Hinterland by Phil Neel

Armies of Mud and Flame

I was raised in the mountains overlooking a small river valley in a mildly secessionist border territory stretched between Oregon and California. Distant from the administration centers of either state, the area seemed governed more by a congress of floods, fires, and other forces of nature. In the depths of the Klamath Mountains, alpine snowmelt winds down narrow cuts in granite into storm-fattened rivers that writhe through valley bottoms like blue-green eels. Black bears hibernate in hidden, snow sealed grottoes.  Elk brush their broad antlers through the soft-needled bowery of fur and pine. In spring, rainstorms and thawing frost dislodge entire ridgelines from the mountains, periodically feeding roads, houses, and rich-smelling groves of evergreens into the endless maw of churning waters. Everyone seems to know who a sacrificed those grand, deadly rivers – the Klamath, the Rogue, the Trinity.

Upriver means mostly white valley towns encircled by alfalfa, with farms and ranches stretched up into the foothills. It means church, school, post office –the places where power seems to touch down from afar, if only gently. Downriver, on the other hand, is a violent land speckled with mud-sunken trailers, overgrown trailheads, secretive mansions built by weed barons, and ramshackle hamlets beyond the reach of any highway. Farms give way to forest service substations and, father still, the tribal lands and reservations along the rivers’ lower reaches. Down river is where the waters converge. Any corpse dumped upstream will finally surface there, bobbing and circling in eddies where the rivers mix. It’s a land that’s hardly a land – more a swirl of water and roots helmed by storms- a place where dark stories grow into ponderous myths overlooking the timbered ruin.

In  the 1970s and ‘80s, a series of communes were set up along the Salmon and the Klamath by back-to-the-land hippies convinced that America was a soulless empire on the verge of collapse. The deep folds of oak and evergreen were to be a site of spiritual rebirth, a catchment for refugees from a dying nation. But over the space of a decade, the empire refused to die, and each of the communes fell instead, evacuated of everything but their guns and drugs. Now those that are left simply curse the state for wanting to flood the valleys to siphon more water to the cities in the south. Along the river roads, meth-stricken sawyers set up  small stands selling burl statues of bears and hunched, grim looking sasquatch.

In summer, wildfires sparked in the unpopulated interior burst forward like an invading army. Clearcutting has led to mass replanting of trees, and property protection had encouraged widespread fire prevention, all ensuring that the regrown forest would neither be staggered in its grown nor properly thinned. Meanwhile, deadfall would accumulate unhindered, new seeding fire-symbiont evergreens would be slowed, and the natural firebreak offered by oak savanna gradually closed. The  feedback is essentially the same as tat between a bubble, crisis and stimulus in today’s economy: all this leading to larger, less containable wildfires, which increase the demand for fire prevention and thereby increase the risk and severity of future wildfires. As the bubble gets bigger, so does the coming crisis, and even bigger debt-financed stimulus to combat it when it hits, laying the round for the next crisis. There is no final crisis, just the continual management  of widening collapse.

Silver and Ash


The soil was blood red, heavy with iron and other ancient metals gestated by the slow knotting and fissuring of tectonic eons, now uplifted and ground apart by air, water and the invisible chaos of microscopic life. It’ often hard to connect the solidity of earth and stone to their explosive origins, as pressure flays subducted rocks down to their constituent chemicals and build them stronger – all driven by that deep, distant rumbling of the asthenosphere where solid stone  flows like slow blood; this and everything below just ripples in that constant, low-level explosion atop which continents and ocean floor float like a fragile halo.

When the bomb went off, I don’t remember seeing the combustion, just the soil turned to red dust, small stones raining down into my hair. Maybe the babysitter – in a fleeting moment of responsibility wedged between making the bomb out of gunpowder and a plastic coke bottle in the garage and lazily hurling it underhanded into the ridged like a softball- had covered our eyes, concerned about the splinters of granite that might soon bullet towards us. Or maybe explosions are sometimes things you can’t really see entirely, just as the tectonic crushing and flaying of minerals to make this incarnadine earth is itself an explosion to slow to see.

It was sometime in the early to mid 1990, when everything had already begun to shake apart even as we were told that that war for the world had finally been one. I always had trouble remembering my age in that interval between the end of the Cold War, when my first, muddiest memories were gathering, and the fall of the twin towers, when I was just beginning to hit puberty. Maybe it’s just as hard to think back to the End of History, a temporal glitch that was soon overcome as the wars and riots flooded in again. But maybe it’s more that in the countryside there just wasn’t much to remember. Mining had collapsed long ago. Timber fell in pieces, starting with a plummet in the late 1970s, recovering to a lower plateau in the 80s, and then declining ever since. Farming experienced the height of its crisis in the 80s, but in reality this was simply one period in a long decline in employment driven by mechanization. . .

The babysitter had what I would later come to recognize as tweaker eyes, bespeaking other explosions happening at other scales: the euphoric chemical explosion of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, the periodic explosions of meth labs in the forest like the sound of ancient trees finally being felled, the slow explosion of a rural way of life out into a groundless scattering of scams and desperate, private miseries. After a life mostly lived in the country, I am convinced that the eyes of tweakers see something other eyes do not. Those orbs gouged deep down into their sockets like antlions awaiting prey, their presence only hinted at by a brief glint of quivering motion beneath the surface – as if the eyes are sunk straight back into the brain and thereby opened to some sort of neural augury, the iris black like a single, dilated pupil open to the world’s many wounds and thus capable of seeing that world as it is: a congress of explosions tearing bodies apart all at different speeds and different directions. This reality is a horror native to country people, accounting for our  fascination with meth first and opiates second. One give as sight that reaches too far, illuminating monstrosities at the depth of a shattered world, and the other offers at last the consolation of a slow and quiet blinding.

