FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Spirit and Structure
[Caleb Stegall 03/13 04:06 PM]Reading over the discussion today puts me in mind of Debora Shuger’s excellent book on the English Reformation — a time very formative of the kinds of divides we experience today — called Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. In one passage in particular, Shuger quotes Paul Tillich’s statement that “the Middle Ages were dominated by one problem, namely, to have a society which is guided by a present reality of a transcendent divine character. … This was the problem of the Middle Ages — to have the holy present.” Shuger goes on to describe how the medieval church was attacked in the Reformation precisely at those points of most clear visible manifestations of holiness.
She then restates the matter: Viewed one way, Protestantism represents a denial of the need for visible, institutional holiness. In opposition to Catholics like Sir Thomas More who stressed the visibility and continuity of the Roman church, Protestants tended to redefine the “holy, catholic, and apostolic church” of the Creed as the invisible church of the predestined. Thus the church could not be identified with any specific historical church: it was not an institution but “the whole multitude of the faithful.” The split between Spirit and structure appears most clearly in the Radicals, who, according to Luther, supposed they had “swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all,” and therefore denied the need of any official (that is, clerical) church. However, the great paradox of the Reformation was that the largely successful attack on the medieval locus of transcendence did not obviate the need within society to have some point of contact with the holy and divine; or with what Voegelin called the “ground of being.” Historically the “Protestant Principle” — which is described by Tillich as “a living, moving, restless power” which contains the “human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality” — has tried to relocate the ground of existence in one of two places: either in a secularized institutional form, usually the state, or in the radically atomized heart of every individual. This has led in simplified term to either some form of collectivism or some form of liberalism, each tending towards more radical expression over the course of time.
What does this have to do with home? A lot I think. At its most fundamental points I think the traditional conservative project is best understood as an attempt to recover the ground of existence for a truly social realm that is neither of the state/market/collective nor of the individual and his limitless appetite. “Home” broadly construed as not just four walls and a roof but as the highways and byways that weave together the strands of memory, church, kin, work, and play into a place of belonging; home in this sense is seen and ought to be experienced as the central focal point of man’s contact with God; with the divine and holy ground of being.
As has been pointed out before, these discussions are nothing new. Anyone remember Brent Bozell?
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