbnail showed the lugubrious face of Ross Douthat. The headline below it read: "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"

The answer, presumably (given the source) is going to be "yes." 

I am reminded of one of Arthur Koestler's observations in The Trail of the Dinosaur: "Mr. Greene's defense of the bodily ascent of the Virgin in the pages of Life Magazine would embarrass even a saint." So too would Mr. Douthat's defenses of the resurrection in the pages of the New York Times. 

We seem to be living through another period of what Stephen Spender calls (in his book The Creative Element) resurgent "orthodoxy." 

Spender meant the term both figuratively and literally. Writers in his era, he observed, had sought a variety of means of escape from the "destructive element" in modern culture. 

Some sought salvation in new totalitarian political creeds. (Spender himself had been a part of the Marxist generation of poets in the 1930s, before joining other liberal intellectuals (including Koestler) in penning a critique of the Soviet system in The God That Failed.)

But still others took their orthodoxy straight. They sought answers not in the new religions of all-consuming political doctrines—but in the catechism of the historical churches. 

Comparing the two periods, in his classic essay, "Inside the Whale," George Orwell wrote of the Communist Party in the '30s: "It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had ‘joined’ as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that So-and-so had ‘been received’."

Orwell had earlier written, in his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, that Catholic conversion was a "standing temptation to the intelligentsia." His protagonist adds: "I dare say it's fairly cosy under Mother Church's wing. A bit insanitary, of course."

Unlike some of his admirers over the years, Orwell was never confused about the issue: he saw that religious conversion did not promise safety from the perilous temptation of totalitarian ideology—but was simply another version of the same flight from reason. 

Other writers have not been so clear on this. Many have instead spoken of the infatuation of postwar intellectuals with Christian belief systems as a kind of answer to the hubris of totalitarianism. 

Even Spender succumbs to this pat narrative at times. His book discusses Auden, Waugh, Eliot, and Greene as examples of British writers who turned to the Church in repudiation of worldly political systems. He thus contrasts favorably their worship of God with the totalitarian's worship of Stalin. 

But he does note too that the Church proved very amendable to this-worldly ideologies of power and domination, when it came down to it. And he accuses the "orthodox" writers of his time (rightly) of failing to grapple with this fact. 

There is scant reference among them, after all, to those "cannon-blessing bishops of the Spanish war," as Cyril Connolly put it. 

So too in our era. We are living through another wave of religious conversions—often to an extremely right-wing version of Catholicism (which is a version of the faith, let it be noted, very different from the one practiced by the Pope, as far as I can tell). 

It should be as obvious to us now as it was to Orwell in the thirties that this sudden interest in right-wing religious "orthodoxy" on the part of educated young people is not some sort of safety valve that prevents us from succumbing to authoritarianism—but an expression of the same tendency. 

The neo-orthodox "post-liberal" writers of the American Conservative and First Things have been cheerleading the Trumpian revolt against liberal democracy at every turn, after all. 

Far from escaping the hubris of totalitarian politics, which worships a man in place of God (as Spender puts it)—they have helped erect a new Stalin cult around our own American "Big Brother." 

Koestler, like Spender, was somewhat sympathetic at times to the general appeal of spirituality. He understood in part where the neo-"orthodox" writers were coming from. 

He insists repeatedly in his essays from the '50s that humankind needs to undergo some sort of novel intellectual "mutation" in order to escape the hopeless binary choice between capitalism and Communism in his era—and that this mutation may take a spiritual form. 

But he was equally insistent that the path out of this dilemma could not be simply a retreat. There was no prospect of merely going back to tried and rejected truths ("intellectual absurdities," as Orwell calls them, in his essay on Eliot). 

Throughout history, the "mutations" that free humankind from its earlier ideological struggles have never come in the form of a mere revival of past ideologies. They can only come, Koestler argued, from something genuinely new erupting onto the scene. 

Likewise, the sudden proliferation of interest in conservative "neo-orthodox" versions of Christianity in our era will not save us from the impasse of our present culture wars—where liberal democracy each day contends with a resurgent far-right nationalism and authoritarianism.

Indeed, all the "post-liberal" Christian converts seem to be doing their level best to help one side of that culture war—the fascist side—win. 

The religious converts in their journeying thus will lead us only "from darkness to darkness"—as Oscar Wilde once wrote of the famous intellectual odyssey of Cardinal John Newman.  

There can be no salvation for us from simply asserting as true the prescribed answers of one ideological "orthodoxy" or another. It is no answer to the political totalisms of our time to simply retreat into the oldest and biggest totalism of them all—what Shelley called "bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time."