Tweakers have become objects of revulsion within rural America, not due to their many moral failures or seemingly plague-ridden bodies but because of their matter-of-fact recognition that those of us from the country are all already dead. The way of life has been destroyed in a devastating, irrevocable fashion, essential industries torn out from under us, ecosystems razed, and everyone left suffering not just material deprivation but an expansive social and cultural collapse that can only be characterized as apocalyptic. The many new non-denominational Christian sects that sprang up in the early stages of this collapse offered a simple solution for the dead: to become born again. But now the sects are shrinking as people  see what the tweaker’s heresy had perceived all along: the born again are born dead or die soon after through the thousand sacrificial cuts of daily drudgery. The rupture of the apocalypse is therefore  not on its way in but instead long  past. We’re adrift in its wake.

Oaths of Blood 

In northern Nevada, the soil alternates between a dull yellow and a jaundiced gray, intercut with the washed-out color of skin-rending sagebrush, a sweet–smelling corpse of a plant that clusters in vast broken archipelagos scattered across endless seas of hyper-flammable cheatgrass. When the sun is at its highest, creatures rest in the intricate root work of the brush, bodies entwined in the shade, where undead tendrils offer respite to predator and prey alike – small dens dug by families of wild foxes, crevices filled with shivering shrews, weasels, and mice: lightless sinkholes hiding legions of night-black beetles; roots entwined with rattlesnakes biding their time. Everything stinks of sun-heated sage, and after working a day on the range, you return to the trailer with the same smell, covered in thin layers of yellow-gray dust. That scent burns its way into your memory like a callus.

In Nevada the real desert was not the dust or the sagebrush but the massive industrial leveling that characterizes the day-to-day functioning of a ‘healthy economy’. The undead sagebrush at least held multitudes of life in its roots. One, when one of my higher-ups had been out of a job, he’d run across a den of wild foxes. He spent several days watching them, counting their numbers, excited that the nearby mine hadn’t driven away all the sparse desert fauna. But he made the mistake of telling his co-workers, and the next weekend one of the other employees – a red-faced, blundering man originally from some exurb in Florida- drove his truck out to the area, tracked down the foxes, shot them all, skinned them, and took the pelts as trophies. It often seems as if there is an unbridgeable gap between the minds of those enmeshed in the present world and those who see it as almost unthinkably monstrous, something that is not even a ‘world’ but the name for an utterly atonal; status quo constructed on the continual ruins of worlds as such. There are those who see foxes and those who see pelts. . .

Someone like Jack Donovan would also see the fox and not the pelt, maybe seeing it much as I did. We might see the same economic apocalypse, the same increase in the valence of the riots and insurrections, the same strategic openings offered by these events, the same placid misery offered by the status quo. But none of this makes us allies. The myth of the Third Position* is precisely that opposition to the present order and all gradualist attempts to change it is the only unifying force that matters, with the left and right being mere ideological accessories. But dig deeper and politics is inevitably replaced by nature, tradition, or some other seemingly apolitical order, in which the sanctity of the community is preserved by its ability to wall itself off from all the others. Third Positionalism, national anarchism, the Patriot Movement, and even the simple populism of Trump are all forms of blood politics. Political practice only exists for them insofar as it can be performed by kindred actors, and politics  is the performance of this kinship.

What is nonetheless fascinating about the new far right is its commitment to pragmatic action. The Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters offer a fundamental theoretical insight here, since their existence is dependent on the ability to unify across the fragmentation of the proletariat via the ‘oath’ as a shared principle of action. In contrast to the unwieldy populism of ‘the 99%’, the Patriot Movement proposes a focus on the functional abilities of an engaged minority (the ‘111%’), which can gain popular support via its ability to outcompete the state and other opponents in an environment of economic collapse. And it is this fact that is missed in most ‘anti-fascist’ analysis. Rather than attempting to identify individual grouplets, parse their ideologies, and see how their practice accords (or doesn’t) with whatever programs they’ve put forward (per the usual leftist formula), it is far more useful to explore moments like ours as chaotic processes in which many different actors have to take sides in relation to political upheavals, the collapse of economic order, and the various new forces that arise amid al this. Such grouplets are often ad hoc, and frequently do not state any political positions. They seem empty of ideological content, or it is so vague as to be inconsequential. They are driven bot by a program, but by an oath,. The feature that distinguishes them is not so much their belief, as laid out in founding documents or key theoretical texts, but the way that they act relative to sequences of struggle and collapse. These are concrete things such as how they approach the influxes of refugees and migrant workers, how they participate in (or against) local cycles of unrest, whom they ally themselves with in the midst of an insurrection, and whose interests they serve when they begin to succeed in the game of ‘competitive control,’ creating local structures of power.

The far right is defined by an oath of blood. They share a commitment to pragmatic action and the ability to see the untenable nature of the present economic order, but their actions are exclusionary, and their strategy envisions closed, communitarian solutions to systematic collapse. This is mot visible in the more experienced, thought-out form of the Patriot Movement or the Wolves of Vinland, but it exists on a continuum, as more residents of the hinterland become aware of the apocalypse surrounding them. But the real political advance visible on the far right – and the thing that has made possible its recent ascendance – is the pragmatic focus on questions of power, which are religiously ignored by the American leftist, who instead focuses on building elaborate political programs and ornate utopias, as if politics were an exercise of one’s imagination. It is this focus on building power in the midst of crisis that distinguishes the partisan from the leftist, and the oath is the present organizational form of partisanship.


