Where have I been?
And where do we go from here?
I have legalized robbery
And called it relief
I have run with the money
I have hid like a thief
Rewritten histories with armies and my crooks
Invented memories
I did burn all the books
And I can still hear his laughter
And I can still hear his song
The man's too big
The man's too strong
Mark Knopfler
The widening gyre
A week or so ago, the news came that the rabid dogs who rule our world had decided to escalate the war in Ukraine; an apparent eleventh hour last ditch effort to force the great powers into a nuclear global war.
We talk here about the past of the Christian world, and in this work I’ve been hoping to find something to pass along, some glimmer of light in the increasing darkness. In the last week, I’ve found this more difficult. I am wondering what to do next. What is the proper response to what we have done to ourselves as a civilisation?
I no longer know.
Can we even imagine a “golden age” anymore? Are we too cynical, too broken, too inured to the colossal failures of our institutions and our ferocious determination to destroy ourselves and our civilization? Have we spent too long bathed in the crippling radioactivity of Modernity, scorched and disfigured by its glare and numbed to its contradictions?
Are we - am I - just addicted in some sense to the disaster? Am I just committed to it because my imagination has been blackened so long it’s too hard to think about a good story? I’ve spent most of my working life watching and thinking about this world, trying to understand the terrible sense of unease and foreboding I’ve experienced since I reached the age of reason. As a professional writer, I’ve been watching the world’s biggest-budget disaster movie every day for 25 years.
Look at our stories. The movies, the television shows, the books we read; they’re obsessed with grand endings, the fall of empires, the collapse of societies, the final, dismal, meaningless failure of all our hundreds of years of appalling and awful Bright Ideas. We seem to revel in tales of dystopias and apocalypses, as if rehearsing for a future we’ve already resigned ourselves to. Endings are easy to believe in, after all, when you see mushroom clouds in your sleep every night.
We’ve been telling awful stories to ourselves for so long now that we can hardly even imagine anymore what other kinds of stories there are.
Some older men, men of a past world, were able to imagine a paradise that we can’t believe in now. I just finished reading C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I read it backwards, starting with That Hideous Strength, and ending with Perelandra, and the cold, ancient and dying world of Malacandra between.
Lewis - who had suffered loss and seen tragedy, and certainly knew more than most the danger we are all in - dared to imagine something other than the inevitability of decay. He saw paradise, not as a naive, escapist dream, but as a radiant possibility. In Perelandra, he gave us a sumptuous world untouched by sin, unbroken by cynicism, and filled with the glory of what might have been if humanity had chosen rightly. Reading it felt almost alien, as if I were snooping in a place I shouldn’t have been, glimpsing something my own imagination had forgotten how to reach for.
It makes me wonder: what happened to our ability to tell stories like that? Stories of redemption, renewal, or the restoration of a broken world? Why was C. S. Lewis able to tell it, after seeing the worst Modernity had to offer in the trenches of WWI, but we who have lived all our lives in comfort are losing the capacity? We are so heartened and cheered by the Scouring of the Shire, the justice and rightness of the restoration of all the goodness we knew. But Peter Jackson left it out. Was it too good to be true?
This is something we still hunger for, though. The mad success of the Jackson Tolkien films, tells us that we still at least want that kind of story - a hope in the ability of powers beyond us to pull us out of the fire at the last moment when we, in our weakness, have failed. Not the easy, sentimental kind of story, but the hard-won kind. Lewis and Tolkien were both writing in the shadow of modernity’s chaos, but they had the capacity to imagine something beautiful.
Maybe we’ve just stopped believing such things are possible. Maybe that’s why we keep returning to our bleak stories of endings - maybe we’re just hoping it will all be over soon.
For Lewis, the horrors of war and the disillusionment of the modern age didn’t destroy his ability to believe in redemption; they sharpened it, gave it urgency. He could write about the restoration of a broken world because he knew, viscerally, what a broken world looked like.
But what about us? We’ve been shielded, in many ways, from the extremities of suffering that shaped men like Lewis and Tolkien. And yet, our contemptible comfort - greater than any generation in the history of humanity - has left us strangely paralysed. We are helpless, in a world that feels broken in subtler, more insidious and hidden ways - riddled with cynicism and a cripling sense that nothing we do can make a difference, so desperate for distraction we can’t bring ourselves to look away from our phones.
It’s as if, in the absence of overt physical catastrophe, we’ve forgotten how to hope, or even how to want a happy ending, how to fight against these enervating illnesses for any kind of renewal. We’ve stopped telling stories about what could be and started settling for stories about what is, no matter how bleak. In fact, maybe the bleaker the better; to justify giving up.
Since the death of my friend Giancarlo in September in Rome - someone whose influence on me has been quiet but strong for more than 20 years - I've been feeling a strange pointlessness settling over everything, like a radioactive ash that turns the ordinary and familiar strange and alien, that during the day is mostly invisible, but that you can see especially, glowing with menace, at night. I feel strangely slowed and impeded, as though someone has turned up the gravity dial.
