Pride & Incorrigibility
How to Save the World from Itself
Michael the Archangel, relating to Adam what shall happen between the great flood and the calling of Abraham, expresses what in both the pagan and the Christian world was the most common view of human history, that of degeneracy:
So shall this latter, as the former world,
Still tend from bad to worse, till God at last,
Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw
His presence from among them, and avert
His holy eyes, resolving from thenceforth
To leave them to their own polluted ways,
And one peculiar nation to select
From all the rest, of whom to be invoked,
A nation from one faithful man to spring.
It is not to Abraham’s credit that God chose him, since, as Michael points out, he was “bred up in idol worship,” a development that causes the angel to interrupt his own narrative with a burst of ridicule:
O that men
(Canst thou believe?) should be so stupid grown,
While yet the patriarch lived
who ’scaped the flood,
As to forsake the living God, and fall
To worship their own work in wood and stone
As gods!
The remarkable point here is of broad application. Man does not only go astray; his proudest works do not only fall to ruin; he fails to learn the hard lessons which his own immediate forebears have to teach him. He does not have to wait to see what happens when in his pride he boasts that he can rival the Almighty or that he can safely ignore him. He need only look over his shoulder, and see the ruins of such pride in its nearest or most recent instantiation, fallen to rubble and still not cleared away. In this regard, human pride and the staggering ignorance that is both its nourisher and its offspring resemble those of Satan, who even after being flung down into Hell at the first sortie of the Son of God, remains “untaught” and ready to display his “proud imaginations” to the rest of his fallen crew, to lead them farther into evil, and thus deeper into folly and futility.
A Regular Feature of History
We may notice the same phenomenon in our time, this stubborn refusal to learn an obvious and urgent truth when the truth has already been demonstrated and in devastating fashion—when, we might say, the world has already been destroyed by a flood and there is someone still alive to witness to it. Solzhenitsyn spoke to the rich and proud students at Harvard, as the world’s most famous and astute observer of the evil of communism, pointing out that that evil was, at its core, a denial of God. But the students and the liberal journalistic world treated him with contempt. How many millions of lives were lost in the relentless teeth of the atheistic machine! He might as well have been Milton’s Noah, who preached repentance to the worldly all about him, but returned “of them derided.” Or I think of the colossal and ridiculous failure of the sexual revolution to deliver on its one great promise, that it would freshen and renew the relations between men and women, making them sweeter than ever, when in short order even the music became harsh and violent, or lonely and desperate, and now—does anyone sing a love song at all?
Yet Christian churches all over the world, refusing to be taught by Scripture, which they desire to make as ambiguous as possible so that they may violate its commands with a soft and queasy conscience rather than in bold and direct hatred, will not learn from the miseries in their midst. Let millions of American children grow up without a father in the home, a tragedy that the great majority of liberals within living memory would have found at least sobering—let them be fatherless, lest we be compelled to admit that the unmarried Jim and Joan should not be bedding down, and thus to rule out as inconceivable that Jim should be bedding down instead with John.
I will be accused of “declinism,” but the decline of human institutions is one of the regular features of human history. I tell my students that in any year in Italy from 1400 to 1600, there were at least a hundred painters, perhaps a thousand, any of whom would be the greatest in the world now if he were alive. English drama reached its peak under Elizabeth I and James I; Hollywood’s greatest year was 1939, and there are cultural reasons why it was so; English schoolboys once immersed themselves in Latin and Greek literature, and now for them Shakespeare might as well be written in Hittite; sacred music knows no composer greater than Bach, and Christ lag in Todesbanden bears the same relation to “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Gather Us In” as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam bears to a paint-by-numbers picture of Elvis.
Honor the Best & Make God All
The question for us Christians is what to do about it. The world cannot save itself. It seems rather to be an ever-collapsing bottomless crater, rather like what Satan says, with no one around to hear, about the entropy of his condition as separate from God:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, or infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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