on the Cappadocian church
When I think about what the Christian church can be at its very best, I think back to Cappadocia in late Roman times. The central figure in that world was Basil of Caesarea, later St. Basil the Great. And he was great: no Christian that I know of has ever been greater. He preached the Trinitarian Gospel fearlessly and in the face of Imperial opposition, defended the use of pagan literary texts in Christian education, and laid the foundations for Eastern monasticism.
All that would have been enough to cement his place in history, but he also was a tireless advocate for the hungry, the sick, and the destitute. In a time of famine he preached eviscerating sermons to the wealthy of Cappadocia demanding that they “empty their barns” to feed the poor. (“I would like you to take a short vacation from works of iniquity, and give your calculations a rest, so that you might seriously consider the kind of end towards which these preoccupations are heading…. People, what’s the matter with you?”) To those who were willing to give to their fellow Christians but not to Jews, Basil demanded that food be made available freely to all who were hungry. He established what may have been the first hospital, and supported his magnificent sister Macrina in caring for women and children abandoned by their men. By the way, Macrina is also a saint, as are six other members of their extraordinary family.
A church is a community constituted by certain foundational beliefs, but among those beliefs a key one is that the word of the Lord must be obeyed. That is, there are practices that are intrinsic to Christian belief properly understood, and among those are the obligations to feed the hungry, heal the sick, tend to the widows and orphans in their distress, train up children in the way they should go, and be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Thus religion, in the Biblical sense, involves not just holding certain beliefs but acting on them, and the institutions the church creates to help us carry out those commandments are just as “religious” as worshipping congregations. From that it follows that “freedom of religion,” if it is to mean anything, must be extended just as fully to those institutions as to parish churches. Otherwise the church is crippled in its obedience. Which is bad for the church, but also, and more important, bad for the world — unless you happen to think that the State, and the State only, is the proper vehicle for charity and social service. My own view, in political and not specifically Christian terms, is that to yield such service wholly to the State — or to the State’s power to define and circumscribe such service — is a profound impoverishment of human community. And as you can see I have my Christian reasons for thinking this way also.
Consider all this an expansion of my recent post explaining why I support my employer’s lawsuit against the recent HHS contraception mandate: not because I am opposed to contraception, but because I am opposed to a federal agency acting on its own to amputate the full and proper definition of “religious freedom.” And if you want to read more about the amazing Cappadocian Christians, read the book by my friend Susan Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia.
People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).
On the other hand, if I had chosen to support the HHS mandate, or at least declined to protest it, which was a position I considered very seriously, I would be “out to destroy American Christianity” and an “enemy of religious freedom.”
It’s comforting, no doubt, to think that everyone who disagrees with you does so either out of intellectual deficiency or mendacity; as long as you convince yourself of that you can believe that there are no really difficult questions and that every problem has an ideal solution. Those particular illusions are dear to most people, and anyone who disrupts them gets punished. Moreover (I theorize) the moderate who disagrees with you is more troublesome than the person at the opposite extreme, since that moderate has probably agreed with you about some issues in the past and has therefore appeared to be a rational person, so the current disagreement seems like a betrayal, and one of the worst kinds of betrayal: the cruel revelation that the world is more complicated than you thought it was. This, I think, is why the people I follow on Twitter hate David Brooks more than any other columnist (and in many cases “hate” is not too strong a word): whoever they are, they’ve probably seen him be right about some things, so when he’s wrong it’s just insufferable. It disrupts the pigeonholes.
I wonder if moderates were as unhappy before they had to deal with the blast-furnaces of internet hatred? I’d like to think that there were Good Old Days when moderate or ideologically variable positions were received with more good will, or at least polite silence. That probably isn’t true, but at least back in the day contempt didn’t come furnished with a digital megaphone.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
‘Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have passed on to you anything that he thought would be a danger, even though I promised to look after you. He thought the ring was very beautiful, and very useful at need; and if anything was wrong or queer, it was himself. He said that it was “growing on his mind”, and he was always worrying about it; but he did not suspect that the ring itself was to blame. Though he had found out that the thing needed looking after; it did not seem always of the same size or weight; it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight.’
Our online experience (and this is particularly true for specific ones, such as gaming or digital photography) seems to proceed in four stages. The first is tentative exploration, testing the waters; the second is wholehearted immersion; the third is a determination to maintain boundaries; the fourth is recalibration of the relationship between what happens online and what happens IRL – as we still like to put it. This has been happening to millions of people for around twenty years now, and what’s most remarkable is how little progress we have made in understanding ourselves.
Elizabeth Anscombe, for no reason except that I love this photo and think that she’s one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century.