*Third Position is an ideology that was developed in the late 20th century by political parties including Terza Posizione in Italy and Troisième Voie in France. It emphasizes opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right" while syncretizing ideas from each end of the political spectrum, usually reactionary right-wing cultural views and radical left-wing economic views


Crowds

Sometimes the seemingly determined arc of development suddenly mutates. Crowds fill spaces built for capital. Tear gas drifts through te financial district like the specter of finance itself; as if that abstract swarm of shares, bonds, and derivatives had achieved its own ascension, tearing free from prisons of paper and computer circuitry like mist rising from a corpse. Against this haunting shape, the crowds surge with their own spectral sentience. A its most extreme, the very bedrock of the city appears fissured, the plaza or square now the central fault in a new urban tectonics.

Sometimes I can only remember Occupy as a sort of impressionistic mesh of bodies pushed together and hurled for a moment through a cacophony of echoes: the crowd echoing back its own words, the police grenades echoing off the asphalt, our own chants echoing off glass palaces but for money and the people designated to handle it in lump sums – for a moment these echoes seemed to vibrate something deep down in things, stirring our flesh as if it were a fluid that could never be trapped in its entirety, throwing our voices back at us from the steel and glass in a language-less roar as if to invoke the utterly world-breaking, if ultimately fleeting, realization that such palaces could fall. As everything else gave ay to work, jail, and simple, grinding time, something of that feeling has nonetheless remained: a vague impression of power, glimpsed for a moment by the first of many proletarian generations to come.

 In the first sequence of uprisings, the landscape seem almost to become the subject of the insurrection itself – the people of Egypt were condensed into the roiling bodies of Tahrir Square, a mundane protest against the demolition of Istanbul’s Gezi Park was baptized in tear gas and batons, and then born again in a million-body flood. In the middle of winter in Ukraine, central Kiev was transformed into a pyramid of flame. People wandered through the smoke and snow beneath the pyre, their legs sunken in they grey wreckage. The barricades were all slowly caked with ash, as if a new skin had grown over everything, bodies surging like the muscle underneath.


To those looking down from the boardrooms and brownstones, the new sentience gestating in the square can only appear monstrous. Anyone who has seen such a crowd can feel the power there, the strange new logics that emerge when so many bodies are pushed together against the police and the absolutely terrifying multiplication of violence made possible by such moments. Those who seek to preserve the present order unleash their own demons against this new power, and at last the antagonisms at the heart of that vast hostage situation called ‘the economy’ descends into  physical form as hooded youths hurl bricks against swarms of rubber bullets, the newly reborn god of the rabble wresting with the old gods of capital.

The wealthy Syrian looking down from the high-rises of Damascus at the street protests of 2011 might in all likelihood have simply thought, who are these people? The answer, of course, was that many were resident’s of the country’s own agricultural hinterland, made into internal refugees by severe drought and subsequent environmental and economic collapse. Others were residents of the city who simply saw no future in the city as it was. The feeling was much the same when urban liberals in America’s costal cities looked at the blood-red election map in November 2016: their only possible response, who are these people? What is this place? The answer? This is the Hinterland. It is the sunken continent that stretches between the constellation of spectacular cities, the growing desert beyond the palace walls. These are the people who live here.  .  .


Personally, I don’t understand the compulsion to mine history for words to that might describe what’s to come. The fact is that the approaching flood has no name. Any title it might take is presently lost in the noise of its gestation, maybe just beginning to be spoken in a language that we can hardly recognize. There will be no Commune because this isn’t Paris in 1871. There will be no Dual Power because this isn’t Russia in 1917. There will be no Autonomy because this isn’t Italy in 1977. I am writing this in 2017, and I don’t know what’s coming, even though I know something is rolling towards us in the darkness, and the world can end in more ways than one. It’s presence is hinted at somewhere deep inside the evolutionary meat grinder of riot repeating riot, all echoing ad infinitum through the Year of our Lord 2016, when the anthem returned to its origin, and the corpse flowers bloomed all at once as Louisiana was turned to water, and no one knew why. I don’t call people comrade; I just call them friend. Because whatever’s coming has no name, and anyone who says they hear it is a liar. All I hear are guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity.

An exchange of views on religion by Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune

Michel Houellebecq: Many Americans probably don’t know that a Pentecostal movement exists in France. I became aware of it when I was living in Paris near the Porte de Montreuil, at that time a poor neighborhood with a lot of recent immigrants. Drawn by posters, I went to several meetings, some led by an American televangelist on tour. Probably 90 percent of the attendees were black. The memories I have of this are strange—I almost doubt having lived these moments. The people danced, sang at the top of their lungs, and sometimes spoke in tongues. I never had the feeling I was witnessing a collective delirium, or that I was in the midst of a cult. The sign of peace, reduced in Catholic Masses to a brief, irritated, and icy shake of the hand, gave way here to interminable warm hugs and kisses. And at the end of the celebration, we would share bountiful meals.
“If these people are saved,” Nietzsche more or less said (with cruelty, but rightly), “they ought to look like it!” I understood from this moment that the Catholic Church had much to gain by moving closer to the ambience of Pentecostal celebrations.

Especially because this is perfectly possible. It has even been tried, with success, by the communities affiliated with the charismatic renewal. I spent a week in the midst of one of them—at that time called the “Communauté du Lion de Juda et de l’Agneau Immolé”—and there I found exactly the same effusiveness, the same warmth. And it was almost entirely a group of white people—I say that in order to establish that whenever we are ­dealing with affairs of the heart (and religion is such an affair, indeed of the highest degree), race is not ­pertinent.

