Those Who Make a Difference
A Book Review by James S. Taylor
The Restoration of Christian Culture
by John Senior. 244 pp. (Ignatius Press, 1983)
Available from The Immaculata Bookstore,
P.O. Drawer 159, St. Marys, Kansas 66536.
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Dear Readers: Some of you saw the name of Dr. John Senior recently associated with St. Mary's College and the Society of St. Pius X, in an advertisement for a summer college to be held at St. Mary's next month. As the Rector of St. Mary's College, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Senior. I can say I have been very happy to profit from the experience of Dr. Senior, who has been a professor at the University of Kansas for nearly fourteen years, and a teacher for over thirty years. His program there, the Integrated Humanities Program of Pearson College, is a two-year-course of studies in the development of Western Civilization. It begins by the reading of the classic works of Greek and Roman authors, and gradually introduces the student to the great cultural tradition of Western man. The emphasis of this program is on the great inheritance and achievement of Medieval Europe, the Catholic Tradition. This program has been very successful in forming wholesome minds and has often been the instrument of many conversions, some of whom now attend Mass at St. Mary's and other Society chapels. In the Fall of 1983, we reformed the curriculum of our College in order to offer a suitable remedy for the present disease of the modern intellect. Our students needed a curriculum imbued with the great principles of the Catholic Tradition. For this difficult task, I asked Dr. Senior to help us and he did so very kindly. It was the first time I had met this man, so steeped in the great traditions of Catholic teaching, so familiar with the great traditionalist thinkers of our times such as Jean Madiran, the Charlier brothers, and Dom Gerard O.S.B. It is thanks to his assistance that we were able to reorganize the curriculum of our College with real success. Then, I had the opportunity to bring the Sacraments to Dr. Senior when he was at the hospital because of open heart surgery. He impressed me with his great patience in the midst of suffering. Several other meetings have followed over the past year, and when his health allows, we see Dr. Senior at the beautiful liturgical ceremonies of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at St. Mary's. So that readers might be more familiar with the work of Dr. Senior I asked Mr. James S. Taylor, President of St. Mary's College, to write a review of Dr. Senior's most recent book. I do hope you will be able to discover the wisdom of this important Catholic man. Father Hervé de la Tour |
In attempting a proper review of Dr. Senior's new book, one can only hope that something said in passing will catch the reader's attention and lead them to read and live with this book themselves. In this way, the reader will know something of the reviewer's burden in trying, in a relatively short space, to capture the great spirit of this work. Where does one begin?
For the book itself, so much like Senior's traditional view of education, is integrated. All the chapters connect, echo back and forth to other topics while, like the play of light and shadows reflected from a pool of water in a garden, the themes all beautifully interplay from beginning to end. One can pick the book up and begin it anywhere—even read from back to front, and come away with the same sense of inspiration and determination to assist, in some small way, in the restoration of our Christian culture. So all we can do in this inadequate review will be to examine some of those shadows and those lights.
However, it is quite easy to see the light of Dr. Senior's vision in this restoration: the Blessed Virgin Mary. The first chapter, like the last, is virtually dedicated to her. What is in between is the Catholic agenda, spirit and solution for the restoration of culture, whose "death" was the subject of Dr. Senior's first book. The Death of Christian Culture, published by Arlington House in 1978.
Certainly, John Senior is keenly aware of the fact that grace normally operates with nature, and that our human nature, like the soil from whence it came, needs to be properly cultivated by the great civilizing elements of a tradition of poetry, stories, music, manners, and family customs of the Western tradition, before the great truths of philosophy and theology can take hold and grow. And seeing so much of our ordinary experience of growing up has been without these elements, Senior seizes on the greatest "death" and the most a restoration:
From the cultural point of view, which I must insist is not a minor or accidental thing but indispensable to the ordinary means of salvation, and prescinding from all the complex canonical and theological disputes about its validity and liceity—whatever defense can be made of it on pastoral and other grounds—from the cultural point of view, the new Catholic Mass established in the United States has been a disaster; and I must give public witness to my private petitions, with all due respect to the authorities, that its great predecessor—the most refined and brilliant work of art in the history of the world, the heart and soul and most powerful determinant factor in Western Civilization, seedbed of saints—be restored.
