“A withering boredom” – that is Europe

Fr. Jonathan of the blog Second Terrace has written some very insightful thoughts inspired by David Hart’s book “Atheist Delusions“.

“In another place (The New Criterion, March 2004), Hart describes vestiges of Christendom, especially in Europe, in this way: “… the very desuetude of these remnants imbues them with a special charm. Just as the exuviae of cicadas acquire their milky translucence and poignant fragility only in being evacuated of anything living, so the misty, haunting glamour of the churches of France might be invisible but for the desolation in their pews.

In that particular article, Hart takes pains to draw a difference between America and the shriveling (and sterile) Christendom in Europe (which is cursed with “that misbegotten abomination, the European Union – that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity” – sometimes, one just sighs in near envy at such ripping eloquence). To this end, here is a particularly trenchant bon mot:

… it seems certain that Europe will continue to sink into its demographic twilight, and increasingly to look like the land of the “last men” that Nietzsche prophesied would follow the “death of God”: a realm of sanctimony, petty sensualisms, pettier rationalisms, and a vaguely euthanasiac addiction to comfort. For, stated simply, against the withering boredom that descends upon a culture no longer invaded by visions of eternal order, no civilization can endure. (“Religion in America,” In the Aftermath, pp45-6).

“A withering boredom” – that is Europe, for sure, and it will be seconded and ratified by the de-christianization of the European Union. No civilization can endure such boredom (the cognoscenti call it ennui to sound au courant). And it is a boredom that sounds disturbingly like the Matthew 12.45 demon (singing “Hell, hell, the gang’s all here”): it was invoked by the secularist exorcism of “visions of eternal order.”

America is different, Hart said in 2004. And I have oft said in these pages, America is a beautiful God-haunted land, though besotted with hillrod Gnosticism. He closes his 2004 article with some sanguine (or maybe, just less than bilious) hopes that America’s penchant for God and Bible might pull her out of the biologically sterile, jaded and bored cultural swirly that the rest of the north-of-the-forties West is tubing in.

I don’t think so. That penchant for God and Bible was and is a most Protestant thing. The trajectory started in the sixteenth century (or perhaps in the thirteenth) must always lead away from the sacred order. Perhaps Hart thinks so, too, because in 2009, there is no special mention of America as having a different eschatology.” Read the entire post here.