A scene of the same sort can be found in the magnificent final pages of Emmanuel Carrère’s book The Kingdom, located this time in Jean Vanier’s L’Arche community. I am talking about the moment when Carrère comes face-to-face with dancing Élodie, the girl with Down syndrome, and catches a glimpse of the Kingdom.

While I very much liked these charismatic celebrations, there remained in me a certain uneasiness, which I fully understood only later, thanks to Douglas Kennedy’s very good book, In God’s Country, which relates his study of revivalist Christianity in the Bible Belt. In reading the book, you sometimes get the impression that this renewal can only involve people with a past in alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, or homelessness—that it does not address itself to people who are integrated into society in a normal way, having spent their childhood in a reasonably loving family. As a matter of fact, the L’Arche community has as its essential vocation the care of the mentally handicapped; and I would probably not have stayed with the Communauté du Lion de Juda if at the time I had not been the victim of a severe depression, in part tied to joblessness.

In short, it seems that though the Pentecostals can rescue people from the edge of the abyss, or sometimes even a bit farther away (which is already a considerable good—in this regard, probably only Jehovah’s Witnesses could be comparable), they cannot do what the Catholic Church has so perfectly succeeded in doing for many centuries: organize the functioning of society as a whole.

Geoffroy Lejeune: I have been going to Mass every Sunday for the last thirty years and have experienced almost all the liturgical styles. I frequented some charismatic meetings, notably with the Communauté de l’Emmanuel, and like you I saw people dancing, singing, speaking in tongues—in short, giving themselves over to all the effusions that we thought were reserved to Americans alone. I have to admit that a form of joy reigns over these assemblies that is sometimes a bit worrisome, because certain members seem possessed (their behavior during so-called “evenings of healing” leads one to believe that this mystery can only be experienced if one is in bad shape). And I have never felt farther from God than on these occasions: I was eighteen years old, I was neither sickly nor depressed, and I ended up believing that, because I was unable to sob uncontrollably or pour out my feelings into a microphone in front of people I didn’t know, I was simply not made for the faith.
There is a wound that ought to be treated by the Church: the wound of not knowing God, or of not knowing how to find him. In the 1960s, when the Beatles were making the world dance, the Church asked itself how to continue to announce the gospel. In 1962, it called the Second Vatican Council. Wags remarked that the cardinals arrived there by boat and left by plane: The institution had just entered modernity. In drawing closer to common mores, in speaking the language of its time, the Church believed it could maintain its tie with the faithful who were thrown off balance by the liberal and sexual revolutions.

The changes, notably, concerned liturgy: Latin was abandoned, ornamentation was simplified, and the priest turned toward the congregation. Parishes invested in synthesizers, and girls began to keep the beat in the choir. But the drama of style is that it goes out of style. Sixty years later, the synthesizers are still there, and the girls too, but they have grown old, and their voices quaver—even the priests can no longer put up with them. Only the dynamic parishes of the city centers escape this liturgical impoverishment, but even there on a Sunday one can hear a guitarist trying his hand at arpeggios, and recall this cruel reality: He’s no Mark Knopfler.

This race toward modernity is an obvious failure, and the churches are considerably emptied as a result. Before Vatican II, one-third of French people stated that they went to Mass every Sunday. In 2012, this number had fallen to six percent, the sign of a major cultural upheaval.

The phenomena are probably linked: The Church tried to conform itself to the world at a moment when the world was becoming uglier. This is a sufficiently serious reason for reproach: We are right to expect that the Church will point out a path toward God, independently of the jolts and shocks of the epoch; that it will remain, subsist. Latin was thus supposed to mark a difference between everyday language and the language with which we address the Creator. The incense, rising up into the nave, pointed out a path for the soul. The priest, with his back to the faithful, was in reality turned toward heaven. The sacred was silently driven from the churches and replaced only with the cool, the festive—that’s great, but desperately human. I want to clarify, to avoid confusion, that I have also known ultra-traditionalists for whom incense, prayers reeled off in Latin at top speed, and hours spent kneeling were the alpha and the omega of faith: I take them equally for fanatics. So what should we conclude? Jesus said to his disciples, you must be in the world but not of the world. The Church should have taken him seriously.

Social Organization
Mh: We can spot in the history of thought a strange family of minds that admires the Roman Catholic Church for its power in the spiritual direction of human beings, and above all in the organization of human societies, yet do so without being Christians.

The first and most remarkable representative of this tendency is certainly Auguste Comte. In his inimitable way, Comte describes the label “Protestant” as characteristic. A Protestant knows how to do nothing but protest—it is in his nature. Joseph de Maistre, whom Comte quotes with approval, had noted that a Protestant will be a republican under the monarchy and an anarchist under the republic. For de Maistre, it is even worse to be a Protestant than to be an atheist. An atheist can have lost his faith for respectable reasons, and it is possible to bring him back to the faith, as many have seen; but Protestantism, he writes, “is only a negation.”

Intellectually the most remarkable in this strange family of “non-Christian Catholics,” Comte is also the most sympathetic, because his picturesque megalomania leads him, in the end, to frequent appeals to all those whom he judges ready to agree with his positivism: the conservatives, the proletariat, women, Czar Nicholas I . . . Basically, he could see himself replacing the pope in Rome and taking over the entire Catholic organization. Catholics would merely have to undertake the—in his eyes very simple—gesture of converting to the positive faith.

Invoking Comte in his turn, Charles Maurras, the leader of Action française, granted too great an importance to political efficacy, which led him into base behaviors that were as lethal as they were immoral.