In fact, it is the true Mass that is at the heart of our culture:
What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my, or anyone's opinion or theory or wish, but the central fact of two thousand years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature—all these things when they are right, are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
And, what happens, among other things, when the Mass is tampered with? Dr. Senior states:
There has never been a holocaust in history like the annual murder of a million and a half of our children in the United States. And worse, in the spiritual order, the norms for the celebration of the greatest act in the universe, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, are trifled with ad libitum.
But, while it is obviously true there can be no true restoration of our Christian culture without the return of the true Catholic Mass, Senior realizes we must prepare ourselves to do much more, in addition to assisting at the Holy Sacrifice. (After all, our culture, our schools, were being destroyed long before the Second Vatican Council, while the true Mass was still being offered all over the world.)
So, what can we do? Well, first we have to grasp, deeply, painfully, the seriousness of the death that has taken place. As a teacher of youth for over thirty years, Dr. Senior admits with a sadder-but-wiser authority that the battle—for a restored education, for example—is not so much a quarrel over certain teaching techniques and what text to use, although these are subjects worthy of attention and dispute. But the very reason why such disputes take place are because the real problem lies elsewhere, beyond the classroom. Johnny can't read (or reads trash), not necessarily because of wrong teaching methods, but because his prerequisites for reading, his cultural soil has been depleted, even poisoned, by television, by the absence of a disciplined life, by the absence of family customs of singing, reading, playing, and praying together; by a life around him dominated by greed and materialism, a virtual conspiracy, that has, for Johnny, destroyed the actuality of things, or reality. If the child is robbed of the real and natural experiences of life, a life lived apart from video games, television, rock music, and fast food; if he does not have a real family life and experience of trees, rivers, stars, storms, fireplaces, real food, and the heroes and villains from our great literature; if our children do not have normal, civilized experiences of growing up, they will lack the very stuff of reality, culture, upon which the truths of our Faith are based.
Realizing this cultural depletion, the destruction of the civilization that gave easy access to the learning of the Faith, how do we regain such a culture? What must we do in addition to having the old Mass? Where do we begin? Dr. Senior says:
Anyone, right now, can live a better life if he wants to wherever he is—it is not a matter of moving to "kinder shores," or anywhere else "out of this world," except to the unexplored frontiers behind our own closed doors. The answer lies where it always has, not in the laws of nations, which indeed determine the destinies of Sodom and Gomorrah; the answer lies in the laws of the Kingdom within us because there we make the choice. There we are slaves not of instruments but only of our own bad habits which have demanded the instruments—slaves of our own lust for sex, money, power, pleasure and inanition.
This real restoration, therefore, will have as its focus: first, in the heart and in the home. For example:
The home ... is the living building block of civilization, and it consists materially of walls, a roof and smoke rising from the chimney ... Families don't draw their chairs up closer to the central heating duct. No one sings while attending to the automatic dishwasher. But husbands and wives washing and drying dishes together have actually conversed and sung; and washing clothes, as we remember from the Odyssey, is a recreation for princesses.
In other words, Senior is saying that within the common, ordinary experiences of life are hidden the seeds of this restoration; those daily tasks, the work proper to running a household, need to be sanctified once again by a labor of love. With this kind of humble beginning, so much in the spirit of the poor and humble Holy Family, there is less danger of veering off into radicalism or cultism, those ominous temptations of the traditional Catholic movement.
I don't expect or advocate any "final solution" to the world's catastrophe but only a change in the direction of one person. Simplicity is not the product of study; it cannot be prepared for, nor plotted like an assassination; and it is disgusting to see it exploited by the "whole earth" people and the communists who use it as bait ... Long-range change is slow and for practical purposes impossible; but the decision to change oneself is unpremeditated and instantaneous, a systole of the heart. And even if a fraction of the next generation should live in that trembling hope, then when the great change comes, as it always does, like a thief in the night, by surprise, it will come because of them, far from the madding crowd, far from the protests, bull horns, klieg lights and cameras, in that quiet place at home by the fire which in the meantime, little as it is, is of immediate and lasting worth.
Senior offers even more practical advice, which is a fine balance to the complaints of some in the past who have accused him of living too much on the theoretical level, misunderstanding both Senior and the word "theory," which simply means to "look at, as to gaze, inwardly, as in contemplation."
Build a fireplace ... and forge efficiency. As Thoreau said, we are fools to box up one of the most beautiful sights in the world—a living fire—and keep it in the cellar. Smash the television set, turn out the lights, build a fire in the fireplace, move the family into the living room, put a pot on to boil some tea and toddy and have an experiment in merriment, a sudden, unexpected hearth, the heart and first step in the restoration of a home—and see how love will quicken in a single winter's night!
