May 2008 Print

Dr. Anthony Esolen

Impiety is a disease that starts with an attitude toward our father which spreads to become an attitude of dishonor and dismissal towards God the Father.

Father Aeneas is arming on the morning of what he hopes will be his last battle to establish his refugee people on the Italian mainland.  

Ever since he could bear the arms of a man he has fought, and fought well. For ten long and sad years he helped to defend the walls of Troy against the Greeks. On the terrible night of destruction, when the hatch of the wooden horse was opened and the Greeks let their comrades pour through the city gates, Aeneas did his best to die for Troy, to go down fighting in that lost cause. But when the gods instruct him instead to lead some few survivors and their defeated gods to a new land, Aeneas makes his way through a burning city to reach his father's house, which he will never see again. There he takes up his crippled old father, Anchises, upon his shoulders, and leads his son Ascanius by the hand, with Anchises clutching to his breast the forms of uncle and grandfather and the forebears of old. Theirs are the faces that would look silently upon a child from the hearth; they are the household gods.

Anchises, "best of fathers," as Aeneas has called him, died on the voyage. Aeneas' wife, Creusa, never made it out of the burning city. Aeneas himself has watched in patient fortitude as others have died for their people–his trusty pilot, old friends, young men, an Italian prince who looked up to him as to a father. He has won mainly heartache and disappointment from his travels, nor is it prophesied that he will live long in the place where the Trojans will settle. But his duty has rooted him firmly in both the past and the future. Because he gives due honor to those who came before him, he can also give a chance for glory to those who will come after. In that sense his life is of a far wider span than his days on earth. It is not eternal life–but it is at least a partial answer to man's deep and natural longing, that his life should not be forgotten utterly. That most of Aeneas' days will not be happy only makes him the more admirable in our eyes. Says he to the lad Ascanius, as he readies for the fight:

Manhood and hard work learn from me, my son;
    Good fortune you can learn from someone else.

Indeed it will be the last day of the fighting–for now.

Does that quiet moment between father and son still have the power to move us, even now? If so, it's a testimony to Virgil's poetry and the naturalness of piety. For we are a deeply impious people, so impious that we hardly know it, as people who lie in the ditch every night fail to notice the smell of the filth on their tattered clothes. I might go so far as to say that impiety is the essential feature of modern life: its economy, its politics, its flattened education, its few and fractured families.

What do I mean by our impiety, and what does the scene with Aeneas have to do with it? Consider the forgotten or sentimentalized commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother." It is the first commandment that refers explicitly to our duties toward others. But it does not refer to them by mentioning any specific good or specific harm. It does not prohibit our taking oxen from our parents, or lying to them, or killing them. Rather it commands honor. In doing so the commandment serves as a bridge between our devotion to God and our love of neighbor. The foundation of our social life is the honor–note, not affection, not sweetness, as fine as those things may be–we give to those who brought us into being. And the important natural virtue that gives that honor the flesh and blood of action is piety.

We believe, perhaps, that our piety is made manifest in saying the rosary on occasion, going to Mass, receiving the Eucharist, and not cheating too badly on our tax returns. But we should recall the dictum of Thomas Aquinas, that grace presupposes nature and brings it to perfection. If the piety we show to God our Father and to Jesus our Lord is the summit of that virtue, that does not mean there are no natural objects of piety, for Christian as well as pagan. Nor does it mean that we can ignore that piety, as if we had climbed, as Americans or Christians, far beyond its lowly and humiliating requirements.

What are those requirements, then? The old catechisms used to teach them, but Virgil will do almost as well here. The leader of the Trojans is called "pious Aeneas" because, regardless of his personal desires, he submits to duty: to his father, his country, his ancestral gods, and the great gods. He prays to Jupiter to assist him when the seas are in tumult and his ships may go down to the bottom; he defers always to the advice of his good father Anchises; he takes care that his son should grow up in turn as a manly and pious prince. Piety, in other words, is that virtue that binds us to duty in relationships that are both hierarchical and deeply personal. Scripture teaches us the same. We care for our father, even when his mind fails. We do not hide away money so as to evade having to care for our parents. We train our sons in the way of the Lord, that they may not leave it when they grow up. We remember Jerusalem, even in exile, and would gladly fight and die for her. We look for instruction to the noble heroes of our past, the patriarchs Abraham and Noah, and the high priest Melchisedek.

