Yesterday was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in the Catholic calendar — something held in faith for over 1500 years, but only defined in the 1950s.
I do not wish to argue the history of the doctrine, but would like to bring to light something of the reasoning behind it — for what what the dogma proclaims, what the Church wanted to highlight, was the central tenet of Christianity — that the body matters.
Before it, the depradations of the so-called Enlightenment, the genesis of a strictly secular science and its handmaid, technology, had triumphed over the flesh by reducing man to a unit of production, life's value in direct proportion to the ability to service the machine. The worth of a child was in someone who could be squeezed up a chimney, or reach into a machine without having to turn it off ... the worth of the old, of course, was nothing ...
(... The 'nobility of labour' might well be a romatic ideal, the picturesque image of the agrarian lifestyle far removed from lambing in the freezing hours of dawn, or watching a crop ruined by drought or deluge, a herd by disease ... but industrialism cared nothing for such delusions, and it cared not a jot who knew it ...)
The 'triumph of technology' was World War I. Railway timetables had more to do with the declaration of war than the assasination in Sarajevo. But more than this, every noble human value was desecrated and draped across the wire of no-mans' land, as humanity was forced into an inescapable danse macabre without solution, set to the rattle of the machine gun... the only rule being the mathematical theory that assured victory to the one who could throw men at the enemy faster than the enemy could kill them.
World War II saw this desecration of the human person carried across into the civilian population ... the Blitzkreig that deployed terror against populations as a weapon against the enemy (to disrupt the '3C's — command, control and communications) ... the image of Jews crammed into cattle trucks, the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz (so efficient, thanks to railway timetables, once again) ...
After it, the new dawn ... the vainglorius counter-culture of the 50s and 60's — the new desecration — the surrender of responsibility: turn on, tune in, drop out — get stoned, stare into your navel and waste away ... the mantra of the swinging 60s, "if you can remember it, you weren't there" — where else do we find such nihilism paraded as a virtue? The Age of Aquarius that turned the idea of agape ... of real love ... into a shagfest, the rut of a generation with too much money, too much time, no sense of self-worth, the body reduced to a trading commoddity.
Don't agree? Then why is the cosmetics industry one of the richest in the world? Why are there generations hooked on 'therapies'? Why is teenage suicide among young men in the affluent west at the highest levels ever recorded? Why is self-harm, bullemia and anorexia epidemic among our young women? They are the fruit of our generation ... Why are we powerless to protect them from the mediaculture we have created?
Because we are addicted to the ethos that created the problem. Every promise we have made to ourselves has been comprehensively broken — science and technology, that was going to set us free, has made us poor, impoverished, and has crippled our ecologies, damaged our environment, so we numb ourselves with new and exciting devices, we chase after novelty and shiny, pretty things, the latest distraction.
And we move faster and faster, because this culture is sick, and refuses to admit it, and dare not stop to take stock.
That's why it matters, more now than ever ... because sometimes the Church displays an uncanny prescience in making her declarations, the widsom of which only comes to light generations later ...
In this case, it is only when we rediscover the dignity of the human person will we have an adequate answer, a solution, a medicine, that will enable us to embrace the necessary ascesis to combat the rampant consumerism that will, if left unchecked, bring the world to ruin.
Ascesis — it was that word, that word alone, that converted Thomas Merton to the Catholic Faith.
Thomas
I do not wish to argue the history of the doctrine, but would like to bring to light something of the reasoning behind it — for what what the dogma proclaims, what the Church wanted to highlight, was the central tenet of Christianity — that the body matters.
Before it, the depradations of the so-called Enlightenment, the genesis of a strictly secular science and its handmaid, technology, had triumphed over the flesh by reducing man to a unit of production, life's value in direct proportion to the ability to service the machine. The worth of a child was in someone who could be squeezed up a chimney, or reach into a machine without having to turn it off ... the worth of the old, of course, was nothing ...
(... The 'nobility of labour' might well be a romatic ideal, the picturesque image of the agrarian lifestyle far removed from lambing in the freezing hours of dawn, or watching a crop ruined by drought or deluge, a herd by disease ... but industrialism cared nothing for such delusions, and it cared not a jot who knew it ...)
The 'triumph of technology' was World War I. Railway timetables had more to do with the declaration of war than the assasination in Sarajevo. But more than this, every noble human value was desecrated and draped across the wire of no-mans' land, as humanity was forced into an inescapable danse macabre without solution, set to the rattle of the machine gun... the only rule being the mathematical theory that assured victory to the one who could throw men at the enemy faster than the enemy could kill them.
World War II saw this desecration of the human person carried across into the civilian population ... the Blitzkreig that deployed terror against populations as a weapon against the enemy (to disrupt the '3C's — command, control and communications) ... the image of Jews crammed into cattle trucks, the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz (so efficient, thanks to railway timetables, once again) ...
After it, the new dawn ... the vainglorius counter-culture of the 50s and 60's — the new desecration — the surrender of responsibility: turn on, tune in, drop out — get stoned, stare into your navel and waste away ... the mantra of the swinging 60s, "if you can remember it, you weren't there" — where else do we find such nihilism paraded as a virtue? The Age of Aquarius that turned the idea of agape ... of real love ... into a shagfest, the rut of a generation with too much money, too much time, no sense of self-worth, the body reduced to a trading commoddity.
Don't agree? Then why is the cosmetics industry one of the richest in the world? Why are there generations hooked on 'therapies'? Why is teenage suicide among young men in the affluent west at the highest levels ever recorded? Why is self-harm, bullemia and anorexia epidemic among our young women? They are the fruit of our generation ... Why are we powerless to protect them from the mediaculture we have created?
Because we are addicted to the ethos that created the problem. Every promise we have made to ourselves has been comprehensively broken — science and technology, that was going to set us free, has made us poor, impoverished, and has crippled our ecologies, damaged our environment, so we numb ourselves with new and exciting devices, we chase after novelty and shiny, pretty things, the latest distraction.
And we move faster and faster, because this culture is sick, and refuses to admit it, and dare not stop to take stock.
That's why it matters, more now than ever ... because sometimes the Church displays an uncanny prescience in making her declarations, the widsom of which only comes to light generations later ...
In this case, it is only when we rediscover the dignity of the human person will we have an adequate answer, a solution, a medicine, that will enable us to embrace the necessary ascesis to combat the rampant consumerism that will, if left unchecked, bring the world to ruin.
Ascesis — it was that word, that word alone, that converted Thomas Merton to the Catholic Faith.
Thomas