The most interesting contemporary avatar of this tendency in France is Éric Zemmour. For years, he reminded me of someone without my being able to determine who. Then recently, the answer came to me: Zemmour is precisely Naphta from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
Leo Naphta is the most fascinating Jesuit in world literature. In the interminable controversy between Settembrini and Naphta, Mann takes an ­ambiguous position; we feel that it is not straightforward for him. Naphta wins out over Settembrini on every point; Naphta’s intelligence surpasses ­Settembrini’s, just as the intelligence of Zemmour surpasses that of his current contradictors. But, in an equally ­indisputable way, all of Mann’s sympathy (more and more ­clearly, as the book moves forward) is directed toward Settembrini, and this old Italian humanist driveler winds up making us cry, something that the brilliant Naphta would be incapable of doing.

If we suddenly and radically change surroundings, leaving the edges of civilized Europe of the 1900s and transporting ourselves to the heart of Russian hysteria, we can add another item to the dossier: the famous scene from The Brothers Karamazov where, putting Christ and the Grand Inquisitor on stage, Dostoevsky violently attacks the Catholic Church, especially the pope and the Jesuits. Having returned to earth, Christ is immediately imprisoned by the ­ecclesiastical authorities. The Grand Inquisitor, visiting him in his prison cell, explains that the Church has organized herself quite well without him, that she no longer needs him—and that, indeed, he bothers her. The Grand Inquisitor thus has no other choice than to have Christ executed once again.

This scene, which Freud called “one of the peaks in literature of the world,” plunges the Catholic ­reader into a deep and prolonged uneasiness. For what, indeed, would happen if Christ returned and walked the streets of Rome, preaching and performing miracles? How would the pope react?
Gl: Éric Zemmour very much likes history, but in a few centuries he will considerably complicate the task of historians. Those who study his case in order to understand our era will have much difficulty drawing correct conclusions: He incarnates a very powerful intellectual current in France, which we could classify as reactionary, but he finds himself almost completely alone in defending these ideas, and he is attacked in a ferocious manner.

The posture of the “non-Christian Catholic” that you describe fits him marvelously; he is one of the last of this breed. At the time of Comte, and even later, many such existed, for a quite simple reason: Catholicism was, at least in Europe, in a situation of cultural hegemony, to speak like the Italian communists. In a Christian continent, where Catholicism was often the state religion and at the same time the common cultural base, it was possible for the great minds, whether believers or not, to influence the Church. In a de-Christianized era, on a continent that has forgotten its roots, with juridical systems aimed at erasing all traces of religion, the “non-Christian Catholics” are rare, and there are hardly any plain Catholics left at all.

In general, nostalgia for the time of controversies among great thinkers over the subject of faith seems anachronistic to me. The Church herself, at the same time that she has withdrawn from the public sphere, has given up playing a role and influencing minds. In France, the law of 1905 was applied too well: In separating the Church and the State, the political power probably did not think that it would succeed, in less than a century, in carrying out this gigantic erasure. The Church has her share of responsibility, even if she was bitterly opposed, by submitting too easily. Today, she is paying for that decision.


Christian Art
Mh: What are, exactly, these centuries of the Church’s splendor? In my opinion, each of us has his era of predilection, and it seems to me that it is the architecture that allows us to situate ourselves. In a Romanesque cloister I feel at peace, connected to the divinity. With Gothic cathedrals, it’s already something different. Beauty takes on a character there that Kant will later call sublime (beauty accompanied by the sensation of danger, such as a great storm at sea, or a thunderstorm high in the mountains). In a baroque church it’s no good at all, I could just as well be in a palace, or at the theater.

It seems to me that the Church of Rome committed different errors at the beginning of the twelfth ­century: separating itself from the Eastern churches; trying to reconcile reason and faith; attempting to interfere in the affairs of temporal powers; and granting too much importance to the Final Judgment and, consequently, to questions of morality. These errors made possible the civilizational catastrophes that were the Greco-Latin Renaissance and, above all, Protestantism—which, through their related action, necessarily led to the Enlightenment, and thus to the crumbling of the whole thing. The evil thus comes from long ago.

Gl: If you choose to go by architecture, there is indeed a striking aspect: In the time of the cathedrals, monumental places of worship were erected and their construction lasted longer than a man’s lifetime. The cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Paris were built in 75, 134, and 182 years, respectively. At that time, preference was not for the minuscule. By comparison, Trump Tower in New York was designed, constructed, and delivered in four years, between 1979 and 1983. You can say that motorization, technological progress, and materials explain this difference. So much for the business angle, but when we see the ugliness of modern churches, these unhappy cubes of faded cement, sometimes so hideous, which hardly ever tower above the horizon traced by the surrounding houses, one understands above all that what differentiates us from the Christian builders is “functional thinking,” instead of dedicating the construction to God. It was better before, when the supernatural was seen everywhere, even in the cathedral spires pointing toward heaven.

If we extend this observation to art, it’s even worse. European artists, whether believers or not, found in the sacred a limitless inspiration, nourishing centuries of Christianity with their genius. Everything was linked, homogeneous. Caravaggio, a scandalous, whimsical, and aggressive character, could thank his talent (and, it is true, certain well-placed relations) for his rehabilitation by the pope when he was condemned to death. When one enters the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, one sees in Caravaggio’s three paintings devoted to the life of St. Matthew the magnificent fruits of this conniving between clergy and artists. Must we compare that period to ours when it comes to sacred art? Honestly, let’s not waste our time.

Political Power

Mh: The precept “render unto Caesar” was clear; it does not seem to me that the Catholic Church has applied it with sufficient rigor.