What is most controversial for us, we observe a right order in marriage, with wives giving their husbands what they most need, obedient reverence, to assume their rightful place as head of that small and irreplaceable platoon called the family, and husbands giving wives what they most need, self-sacrificing love, that they might assume their rightful place at the heart of that family, beloved and honored by their children. As a gracious extension of this piety we treat other grown men and women as if they too were fathers and mothers, and we treat boys and girls in ways most fitting for the family duties they may one day assume. All this, before we even show up at the church to kneel before the Father, falls under the classical definition of piety.

It should be pretty easy to see, then, that in the nations of the West piety is now in short supply. It hasn't been wiped out utterly. There are still plenty of young men who wish to become soldiers not for the self-serving opportunities the army pretends to provide for them afterwards, but mainly because they love America–its mountains and lakes, its boisterous games, its old customs, and its vestiges of genuine liberty. They know that if men like themselves all decline the honor of the service, the nation must soon be no more. And there are still plenty of people who do well by their aging parents, living with them, spending whole days with them at the homes where they often must go, even performing for them the same lowly duties that their parents once performed, when they were little babies and could neither feed nor clean themselves.

And yet–let us look more closely. In our world now, planned obsolescence is not simply for refrigerators or computer systems. It is for people, too. It is the law of our ways, intensely hostile to culture, tradition, and the family. Look, for example, at what has happened to our founders. They have been deposited into the nearest memory hole, never to be heard of again. How many college students, never mind starry-eyed schoolboys, have heard of John Paul Jones, who cried out from the deck of the Bonhomme Richard, "I have not yet begun to fight!" Not many; for the devil of impiety hates the hero, and would level us all down to the same equality of selfishness, cowardice, and ingratitude.

Heroes rouse the imagination precisely because they are beyond us, and because they are so few. We recognize that they have risked everything–their family, their sacred names, and their lives–to give us what we enjoy in ease and comfort. Therefore we pay them heed when they speak to us–or we should. Witness that we are in the midst of a presidential election and no one has seen fit to remind us of what a Madison or Hamilton once said. Our attitude toward them is hardly more reverent now than if their names were Lycurgus and Hammurabi. They lived and died before the invention of the latest computer chip, or before reality television, and therefore they can have nothing to say to us. We ignore them.

Don't suppose that this political impiety can be kept safely cordoned off from community and family life. The disease jumps many a fence. Most American towns have lost the old Memorial Day parade. Those that remain, as far as I have witnessed, are ragged and depressing affairs, silly, chatty, and juvenile. Why keep your mouth shut and your hand over your heart for a fallen hero, when there are no heroes, or when everyone is a hero, or when America is just as good or just as bad as any country, and commands no particular love? But then, why visit the grave of a grandfather who died long ago? Why listen to your father, and heed his commands, against the blockheaded wisdom of the world? Why honor your mother when she serves the family, against the vicious scorn of both men and women who say that a woman who places the welfare of her children before her designs for a fashionable career is a fool or a traitor?

Whom do we reward in our schools? Not the lad who learns both carpentry and reverence from the patient instruction of his father Joseph, in the home at Nazareth. We reward instead people like ourselves, who enjoy revealing to the world the errors and vices of that father Joseph. We reward Noah's son Ham, who found his father drunk with wine, stripped off the old man's cloak, and called his brothers in to snicker at his nakedness. We do not forgive the errors of our forebears. We take an unseemly glee in exposing them, exaggerating them, even inventing a few that did not exist. We equate tradition with quaint folly, or downright bigotry.

The disorder has surely invaded the family. Among the wedding traditions of the Eastern rites, the bridegroom and bride are crowned as it were king and queen of the home they will build; and that means that their children will be inheritors of that royal state. Such is the tradition. What is the reality? Where are the husbands who treat their wives as ladies, in the old aristocratic sense, and the wives who treat their husbands as lords? A dull familiarity, breeding contempt, has swept through all the family relations, leaving them the natural sentiments, but little structure and order to uphold those feelings in times of trouble. Children love their parents, meaning that they feel generally pleasant feelings for them; but they have little intention of obeying them beyond taking out the trash once in a while. They will move far away, as I myself did, though in a land as wealthy as ours there seems very little need to do so. Indeed their parents will not be half displeased to see them move away, as they themselves may have no intention of remaining in the homestead. In fact, there are no homesteads. And that means there are no genuine communities, either, because there will be no long memories, from one generation to the next.

