Christian Vitalism.

I will open rivers on the bare heights and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land fountains of water. I will put the cedar in the wilderness, the acacia and the myrtle and the olive tree; I will place the juniper in the desert together with the box tree and the cypress.  That they may see and recognize and consider and gain insight as well, That the hand of the LORD has done this, and the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Isiah 41:18-20

The other day, Ross Douthat did an interesting interview with Jonathan Keeperman: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. It's an interesting interview, especially this part which I thought was worthy of comment.

Douthat: Now a more personal objection, rooted in my own religious commitments. As you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that late modern life has become decadent and some sense of possibility, of action, of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and A.I. are going to create. I agree with all that.

However, I’m also a Christian. All of the authors that I’ve mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition — Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age Pervert — see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally either a religion of the weak, or a religion of women, that it’s against the erotic.

When I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot, but there’s also a lot of people who, in their own story about what went wrong with the right — the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy — they think, at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk-drinking Christians who didn’t understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: I’m curious, what is your attitude toward those debates? What’s your attitude toward Christianity and religion?

Keeperman: My belief is that there’s a tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. It’s not just my belief. My favorite author, Ernst Junger — actually, Passage Press comes from his book, “Forest Passage” — there’s a great book of letters between him and Martin Heidegger. Junger’s view is that none of this vitalism is sustainable without religion, and actually Christianity, specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe — against which our individual will is being tested at all times, and which a vitalist view of the world is insisting we’re constantly pushing against — all has to live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don’t think these things are incompatible.

Douthat: Junger, if I’m remembering his trajectory correctly, was part of the German right. He’s not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich, and he’s not someone who listeners should think of as like Heiddeger, who goes Nazi in that way, but Junger remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.

My sense of him is that he did have a view of Christianity as you describe, to some degree, but it was Christianity as a useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. Then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, it’s time to succumb to full Christianity. It seems to me that in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age Pervert, like the Nazis.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I’m a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.

Keeperman: Your concern is that it’s merely being cynically operationalized.

Douthat: Not even cynically. It’s more like Christianity is this great mythic structure within which we can operate, and that’s not what I believe about Christianity. I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that’s part of it. The Christian doesn’t just think that nature imposes constraints, it’s that God imposes constraints as well.

Now, what's interesting in this conversation is the implicit assumption of the incompatibility between Christianity and Vitalism.

I suppose we must begin by first defining terms.  Traditionally, vitalism was the notion that living things possessed some kind of "extra thing" which made them alive and distinguished them from inanimate things.  That's not what I think this conversation is all about. Vitalism, in the context above, is more about a essence which celebrates life and and all of it positive elements. Things like strength, beauty, youth, joy, fertility, Eros and so on. It's also an essence whose antithesis is the weak , the ugly the sterile and the joyless. Imagine Spring in all of its glory as opposed to late stage Autumn, with gloom of winter just around the corner. Vitalism is not just pro-life, but pro-healthy beautiful and bountiful life. I also want to make sure that the reader makes the distinction between the goodness of life and immanent beliefs that imply some kind of sacredness in natural things.

Looked at in this light, we then have to ask ourselves what is Vitalism's relationship to Christianity. In my opinion this relationship has broken down and while Christianity may be officially "Pro-life" on the books it doesn't operate that way in real life.

The more I look at this, the more that I'm am prepared to give some ground to the Vitalists criticism of modern Christianity in seeing it as "anti-vital".  This was, after all, Nietzsche's great criticism of Christianity in that enabled a revaluation of values by  inverting the values of the past. Instead of praising the beautiful, strong, fecund and joyus--as the pagan world did-- it  it elevated the weak, sterile, ugly and suffering. The essence of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was that it was anti-life.