Devoid of any theological basis, the Anglican schism has its origin in the refusal of Pope Clement VII to annul the marriage of Henry VIII. Weakened by this struggle, the Anglican clergy showed itself incapable of curbing the development of Puritanism. Without Clement VII’s obstinacy, the United States would perhaps today be a Catholic country. How clever.
Though royal marriages are today little more than odd ceremonies, the Catholic Church has not given up on meddling in the government of states (intervening, for example, in their migratory policies), and it must be said that this ends up irritating everyone.

Gl: With his “render unto Caesar,” Jesus invented laicity; the problem is that Catholics applied it with a little too much zeal. The history of the last century could be summed up thus: a massive de-Christianization of almost the entire West, principally in Europe, where in a few decades what had been built over the course of fifteen centuries was dismantled.

We can make all sorts of reproaches to the Catholic Church, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, she still played a political role, and above all, she remained culturally in the majority. In France, the drama peaks in 1905 with the law of the separation between churches and the State, which was conceived for the purpose of ending the Catholic Church’s influence. The great principle of laicity in the French style is fundamentally compatible with the one set forth by Jesus: There is interior faith (and freedom is preserved from this point of view), and there is the public square, where the member of a religious order may not exert an influence. According to this separation, the State is certainly secular, but at no time was it stated that society must be atheist. The problem is that the Church assimilated the idea that she had been driven away, and gave up in every area.

Her political influence rapidly collapsed, but above all she abandoned what we call “social Catholicism,” which used to give her a basis among the people. For a long time, people lived in a Catholic culture. The church bells gave their day a certain rhythm; they followed some offices and saw one another at Mass on Sunday. Even if in their inner depths they were not animated by an intense faith, they had recourse to the services of the curé in the important moments: marriage, sickness, death. I love very much the idea of the “collier’s faith” described by Honoré de Balzac: “lov[ing] the Holy Virgin as he might have loved his wife,” a filial piety, an attachment devoid of theological or philosophical reflection, a fidelity to a history and to roots more than to a mystical revelation. I put myself in this category; this simple faith was the ­cement of a civilization.

After 1905, and during her vast movement of retreat, the Church confused “disappearing from the public sphere” with “disappearing altogether.” She faded away from the world. In the past, she governed souls; today, her political influence is negligible, and her role in society is reduced to almost nothing. One can live in France without seeing a priest during one’s entire life. One used to see them because they wore soutanes and organized processions for the great religious feasts; today, they dress in civilian clothes and hide, as in the time of the catacombs.

And the Church seems to apologize for her existence. Currently in France, we are experiencing a vast insurrection by those who could be termed the “leftovers of globalization,” the gilets jaunes. These people are crying out with an anger that has been growing for a long time, and they have been ­supported by a majority of the population. A social phenomenon of this order cannot escape the notice of any institution claiming to have a plan for men. In lieu of exercising a political influence, the Church could be offering a spiritual plan to those who are fighting against a loss of fundamental meaning. There are approximatively a hundred dioceses in France, and a few more bishops, all of whom are the representatives of the Church in the country. Only one of them has decided it would be a good idea to go to a meeting of the gilets jaunes.

Sex
Mh: The attention paid by the Catholic Church to the sexuality of its faithful appears to me to be markedly overdone. It isn’t rooted in the origins of Christianity. As usual, St. Paul is irreproachable—“it is better to marry than to burn”—and sometimes even sublime—“the two will become one flesh.” Things clearly go wrong with St. ­Augustine, but that remains without consequence for many centuries. Things truly degenerate only in the modern era, as the Church succumbs to a kind of puritanism. We are still at this point, and I must admit to a real embarrassment when I hear various prelates strongly opposing the use of condoms, AIDS or no. In the name of heaven, what the hell does it matter to them?

For a long time, I had the impression that the Orthodox Church appeared wiser on this point and knew how to maintain an attitude of tolerance. But it was a diffuse impression for which I labored to find textual support (precisely because the Orthodox are reluctant to express themselves on this question, which is secondary in their eyes)—until, in an article by Olivier Clément (clearly, it’s always necessary to resort to good authors), I fell upon this quotation, to my eyes luminous, from Athenagoras I, patriarch of Constantinople: “If a man and a woman truly love one another, I have no need to enter their bedroom: Everything they do is holy.”

Gl: The Catholic Church is indeed thought of as moralizing and puritan; in other words, she is seen as a pain. This is both logical and ­unjust. She is, to my mind, playing her proper role when she points out a spiritual—but also moral—path. The unity of body, mind, and soul that she preaches makes it absolutely normal that she would enter into the domain of sexuality. In this respect, I prefer that she speak of sexuality, and even that she speak of it too often, and that the popes (like Paul VI with the encyclical Humanae Vitae, or John Paul II with his Theology of the Body) express themselves on this subject—unlike in Islam, for instance, where they take a hypocritical and muddled approach to the subject.

What is often forgotten—and perhaps the Church does not insist on this point enough—is that her teaching points out a path that is supposed to lead toward heaven and also procure happiness on earth. Men are sinners, and God forgives them, which is something that non-believers have ceased to perceive. If the Church regained an influence in people’s hearts, she could perhaps deliver this message. We are light-years away from that.

Catholic Splendor

Mh: Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, perhaps, I don’t know.
It would be good if she moved away definitively from Protestantism and drew closer to Orthodoxy. Unity would be the best solution, but it would not be easy. The question of the Filioque could easily be resolved by competent theologians. The problem of the installation of Western barons in the Middle East no longer presents itself; even Donald Trump has dropped it. However, for the bishop of Rome, renouncing his universal ambition and having only an honorific preeminence over the patriarchs of Constantinople or Antioch, would be, perhaps, difficult to swallow.

At the very least, the Catholic Church, imitating Orthodox modesty, ought to limit its interventions in the domains that are not directly within its competence (I mentioned scientific research, the government of states, and human love).

