We Dare Not Despair
on Repenting from the Vice of Declinism
Is belief in inevitable societal decline a heresy? I found myself asking this question during a discussion with a philosopher over a cup of after-dinner coffee last summer. He had just finished narrating the stories of a couple of Christian scholars of his acquaintance who had retreated to a life of leisure in the Scottish Highlands. He also spoke of a few others who had evolved in their beliefs and come to terms with the iconoclasts marching through the colleges smashing images of man and woman. He mused that he was too hard-headed to give up the fight.
This being Oxford, and my friend being Roman Catholic, our conversation turned to Middle-Earth. I mentioned an energetic bishop who once told me that declinism, a variety of the vice of despair, is the great heresy of our day. My friend agreed that he hears an astounding amount of Denethorian rhetoric from the baptized: “I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance”; “the West has failed”; and that sort of thing.
Grounds for Hope
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Clinton Collister is a doctoral candidate in Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge and a researcher at Pusey House, Oxford. He is also an editor at The Cranmer Theological Journal and Nashotah House Press, as well as editor of the recent volume, Charles Chapman Grafton: Selected Writings (Nashotah House, 2022).
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