The pagan world, for all of its vitalism, was a brutal one, especially towards the weak, poor and those who were not "useful. Christianity's notion that even life's "losers" still had the imprint of the Imageo Dei  and were thus worthy of care and charity transformed the evaluation of the poor.  The poor were no longer seen as life's failures but an opportunity whereby Christian love could be expressed. And the poor, instead of being viewed negatively were seen positively instead.

Loving a man because he is a brother in Christ is a different proposition to loving a man because he is needy, and its very important to distinguish the man from his condition. And sometimes, theologians reflecting on the objects of Christian love have failed to make this distinction, or even worse, elevated the condition over the man.

Take for example, the evangelical counsels of perfection. Here we see that the notions of poverty, chastity and obedience are elevated as means to achieve Christian perfection through a denial of self.  But where the error can creep is in the understanding of why we deny. If we assume that wealth--material stuff--is an evil which distracts us from the pursuit of our love for God, we've entered into the world of Manicheanism, on the other hand, if we see the love of God as greater than the good of wealth we have stepped away from that world.  To reiterate, one evaluation sees riches as "bad", the other as a "good". 

Or take the notion of the "preferential option for the poor". Ostensibly, what is there to criticise about this notion, but if you think about it more deeply, you begin to see that under this schema its implied that  God's love to a person tends to be graduated inversely to their degree of material possession. Now imagine yourself as a poor devout Christian. Any effort at self-improvement with regard to material well being will have an inverse affect on God's relationship with you. It's a recipe that promotes poverty and encourages misery. It's a subtle way of saying that wealth is bad and poverty good.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying we don't have a duty to the poor, but the danger is in linking the strength of God's love to a man's material status thereby blessing or cursing the "materiality" of the man. As objectionable as the the prosperity gospel is,  the poverty gospel is its mirror image, and without any of its material benefits.

Likewise a theology which valourises the "margins" links God's love to the degree of disability or social dysfunction to the object has. The clear implication is this schema is the more one moves away from their marginal status the less one is pleasing to God. The logic here is that God is less likely to be in the middle or top and more likely to be in the periphery.  The Bourgeoisie, who've made some success of life,  are thus clearly objectionable.

Nietzsche was of the opinion the ressentiment was the mechanism that was responsible for the Christian hatred of the the good things but he was wrong. The more I've looked into this the more I am of the opinion that  asceticism is the door though which Christianity is made prone to "value inversion". I want to be clear, however, that I'm not repudiating the counsels of perfection,  as asceticism does have a place in Christianity, but it needs to be very strictly policed  lest it corrupts the faith it attempts to uphold. Human thinking is very sloppy, mix that with asceticism, and its very easy to see how life's maladies could be come elevated in the ascetic Christian schema, resulting in an outlook that makes joy, pleasure and strength suspect, or outrightly sinful.

But where the damage has really been done is in robbing Christianity of it's vitalism. It's one thing to love the poor, the weak and the marginal but it does not have come at the expense of loving the material, strong and beautiful.  There's room for both.

I would place myself in the Thomistic camp of Catholic thinking and if I had to give a technical description of what Christian Charity/Caritas is, it would be: A potency, which expressed in act, can instantiate or perfect form. It's a technical definition that does no justice to its implications. Poetically, it can best be described as a power that gives birth, plenitude, and is able to renew all things. It is the engine of life, strength, perfection, beauty and happiness.  When one actually begins to grasp what Charity/Caritas IS, one can understand why men give up everything for it, but not because the other things are bad, but because, when bathed in its light "all things are like straw".

Christianity is a vital religion, but the ascetic tradition has been a weak-point which has been exploited to wound the faith. I'm firmly of the belief that we are living in an age of heresy.

What interests me in our modern Christianity is the neglect of the vocation of the knight, a product of the ages of the faith. His disappearance from the Christian conscience is, I think, a manifestation of the mutilation of Christianity. And the reason I bright this up is because one of my favourite movies, Excalibur deals with just this theme. The movie iss full of Christian allegory and shows what happens when a kingdom goes wrong. One of my favourite scenes is when Percival recovers the Grail. England is wrecked with famine, pestilence, disease and misery. After Arthur drinks from the Grail the land and the king restores his strength. As the knights ride through the fields the trees begin to bloom and the land is reborn.