It also ought to abandon this mania for organizing councils, which are, above all, the opportunity for triggering schisms.

It ought to abandon encyclicals as well, and put a brake on its doctrinal inventiveness. (The Immaculate Conception, and above all papal infallibility, offend reason too directly. Reason is a big, peaceful animal, which falls asleep easily during services, but it is necessary to avoid useless provocations.)

The Church can be inspired by Pentecostalism in the same way that pop music has been inspired by gospel and the blues. Moreover, it’s important not to forget a dose of madness—Dostoevsky offers the Russian version: “If it is necessary to choose between Christ and the truth, I choose Christ.” For the French version, we have Blaise Pascal.

Basically, it amounts to this: The Catholic Church, in the course of its history, has granted much too much importance to reason (aggravated over the centuries, probably, under the influence of Protestantism). Man is a being of reason: That’s true, from time to time. But he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion. It would be good not to forget that.

Gl: Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, probably, but the road is a long one.
If we had to sum up the last few decades, we could say that the Church, having lost temporal power, tried to survive by making herself tolerated; it is for this reason, essentially, that she adapted to the vicissitudes of a world she was supposed to save. This role-reversal led to suicide. But even in the eyes of God, there exists, after this tragic gesture, the possibility of salvation. The holy Curé of Ars once said, to a woman despairing over the suicide of her husband, that between the bridge from which he threw himself and the water in which he drowned, there was enough time to regret what he was doing, and to turn again toward the divine mercy.

In order to save what can be saved, it would be necessary to break with the relativism that has been in vogue since the 1960s. Perhaps the Church would recover a bit of its splendor if it stopped wanting to be cool and taught once again the fear of God, without which there is no love. The same goes for the education of children: Parental authority has been undermined, with the same consequences.
The Church should perhaps moderate its fascination with other religions. How can we tolerate such Trojan horses as the former Secretary-General of the Italian Episcopal Conference, Bishop Nunzio ­Galantino, who said not long ago that “the Reformation carried out by Martin Luther 500 years ago was an event of the Holy Spirit”? Pope Francis himself makes repeated overtures toward Muslims, as witnessed by his recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, and took care to define himself simply as “the bishop of Rome” on the day of his election, a pledge of good faith toward the Orthodox.
It would be necessary to put an end to the continuous quest for emotion, because from this point of view, the Church cannot do battle with concerts or the movies. But if she confines herself to her mission, namely, announcing God and leading men to eternal life, she remains absolutely indispensable.

Perhaps the Church would regain some credibility if she stopped conceiving of herself as an NGO that is vaguely charitable but does not take responsibility for the source of its generosity: Christ. In politics, she would perhaps win by ceasing to throw moral discredit on certain governments (the pope’s criticism of the management of migrants by the Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini is a good example).

Today, the Church in Europe has shrunk back into certain hard cores, sociologically very homogeneous—a social class—cut off from the majority of souls. Its embourgeoisement is perhaps, in the end, the greatest scourge that strikes the Church at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Mh: Can the restoration of Catholicism to its former splendor repair our damaged civilization? Here we are in agreement—it’s much simpler, almost self-evident. The answer is “Yes.”

Michel Houellebecq is the author of Serotonin. 
Geoffroy Lejeune is editor of Valeurs actuelles.
Translated from the French by Stephen E. Lewis.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/05/restoration

The Book of Jonah by Robert Alter

We know nothing about the author of the Book of Jonah or his geographic location, and only a rough approximation can be made of the time of the books composition:. The main evidence for dating is linguistic: there are quite a few turns of phrase that indicate this is Late Biblical  prose, a kind of Hebrew not written until after the return from the Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C. E.  The book’s universalist theology probably also argues for a relatively late date because one does not  find this sort of rigorously world embracing monotheism until  Second Isaiah, the anonymous sixth-century prophet of the Babylonian exile.

The name Jonah son of Amittai is drawn from a passing reference in 2 Kings 14:25 to a prophet so designated who delivered God’s word during the reign of Jeroboam II and about whom nothing more than that is said. Since the story, which itself has no clear historical moorings, apart from a vague invocation of Assyria, was almost surely composed centuries later. . . the writer  might simply have chosen this particular name as a convenient hook upon  which to hang a fable about prophesy precisely because nothing more is known about the prophet in question.


While Hebrew narratives composed in the First Temple period utilized heterogeneous materials, they exhibit a great deal of uniformity in regard to narrative conventions and the general purpose for which the narrative is framed. By contrast, what characterizes the narratives of the Late Biblical period is a vigorous experimentation with genre and an impulse to move beyond the governing procedures of earlier biblical narrative. Perhaps the most distinctive hallmark of Jonah’s relatively are composition is that it tells a story altogether unlike those of earlier biblical literature. The recalcitrance of the prophet is a recurring feature of the classic call of the prophets, as with Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Moses himself, but nowhere else to we have a person summoned to prophesy who actually tries to flee to the other end of the known world. Similarly, though one prophet, Amos, is sent from his home in Judah to prophesy in the northern –and not very friendly  - kingdom of Israel, the two realms are still, after all, within the family, while only Jonah is a man called to deliver prophesy to the general populace of an altogether foreign, and hostile nation.

