It is common to mark the beginning of the introspective conscience of the West in the life of Augustine of Hippo

... Augustine made the inner life legible in a way it had rarely been before. He showed that faith ... is a struggle ... The “Confessions” ... taught believers that the interior life matters — that what happens in the private conversation between a person and their conscience is not a footnote to the religious life but its very center. In some ways, this was more revolutionary than anything in scripture itself. ... Augustine made interiority a theological category. Western Christianity has not been the same since. ...

Discussed here.

And yet Augustine arguably is the product of an introspective Western wave which itself had been many centuries in the making.

One could say that the turn to the inner life in the West actually began under the prosaic circumstances of the collapse of the Athenian Empire in 404 BC. 

If Hellenic is the ideal which was lost and Hellenistic its Nachleben and personalization, there are centuries of preoccupation with the experiences of individuals under various aspects which follow after the collapse of classical Athens. These arguably add up to interiority as the rule of the subsequent West, not the exception.

The advent of disorder in the world ended up provoking a broad search for order in the soul, which ultimately worked to the greatest advantage for Christianity.

Notable evidences of this search would have to include, for example, Plutarch's biographical interest in the personal morality of his subjects, or Hellenistic philosophy's general retreat from concern with public life to the vicissitudes of the inner life, as seen in the developments of Epicureanism and Stoicism.

The latter in particular came to dominate elite conviction for centuries, from East to West in the Mediterranean, from Seneca's Letters in the mid-first century evincing his struggle of the will to Marcus Aurelius' self-critical Meditations a century later, a Stoic analogue to Augustine's Confessions later popular in the Greek East.  

The early great Christian authors are nothing if not children of this past, sometimes quite beyond their ken or control, which was surely not the case with Augustine, who was inspired from a young age by Cicero's love of wisdom. While completing his Confessions in 400 Augustine self-consciously borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus, in whom he found the idea of the immaterial soul liberating from the materialism of the Manichaeans.

Combining this abstraction with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible which he embraced from Ambrose of Milan, one could say Augustine was equipped with the spiritual tools necessary for not just his interior project, but for surviving a civilizational collapse which he saw coming in his own time.

The Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire had begun years before the Confessions, in 376, when Augustine was still a very young man of 22. But by 410 Rome had been sacked, in the wake of which he composed The City of God, in which he provided Christians with a rationalization of the catastrophe and an inner retreat from the horrible new reality, an invisible, spiritual city where God was still in control. 

Augustine is nothing if not a spokesman for the experience of everyman from every age, for the little lives of people who turn inward to protect who they are when all is falling down round about them, while some, and even now just like Strelnikov, simply choose to die on the inside before they must die on the outside:

Rod Dreher's false choice, where his utopian devil is in the detail "truly"

Here:

I would rather live in a truly Christian culture that was dominated by (say) Latino Christians than live in a secular culture dominated by whites.

There's never been a truly Christian culture, and never will be. This is a straw man argument.

In which case the choice of where to live is much less important and much less fraught than this Manichaean choice between Light and Darkness.

But Rod Dreher likes fraught.

Endeavor to Persevere

 

 

 

 Yesterday's sermon endeavored to tell the story of the Book of Job from the point of view of James 5:11, with a view toward encouraging us to reflect that our troubles often pale in comparison to those endured by Job, who persevered despite their severity: "Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy."

No sermon, of course, can do justice to the many difficulties the Book of Job presents to the reader. Not the least of these difficulties presents itself in the opening chapter: "And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. . . . [and] there came also another [messenger], and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

It has always arrested my attention that this last of the preliminary calamities which fall upon Job estimates the value of his own progeny as just so many possessions, right down there with all the other possessions he loses: the caravan camels, the sheep, the oxen, and the asses. And the servants who go with them, who all likewise perish. Job is not unmoved, to be sure, and displays the proper mournfulness, but a student of the gospels cannot help but remember the jarring contrast this presents to the saying of Jesus: "Behold the fowls of the air . . . Your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" In other words, whereas Job's story minimizes the worth of some human life, and does so in a way which makes it look like God toys with human destiny in a capricious, unpredictable, unreliable, unmerciful, yea even malevolent and Manichaean way in its dualism between good and evil, there is another story in the Bible which tries to assert itself from time to time, maintaining the infinite worth of every person to the God "who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .."

It is tempting to choose sides. Down that path endless debates ensue about the priority of the various testimonies of Scripture, screened through equally various interpretive lenses, which have multiplied in the twentieth century to such an extent that Biblical study has largely been reduced to bibliography. "Enlightenment" types still sketch out the progress of religion, from the offending God who appears in Job to the liberal Jesus of a daydream afternoon, who couldn't possibly have predicted the consummation of all things in his own lifetime. Stalwart defenders of the inerrancy of the Bible continue to want to have it both ways, never quite reconciling the texts and holding them, and us, in a perpetual, nervous tension.

Without disrespect to the text, may we not ask whether the text does not instead say something about the human imagination that we have written about God in both of these ways for about as long as writing has existed? Is the text not a reflection of our experience of reality, that we are born into a world of both joy and sorrow, of gain and of loss, of judgment and of forgiveness, indeed only to one day face death ourselves as sure as the noon day sun? The list of antonyms is almost endless, and the ineffable dream of religion is to escape from them.

A very famous man who died last year was wont to warn our generation that the line separating good from evil runs through every human heart. He was not well received. But evil and death do always seem to prevail. There can be no other explanation for the American century just passed with its millions upon millions senselessly slaughtered and gone. Countless sons and husbands and fathers who never came home, to live and prosper and work and love as my father came home to do in 1945. It is of such escapes that our dreams are made, our hopeful stories written, our belief in the goodness of life born anew established.

According to Chief Dan George in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Cherokee nation is lectured by the Secretary of the Interior that they must endeavor to persevere on the reservation set aside by the U.S. government for the Indian nations. "We left," says Dan George, "and thought about the phrase 'endeavor to persevere.' When we had thought about it long enough . . . we declared war on the Union." And we know how that ended. As everything must, one way or another.