Christianity is a vital religion.

Some More Thoughts on the Ordo Amoris

It's this blogs contention that the main reason for the collapse of religion in the West is due to a withdrawal of Grace, primarily as a result of a transformation of the understanding of Christianity by modern theologians and the religious leadership. In "Biblical" language, the shepherds have led the people astray and God isn't too pleased.

Charity or Caritas more precisely, is the stuff of God. Get that wrong and you have God wrong,  and you also get Christianity wrong.

This is why the subject of the Ordo Amoris is interesting, because getting it right is only possible if you understand Caritas properly. And as I said in my previous post, the main reason for misunderstanding it is because when the term "love" is used it is usually associated with emotions, whereas Cartias resides in the Will.

Cartias is more about doing the right thing, regardless of your feelings about the subject. This is why scripture makes a big deal about "Loving" your enemies. Doing the right things by your kids is easy, because you get positive emotions associated with them, doing the right thing by enemies is hard because the emotions push in the opposite direction. But the Christian always aims to do the right thing regardless of the feelings a person has. It all starts to get confusing once feelings and emotions are confused with the Will.

This article, written in Church Life Journal is an example of thinking gone bad. The fact that it is written by a professor of theology at Loyola University and a Law school professor is just another example of the rot in our cultural institutions.  It gets off to a bad start by first quoting Vance:

There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

and then setting up a straw man argument:

"We believe that Aquinas would look askance at the way Mr. Vance employed the idea of ordo amoris to justify cutting off concern for needy people at the nation’s doorstep."

Anyone looking at Vance's comment fairly would not say that. Vance left space for care of the needy but recognised that there were other more pressing priorities as well. And Vance did not argue that Caritas is a zero sum game. 

It's a Strawman argument and Law professors should not set them up.

The article then goes on to say:

What Aquinas says about the order of love or charity (the Latin terms are amor and caritas) describes how we show love to people in the way appropriate to that person’s relationship to us, and we love those closest to us more because we have more ways and opportunities to love them. For example, we care for our children not simply by supporting them financially or granting them access to a safe haven, but also by changing diapers, driving carpools, reading with them, cooking for them, taking them to doctors, cuddling with them, and so forth. It would seem perverse to forego such acts of love and simply send them a check. But no one thinks check-sending is unfitting when dealing with needy strangers; their relative distance often makes this form of beneficence the most fitting way to show our love. Distance does not remove the obligation to help, though it might modify the nature and extent of the help that might be rendered.

All fairly solid traditional thinking on the matter. But then it goes pear shaped:

Love of neighbor as contemplated in the ordo amoris does not require us to treat everyone the way we treat our own children, but it does require us to respond to cases of manifest need.

and,

Thomas Aquinas writes that, when confronted with two people in need, “If one of the two is more closely connected to us and the other is more needy, it is not possible to determine by a universal rule who should be helped more, because there are different degrees of both neediness and proximity, but this requires the judgment of a prudent person.” The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need. Aquinas rejects the idea that one can address such matters via universal rule (or executive order). Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations, which suggests less a closed-door policy on immigration and more the creation of a system in which people seeking refuge can have their claims heard in a timely and fair way. [ED]

Firstly, Aquinas doesn't say there is an automatic response to manifest need to the exclusion of everything else. Aquinas clearly says that Prudence needs to be involved even  in these matters.  Not only prudence, but a Prudence formed which springs from a properly formed Christian conscience.

Secondly, what the author is trying to do here is to tie the orthodox positions of Aquinas with her position on immigration, thereby giving it a moral legitimacy. Furthermore, what the authors also do is ignore context, equating the roles and responsibilities of the private citizen with responsibilities of a member of government, whose domains of action and responsibility are totally different. Thirdly, while she states that prudence should regulate judgement in complex situations, but in the end she simply reduces the imperative to act to "urgent need." I don't think Aquinas would be impressed.