What has the Church done, in this collapse of that natural virtue? In America, it has done nothing at all. It has, rather, worked hard on the other side. Now I'm not arguing for a return to any particular form of devotion that was popular before 1965. I'm instead noting that a general impiety, Latin Mass or no, has been part of the Catholic Church's operation for two generations. Need I list the specifics?

Few new prayers met wide acceptance in those years, but plenty, a precious heritage of devotion, were buried in some ecclesial crypt. Unearth a few of them from an old missal and you will see. An Easter Vigil rite was revived, with some revisions; but for the most part, special feasts were written out of the calendar, and valuable devotionals were eliminated. Some Catholic adults who have gone to Mass every Sunday have never seen a benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Did it matter that for generations mothers would send their children to church on the Feast of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, to have their throats blessed? Foolish mothers; let them bless the throats themselves if they were so hot to do it. Then there were the whitewashed murals, the deposed saints, the mauled statues, the jackhammered altars, all part of a great march into the future, which was of course nothing more than an impious rebellion against our forebears in the faith. We were ungrateful children, no more, who did not want to be told what to do.

We are urged by our hierarchs to "respect life," meaning to oppose abortion, and so we faithful Catholics do, but as for genuinely respecting life or anything else, how can we learn that at our churches? What is respected there? Hardly the fatherhood of the priest. He is either the unseemly and unfatherly showboat at the pulpit, or he is what I'd like to call a Quintorotarian, the required Fifth Wheel for the faithful, who have turned the commandments of Christ into a comfortable permission to do whatever they like, so long as it can, by a lazy stretch of imagination, be called "love." Is Christ's sacrifice upon Calvary an object of devotion, at the typical Mass? We mouth the words, "Lord, I am not worthy," but do we really believe it? If we did believe it, then why would we sing show tunes that celebrate our being the Bread of Life? Why would we croon and moan about our so wonderful feelings?

When feminism came storming in to thrust the father from the headship of his family, what were our Church leaders doing, if not the same thing, essentially, in their demotion of the fatherhood of God? When the technocrats of the state came to consolidate school districts and steal from families and communities the authority to oversee their children's education, what were our Church leaders doing, if not the same thing, in detaching the people's worship from that of their mothers and fathers, and the people who had sacrificed so much to build those impressive churches, not to mention the comfortable rectories? When abortion became the law of the land, as the inevitable and logical consequence of an acceptance of the Pill and the false dream of autonomy that the Pill fostered, our leaders waffled, temporized, made common cause with the enemy whenever they could, ignored the sweeping impiety of the sexual revolution, and finally left us where we are now, with hardly a weapon with which to fight a far vaster and more inhuman evil than the snuffing out of innocent life: I mean the reduction of human life to the products of an assembly line.

I recall a certain glacial hilltop in Pennsylvania, where I used to go with my dog on wintry afternoons, to look over the quiet snow, and see the smoke rising from chimneys for miles in either direction. That place has now been leveled by the bulldozer, and cookie-cutter mansions been built above it, for professionals without children. Yes, I understand that all things lie in the providence of God, and that nothing on earth may remain forever. But it is bitter to hasten oblivion, nor do I think that Jesus, who looked to the Father for what he must do, who observed all the traditions of his people, and who fulfilled them all in the end, would be pleased with us. From the Cross itself he remembered his Mother, and gave her into the care of John, giving us all at the same time to be cared for by her. On the night before he died he solemnly instructed his friends, who kept that moment blazoned in their minds, to eat the hallowed bread and drink the wine in remembrance of him. When he left them on the hill in Bethany, he told them not to go forth in admiration of the twaddle of the day, but to baptize all men, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and to know that he would be with them until the end of time. And from that time until this, in an unbroken succession, men have assumed the croziers of the apostles, to remind us, who always need reminding, that the sacred truths of the faith do not change, because they point to the One who is the First and the Last, the Selfsame.

Pagan Virgil did not know that God, but wrote as if he might have understood, had the truth ever been revealed to him. We do know Him. We have been invited to glimpse, even on earth, the heavenly Jerusalem. If only we could treat it, and our faith, our priestly fathers and our fleshly fathers, our mother the Church and our mothers in the home, our land of pilgrimage and our land of rest to come, with the same honor that his hero Aeneas once treated the Rome he would never live to see.

 

Dr. Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of Touchstone Magazine. He has recently translated and edited Dante's Divine Comedy, in three volumes, for Modern Library. His book, Ironies of Faith, is available from ISI Press.