How about the effects of such decisions? How about our children?
Children, away from the television set, will begin to play outdoors again; several families can support a private, local school where children can learn to read and write again instead of how to cope with mass transit and avoid venereal disease. John Dewey taught that schools are instruments of social change rather than education, and that is one of the reasons why Johnny neither reads nor writes nor dreams nor thinks; but real schools are places precisely of un-change, of the permanent things.
It is, in fact, the permanent things, those of lasting worth, that concern Senior most, and that is why throughout the book we see that his scrutinizing of the debris in the ruins of our culture, the cheapness, the rudeness, crudeness, do accumulate into a kind of nightmare existence so horribly removed from what is true, good and beautiful; so horribly removed from God, even from where God should be most evident.
Of all the suicidal worms gnawing at the vitals of the so-called post-conciliar Church, one of the most destructive is cultural pluralism, which is a self-contradictory reversal of the dictum stamped on our money, e pluribus unum, into ex uno plures. If Sunday after Sunday congregations assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in churches built to the standards and specifications of Hamburger Heaven, it won't be long before the faithful have departed from the Faith, ripe for liturgical innovations like the consecration of Coca-Cola and potato chips.
But, aside from the horrors of the death and dying of the Christendom we so painfully miss, above all are the terms of our slow, nearly impossible task—of restoring that culture. Beginning in the heart and the home, Senior says we must move ahead quietly (except for the smashing of the television set!), slowly, patiently—especially, simply. Our guide here, especially for teachers, in and out of the home, is the spirit of the Rule of St. Benedict, the little book by the great saint that saved Western civilization once from ruin. Of the Rule, Senior says:
The way to read the Rule is not to study but to pray it like a Rosary in little beads, over and over again until it yields its secrets ... For those of us in the secular life today, and not in monasteries, its use is chiefly in its regulation of the manner, form and distribution of prayer ... St. Benedict's is best understood as the spirituality of ordinary life, based upon the fact acknowledged by all masters of the philosophia perennis—Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas—and the constant teaching of the popes confirmed by Revelation and proved by the common experience of mankind—that the vast majority of men are farmers. The great analogy of delving in the earth is prayer—elevation of mind and heart in praise—united in the single root of cult and cultivation ... According to the Gospel, Deus agricola est, God is a farmer ... The Benedictine is a spirituality of work ... or duty by which man pays his debt of praise to God for existence and grace, is largely founded on the Rule.
And, in particular to the teacher, but in application to all in homes and families:
What St. Benedict saw so clearly and set about to do with astonishing singleness of purpose is exactly what we have to see and do today: the purpose ... is to return to Him from whom we fell, which means that a college (for example, or a home) is principally a place not of action but of that highest form of friendship which is prayer, where one becomes a friend of God's in the lifting of the heart and mind above subservience to self ... to Him who first through the meek subservience of His Mother has been subservient to us.
Finally it must be stated clearly that this restoration is not a giddy, irresponsible, optimistic affair. Many will turn back, preferring the madding crowd over the quiet of a few friends; television in place of a few good books and conversation; Hamburger Heaven instead of wholesome, home-cooked meals. And, Senior, like the rest of us, must still move about in the ruins of this catastrophic death of Christendom. But there is a secret strength here, known best to the Christian, that silently calls us to a quiet courage:
I am not suggesting that we hide in cellars, hoarding survival stocks against the coming of Anti-Christ. Quite the contrary: "Let your loins be girt and lamps burning in your hands; and you yourselves be like to men who wait for the Lord." We must get calmly on with our work and taxes, redeeming the time in our station in life ... perhaps in some unlikely Bethlehem like our own backyard.
It is now obvious that this review has only given the briefest and very incomplete outline of this book. There is simply too much here to review. It is more like a poem—certainly the spirit is poetic, like a spiritual canticle—and therefore all the meaning does not emerge as meaning emerges from essays and treatises. One has to read, reflect, and often just wait for the full message to reveal itself. So, dear reader, taste and see for yourself. After all, John Senior has written this for you:
There may be someone reading these words right now who, like St. Margaret Mary or St. Catherine Laboure—unknown as yet to herself—is the focal point of a great historical change. All over the world at this very hour, Mary and her angels are moving among the human race. If we consecrate our hearts to hers we shall be among those who make a difference.
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