There also is an air of unreality in the article which equates the expansion of Christian virtue with a real world means to provide it. While virtue strengthens virtue through habit, an expansion of the virtue of compassion does not always come with the actual means to satisfy it. Every Beauty Pagent queen wants to alleviate world poverty and cancer, but they're still here, despite the sincerity of intention.  Love may be infinite by resources are finite the pain comes in dishing the resources out appropriately. Living in La La land is no help when there are mouths to feed and responsibilities to fulfill here and now.

The other day I heard of a family with four children who were of constrained means, they could only afford to send two of their children to good schools, and I know they're loving parents, but man, that's a hard call.

Likewise given a finite set of resources, Governments frequently have to make tradeoffs for the common good, which sometime injure other parties.  Governments may sometime--in acting for the common good--have to close the door, even for desperately needy people.

In the real world the allocation of resources by men of good will isn't just reduced to need. Other factors such as obligations, responsibilities. long term consequences and self-interest also matter. Opening your door to a serial killer in middle of a winter night may be helping the needy but its also insane.

What Aquinas and Christian common sense dictates is that prudence should regulate the expression of Charity and need is one of the factors of consideration. Sometimes Love hurts. And this is where we come, once again to trying to understand what Christian love is. If you conflate it with happy feeling then any outcome that causes painful feels is going to be evil. This is why they pull out the crying kid everytime they want you to donate money or support their policy and why they don't want to show the MS 13 member trying to get in.
They know that modern Christianity has become an exercise of feelings and not an act of considered goodwill.

The Ordo Amoris is Flatter Than You Think

In and interview the other day,  JD Vance bought to attention the concept of the  Ordo Amoris, the idea that within Christianity, as it was traditionally understood, there is a legitimate ranking of our love.  Vance was speaking in the context of U.S. politics, primarily with the idea being that "Charity begins at home" which meant by implication that governments have their primary duty to their own citizens and then to rest of the world. 

Vance got a lot of push back, from the usual suspects but also from a significant number of Christians of all denominations. It's this group that interests me as my interest is in the self destructive nature of modern Christianity. i.e Christian Buddhism.  So I thought it  worthwhile to look at their approach to the subject.

If we divide the parties in this discussion to self, kin and stranger, the objection of the Christian Buddhists is that by prioritising the self, and by extension kin, we are are, in fact being selfish and leaving the the dregs of Christian love to strangers. Christian love, they argue should be based upon need and not proximity to self. Self care is equivalent to selfishness and we all knows what Christianity thinks about selfishness. Implicit in this line of reasoning is that self-care is wrong in a world of competing needs. At the extreme end, you have the modern Christian thinkers, who see the "stranger" as the face of Christ and therefore anyone who who deprioritizes them is deprioritising Christ. Then of course are all the radical Balthasarians, Bathrians with their vague moralising bromides about encounter and radical love, poverty and self-giving.

I begin to tune out.

The big idea that these guys have is that the poor--especially illegal migrants--are a kind of spiritual litmus test which gives you a chance to prove your Christian bona fides. The more you give, and support them the better the Christian you are. And it helps if they're really repulsive. Because we all know how Christ went to the margins and loved the unlovable. Illegal gang members with a history of savage violence and crime are particularly high on totem pole of Buddhist Christian love. Love them by inviting them into your home and with your family and your are a true disciple of Christ. Prudence, common sense and some hesitation are all example of the failure to commit fully to Christ when he presents himself as the "encounter" with the  repulsive migrant. The problem is that how the "encounter" ends in the parable of the Good Samaritan is not how it sometimes ends in real life.

Total commitment to the migrant even at the expense of the self is the name of the game. And not only does this form of Christianity aim at self-denial but it also agitates against policies which discriminate against the migrant and urges people toward government polices which subordinate all other interests to them.