He was 43, and died of his own body’s built-in failure, an inherited genetic disorder that slowly shut down his organs. He’d told me about it many years ago. He knew his time in this life was on a short lease, though he never talked about it - his mother died almost the same age. He was the kind of man who took that knowledge and used it correctly, and devoted himself completely to the service of God.
And in the time since then, with the cooling of the weather, and the shortening of the days, I’ve found myself disoriented, incapable of generating sufficient sense of meaning to make doing anything seem worthwhile. Everything feels provisional, temporary, fragile and untrustworthy, as though it could vanish in an instant, leaving me grasping for something solid that no longer exists. I have a moment every day on waking, running through the same script, “What is all this? What am I still doing here?” It’s becoming painful.
I find now that don’t share Giancarlo’s faithfulness and belief in the benevolence of God, and I don’t know how to acquire it. Or even if I ought to try. I’ve seen others break themselves by their own efforts to acquire such things.
Today I was going to write something in the usual way, school-teacherish, about the tenth century Saeculum Obscurum, and how a great flowering of reform and refurbishment generated something historians continue to call without irony, a golden age - the 12th Century Renaissance. In brief: things were indescribably terrible, and then some people decided to clean it up and we got something very good, at least for a time. But I find myself unable to gather my thoughts in the usual orderly, business-like way, or generate enough belief in what I’m reading to write anything about it.
We might still get to it this week, if I can get some sleep. It’s worth knowing about.
I think I broke myself this weekend. In a kind of desperation for something to do, a distraction from myself, I dove back into editing and expanding the book I’ve been promising forever - the one about the destruction of Christian monasticism from the 16th century onward. I’d try the trite modern wisdom; throw yourself into work. It seems to have backfired.
I’ve been expanding the original set of articles into something more comprehensive. I’ve got a draft of about 21,500 words, of which about 9000 are finished - the book will probably be about 100 pages in the end. It shows the patterns of destruction that came out of the great asteroid of the Protestant Revolution smashing into Christian Europe, rippling like successive waves of tsunamis, destroying everything in their path.
I’ve been toppled; I’m reeling, shocked and exhausted from studying these vast upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries, these cataclysms, the destruction of what seemed immovable, the very ground itself peeled off the world and burned by lunatics. There’s no coming back from it, this invention of a world of war. This is what Modernity is; this is where it came from. the 17th century was the moment our civilisation renounced the Peace of Christ, renounced itself, and started to tear itself apart, like a man so mad he starts eating his own flesh.
This time, so often framed as a “renewal,” left Christendom in a pile of worthless, hopeless, shattered fragments, its spiritual and cultural inheritance erased by fire and sword, rendered absurd by centuries of bloodshed and betrayal that show no signs even now of halting. All those stories, those “periods of history” that we try to cordon off and isolate from each other, are all one story, one long appalling, irredemptive, multi-century catastrophe that can never rise even to the level of meaning of tragedy.
Looking back at the wreckage of 300 years of war and successive waves of increasingly deranged ideological perversions, how can the suggestion of a renewal, a re-flowering of divine truth, or even of ordinary reality, be anything but a sickening irony?
Of course, like all Anglos educated before the 90s, I’ve always known about the catastrophe of the Tudor Dissolutions and the irremediable scars they left on my native land. But the deeper I go, the more I realize how little I really knew about the broader tragedy that we laughably call “the Reformation”. The names “Thirty Years War” and “Wars of Religion” floated in the back of my mind, a vague shadow, a historical placeholder. Now I’m beginning to grasp it: the total, hopeless and irreparable wreck of Christendom, the collapse of what was once imagined to be the centre of human life, not just in politics or religion, but in art, thought, and the rhythms of ordinary existence.
The destruction of our civilisation is already complete. It all ended 500 years ago, and the wild dogs we call our leaders have been tearing at the corpse ever since. I’m sometimes asked why I don’t take any real interest, place any hope or stake, in the political struggles anymore. All happy endings are lies to lull children to sleep at night; all hopeful renewals are inapplicable to us now. We have destroyed too much - there’s no home to come home to.
What kind of renewal can we even imagine, when we are no longer heirs to the world that was destroyed but scavengers in its ashes, camping in its ruins? The 12th century renewal arose out of a shared belief in a higher order, a shared vision of a cosmos imbued with meaning, even when its structures seemed to fail. We do not share their vision. We live, instead, in a world stripped of common purpose, where even the idea of a centre, spiritual, cultural, or moral, is dismissed as naïve nostalgia.
What do we do now? What’s the point of writing this? Maybe just an explanation about why I haven’t been posting so much. I realise it’s significantly different from my usual offerings. I promise not to share too much; I actually hate writing personally.
I’ve been asked recently a few times by good and decent people, all working for the correction of the world, if I would be interested in talking on a podcast, and I keep having to politely decline. What I want to say is, “Are you mad? The world is ending.” And if it isn’t it damn well should be. It deserves to be.
I’ll try to get back to you all later this week.
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