The Book of Jonah picks up certain hints or precedents from earlier biblical narratives but pushes them to an extreme where they play a role in what amounts to a different genre. The narratives originating in the First Temple period, despite exhibiting some miraculous events and some spectacular episodes of divine intervention, are by and large ‘history-like’. Jonah, on the other hand, is a manifestly fabulous tale. Though earlier Hebrew narrative offers one anomalous instance of a talking animal, Balaam’s she-ass, that is the exception that proves the rule, an invention introduced to sharpen  the attire on the pagan soothsayer who is blind to what his visionary beast can plainly see. Jonah’s fish does not speak, but it follows God’s instructions dutifully, first swallowing Jonah and then, when it gets the word, vomiting him up on dry land. Its capacity, moreover, to keep Jonah three days in the dark prison of its innards is an even more fantastic contrivance than according Balaam’s ass the momentary gift of speech. This peculiar performance of the fish, serving as God’s obedient instrument, is in keeping with the cattle and sheep in Nineveh, bizarrely require to do sackcloth and fast together with the human beings, and, in the deliberately ambiguous wording of the Hebrew, seen as if consciously covering themselves in sackcloth as if crying out to God along with the human denizens of Nineveh.

All this has led scholars to scramble for labels to describe Jonah. It has been called everything from a Menippean satire to an allegory, but none of these identifications of Jonah is entirely convincing. I would see Jonah as its own kind of ad hoc innovative narrative. It aims to recast traditional Israelite notions of prophesy in a radically universalist framework. The prophets of Israel all work in an emphatically national context. Their messages are addressed to the people of Israel, often with explicitly political contents, and the messages are manifestly directed to the fate of the nation - its imminent destruction by foreign powers if it fails to mend its evil ways -  the fulfillment of its hopes for national restoration after the disaster has occurred. The medium of the prophets is generally poetry, where all the powerful expressive resources of the Hebrew language could be summoned to convey the prophetic vision to the people.

Jonah is accorded no verbal prophetic vision to the people, only that single brief prediction of catastrophe which, if one is supposed to think of such considerations, he would have spoken not in Hebrew but in Akkadian. Jonah engages with no Israelites in the story. First he has an exchange with the polytheistic mariners, then he addresses the Ninevites, and his closest connection is with two presumably insensate living things, a very larger fish and a leafy plant. The God with whom he has such difficulties because his Israelite nationalist mind-set is not chiefly the God of Israel but the God of the whole world, all creatures great and small. He is not a God you can pin down to national settings. Although He initially addresses Jonah some where within the land of Israel – perhaps even Jerusalem, where the Temple, evoked in chapter 2 stands- his fullest dialogue with Jonah is on the promontory overlooking Nineveh. While he does rebuke Jonah as the God of earlier narratives rebukes wayward people, the rebuke itself is oddly formulated, in keeping with the wonderful strangeness of this book.

God exercises magisterial control over storm winds, fish, livestock, and plants, as well as over human beings of all tribes and nations, and He asks the recalcitrant prophet why he should ‘have pity’ for an ephemeral plant but not for a vast city of clueless human beings and their beasts. [Jonah is vexed that the Ninevites listened to his prophesy, recanted their evil ways and were thus saved].

 It is beautifully appropriate that the story ends with the beasts, and with a question. It is in no way clear how Jonah will respond to this question. Will God’s challenge lead him to a transformative insight about God’s dominion over all things and all peoples, or will it prove to be a challenge that is quite beyond the myopia of his ingrained prejudices? The trembling balance of this concluding ambiguity perfectly focuses the achievement of the Book of Jonah both as an enchanting story and as a shaking up of an entire theological world.

.  .  . .And the sailors were afraid, and each man cried out to his god, and they cast gear that was in the ship into the sea to lighten the load. And Jonah came down into the far corners of the craft and had laid down and fallen deep asleep. And the captain approached him and said, ‘What are you doing asleep? Call out to your God. Perhaps the god will give some thought to us, that we may not perish.’ And they said to each other, ‘Let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil is upon us.’ And they cast lots, and the lot fell to Jonah. And they said to him, ‘Tell us, pray, you on whose account this evil is upon us, what is your work and from where do you come” What is your land and from what people are you?’ And he said to them, ‘I am Hebrew and the Lord God of heavens do I fear, Who made the sea and the dry land.’ And the men feared greatly, and they said to him, ‘What is this you have done?’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from before the Lord, for he told them. And they said to him, ‘What shall we do that the sea calm for us?’ For the sea was storming more and more. And he said to them, ‘Lift me up and cast me into the sea that the sea calm for you, for I know that on my account this great storm is upon you,.’ And the men rowed to get back to dry land and were not able, for the sea was storming  upon them more and more. And they called out to the Lord and said, ‘Please, O Lord, pray let us not perish on account of the life of this man, and do not exact from us the blood of the innocent, for You, O Lord, as You desire You do.” And they lifted up Jonah and cast him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its fury. And the men feared the Lord Greatly and offered sacrifices to the Lord and made vows.

And the Lord set out a great fish to swallow Jonah and he was three days and three nights in the innards of the fish. And Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the innards of the fish,. And he said:

I called out from my straights

   to the Lord, and He answered me.
From the belly of Sheol* I cried out –

   You heard my voice.
You flung me into the deep, in the heart of the sea,

   And the current came round me,

All your breakers and waves

   Streamed over me.

And I thought:

   I am banished from before  Your eyes.
Yet again will I look

   On Your holy temple.
Water lapped about me to the neck,

   The deep came around me,

      weed was bound around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I went down –

   The underworld’s bolts against me forever.
But You brought up my life from the Pit,
   O Lord my God.

As my life-breath grew faint within me

   The Lord did I recall,

And my prayer came unto You,

   To Your holy Temple.
Those who look to vaporous lies

   Will turn away from their mercy

And I with a voice of thanksgiving

   Let me sacrifice to You.

What I vowed let me pay.

   Rescue is the Lords.

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land.

* the underworld, imagined as a great pit, represented as a kind of hungry monster swallowing those marked for destruction.