the New Pantagruel

Slothward Christian Soldiers: Stuck in Traffic Between the Two Cities

by Randy Boyagoda

On the other hand, to look upon some worthwhile good as impossible to achieve, whether alone or with the help of others, stems from extreme depression, which sometimes can dominate someone’s affections to the point where he begins to think that he can never again be given aspirations towards the good. Because acedia is a kind of sadness having this depressive effect upon the spirit, it gives rise to despair. – St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, II-II, 20, 4.

ay marriage is the new abortion. We’ve been provided with this helpful shortcut by the New York Times and other major media organs. Culture interlocutors across the spectrum seem generally content with such an explanation, since it economically delineates the terms of the issue and anticipates the opposing camps. Pro-lifers, we can readily assume, are pro-marriage, particularly those of traditional religious persuasions; supporters of abortion — with some qualifications — are predictably sympathetic to the gay cause. The story, in a sense, is already told, since the plot-line is immediately on-hand. With the culture wars dragging through their fifth decade, the antagonists are well-defined, as are their respective “bases” and intellectual engines. In the present moment, gay marriage quickly and smoothly assumes its spot on the “life issues” roster, and a new front opens. Cue passionate denunciations, cacophonous rallies, dueling op-ed pieces; memorize the talking points, counterarguments, statistics. Once more: once more to the breach, dear friends. Ready? Excited?

Thoughtful, younger conservatives engaged in contemporary intellectual debate are prey, I would like to suggest, to a subtle type of acedia, that “form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, [and] carelessness of heart,” as defined by the Catholic Catechism. Lacking the automaton zeal of the recklessly rabid ideologue, and resisting the upwardly mobile indifference of the secular twenty and thirty something professional crowd, those who are actively and dispassionately committed to the renovation of our public square may find themselves, on occasion, overwhelmed into sloth. We seek to redeem the age, though we are perhaps too immersed in its chronicles.

In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner provides an acute description of the intellectual and spiritual maladies debilitating the West at the turn-of-the-twenty-first century: “There is, I think, in the climate of spirit — a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry, the contracts with time which so largely determine our consciousness, point to late afternoon in ways that are ontological — this is to say, of the essence, of the fabric of being. We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers.” I’d like to re-position this premise — an elegant articulation of the general problem that many have noted — to appraise the current situation among younger intellectuals with orthodox religious commitments. By this stage in our thinking lives, we know well the ills that have befallen our world. We have heard and learned from the elite minds of the intellectual and spiritual Right as they have bemoaned the situation. Responsibly and often sympathetically, we seek to add our voices and ideas to their efforts, yet in attempting as much, we are greeted with cold comfort, boredom and disillusionment, which in turn can lead to laxity, to less vigilance, to careless hearts. To sloth.

This condition occurs when we sense how well-grooved are the tracks we are expected to run in, and how crowded the traffic already is. Consider: the Times runs a stomach-turning op-ed that encourages women to take proud comfort in loving their “actual, extrauterine” children and to “get past the guilt” of their aborted counterparts (July 22, 2004). We feel it incumbent upon ourselves to compose the “bearing witness” letter, but why take the time to do it? Within a couple of days, missives of that sort and their opposites are dutifully and unsurprisingly printed, largely saying the same things that we would have written, or that we have read so many times before. Core-tiredness. Likewise, inevitably someone else will organize a letter-writing campaign to the ostensibly Christian Congressman with a questionable voting record; someone else will initiate a boycott of the popular company guilty of unseemly production practices. The daily bulge of pleas, offers, and warnings that breaches the readerly Christian’s mailbox suggests as much. One fears the lines of the interminable arguments aren’t shifting, though the volume grows louder and the tone shriller; the output faster and ideas thicker.

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3