Despite some of the more sensational aspects of illegal immigration such as the gangs and the violence the reality is that most illegal migrants who come to a country are not criminals but people simply seeking a better economic life. They are simply the poor and the question then is, what duty sort of duty of care does a Christian actually have towards them.

Now, I am not a official spokesman for anyone but in my opinion, it really depends on the circumstances. There are no hard and fast rules.

In  Mathew 22:34-40, a clear hierarchy of love is established. First love God, then love your neighbour as you love yourself. Note, the neighbour and yourself is established as an equivalent.  Contrary to many who supported Vance he's not way down the list. One of the things that characterised pre-Christian societies is their strong family based networks. What made Christianity so radical to the ancient world is that its love extended outside the family circle even to the repellent. And there's plenty of passages in scripture where neglect of the poor is punished quite severely by God. "Nearest and dearest" taking "priority" is the wrong way of looking at it.

Now the concept of the "self" is an interesting one since different cultures view the self differently.  In some of the more Nordic countries and the Anglosphere, the self is seen as a quite autonomous with a limited number of obligations to others.  The individual is seen more as an "elementary particle". On the other hand, in much of the rest of the world, the self is not seen as "autonomous" but as someone who intermeshed with the wider community with lots of legitimate obligations toward them. Christianity is pretty big on making sure you fulfil your legitimate obligations. Christianity takes a dim view on such things as children abandoning their parents, on not paying for works undertaken by others and parental neglect.

In other words when you love your neighbor as yourself, your "self" should be understood as a self with obligations. A father, for example, is not a an autonomous self but an individual with real duties and obligations to his wife, kids and other family members. A man can't just ditch these if he doesn't feel like it. They're real obligations which he is committed to, even if someone poor comes along. It helps if we like the ones who we are obligated to but like has got nothing to do with it.  It's all about the love.

In other words,  for the Christian, the poor are another legitimate obligation onto the self.

Now, given that most men have finite resources the issue in the face of all these competing interests becomes one of "resource management" and how to achieve the optimal result i.e. the virtue of prudence. As mentioned before, in pagan days, resource allocation was purely driven by "natural sentiment", so resources were allocated to those whom we felt a natural affinity to, but Christianity is quite explicit in rejecting this view. Christianity demands that we help those in need even if we don't have a natural inclination towards them.  But it doesn't compel us to be stupid or self-destructive.

The Christian Buddhists are right in that a Ordo Amoris which puts the poor on the bottom is the wrong way to look at Christian Charity but where they err is the utter abandonment "prudence" when it comes to resource allocation.  Their altruism becomes pathological when it neglects to recognise all other legitimate and binding competing interests which compete with the "poor", seeing the poor as the only metric by which to judge our actions.  Mix that in with a notion which praises self-sacrifice and you've got a recipe for self-destruction in service of the "poor".

This is what I mean;

You are well aware of the generosity which our Lord Jesus Christ had, that, although he was rich, he became poor for your sake, so that you should become rich through his poverty.

I will give you my considered opinion in the matter; this will be the right course for you as you were the first, a year ago, not only to take any action but also even to conceive the project.

Now, then, complete the action as well, so that the fulfilment may -- so far as your resources permit -- be proportionate to your enthusiasm for the project.

As long as the enthusiasm is there, the basis on which it is acceptable is what someone has, not what someone does not have.

 It is not that you ought to relieve other people's needs and leave yourselves in hardship; but there should be a fair balance- your surplus at present may fill their deficit, and another time their surplus may fill your deficit. So there may be a fair balance; as scripture says: No one who had collected more had too much, no one who collected less had too little.

2 Corinthians 8:9-15

You can quote other bits which come to the same conclusion but the stand out feature of this text is a balance needs to be struck between competing needs. And note there is no obligation for "heroic" self-destruction.