On Living a Nonmodern Life in the Modern World

Our sometimes-commenter Peter S. remarks over at Bruce Charlton's Miscellany:

This is the key issue: how to find or create a spiritual ‘modus vivendi’ that allows one to be ‘in the modern world but not of it’? This is the terrible spiritual position of the individual embedded in modernity, for, if a normative civilization quite naturally provides supports for the remembrance of God and the spiritual life, the modern world substitutes, in practical fact, these supports with impediments. In effect, instead of swimming with the spiritual current of a normative civilization, the individual must swim against the current of the modern world if he is to escape spiritual ruination.

As Don Colacho – whose aphorisms are available once again – critically observes, “Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.” [http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/10/2046.html]

There is a twofold effort that is required: intellectual, in that one must see through the errors of the modern conception, and build, for oneself at least, an understanding of things that relates back to the Transcendent and to spiritual realities; operative, in that one should try, in whatever partial and intermittent manner, to orient one’s daily life toward prayer and the remembrance of God. Modern life is inherently centrifugal, scattering one’s attention to the periphery; the task before one is to return, again and again, to the Center, to quite literally ‘re-collect’ oneself before God.

As Frithjof Schuon recommends, “In short, one must live ‘in a little garden of the Holy Virgin,’ without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life. That is ‘holy poverty’ or ‘holy childlikeness’; it is also, so to speak, ‘holy monotony’.... dominated by the proximity of the sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it.”

Comments

[martin snigg]

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/12/christ-and-nothing-28

DB Hart's acclaimed 'Christ and Nothing'

... In practical terms, I suspect that this means that Christians must make an ever more concerted effort to recall and recover the wisdom and centrality of the ascetic tradition. It takes formidable faith and devotion to resist the evils of one's age, and it is to the history of Christian asceticism--especially, perhaps, the apophthegms of the Desert Fathers--that all Christians, whether married or not, should turn for guidance. To have no god but the God of Christ, after all, means today that we must endure the lenten privations of what is most certainly a dark age, and strive to resist the bland solace, inane charms, brute viciousness, and dazed passivity of post-Christian culture--all of which are so tempting precisely because they enjoin us to believe in and adore ourselves.

[Justin]

I will echo the comment above. We are in a similar situation to the early Christians themselves: attempting to forge a life of holiness in the teeth of pagan attack. The scriptures speak directly to us.

[CorkyAgain]

The Komen/PlannedParenthood story led to an epic comment thread on the Seattle Times website.

At one point, a believer (quite correctly) observed:

"Step back for moment, and you're seeing satan in action"

Which prompted the all-too-familiar mocking question:

"Why dosen't [sic] your 'god' put a stop to it?"

Attempts to explain the gift of free will and the Last Judgment fell on deaf ears, of course.

I don't know if Seattle is the capital of paganism, but it sure feels that way sometimes.

[Proph]

"Which prompted the all-too-familiar mocking question: 'Why dosen't [sic] your 'god' put a stop to it?'"

All too familiar indeed. Calls to mind, say, Matthew 27:38-43.

[Samson J.]

"Holy childlikeness" is a good term for the approach I've adopted. It's a mindset that entails sort of willfully living as if you simply don't know about a lot of the evil and emptiness that surrounds us. You can *will* yourself to "forget" modernity (or at least modern values, in spite of their ubiquity) - the way a child might see something evil but not be damaged because he doesn't understand what it means.

Of course, this can cross the line into irresponsibility, since we are obliged to engage our culture on behalf of Christ (and thus to understand our enemies), and obviously that which we don't know *can* hurt us. But we are to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

[poetcomic1]

I was with you till you quoted Schuon. He was an an astonishingly brilliant man and that is what makes his blighted pride and perversity and inability to love even more repulsive. I personally think he was demoniacally possessed. The devil can imitate every virtue except humility. That was Schuon in Bloomington, Indiana in a nutshell.

[Dirichlet]

Proph, I invite you to take a look into the minds of the degenerates we are opposing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l0SAVeK2Rg

I swear I didn't believe this was serious. It just looks like a troll. But no, this is what leftists actually believe (and yes, they want us to disappear).