TV ES PETRVS & SVPER HANC PETRAM ÆDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM & PORTÆ INFERI NON PRÆVALEBVNT ADVERSVS EAM
Among certain Catholics, there is a sort of easy optimism regarding the near future of the Church; an expectation that if things ever get too bad, God will raise up some new saints and heroes and geniuses to make everything good again. It is an expectation that this will happen as a matter of course.
But the promise against the gates of hell was a promise of ultimate victory only, not of stability and comfort in our lifetimes. If the Church would survive, it would at times survive as it did in the Roman catacombs, the caves of Lebanon, the English recusancy, or the Goto Islands. It would at times survive despite staggering material defeat in desperate circumstances. Hope would be no virtue were it easy.
The optimists are fond of quoting a chapter in Chesterton's Everlasting Man on the five deaths of the faith, and its inexplicable resurrection after each. The implication, of course, is that this is what always happens. I never thought this one of Chesterton's more convincing arguments; were he an Assyrian rather than an Englishman, he might have edited the chapter, because in Assyria the faith died five times without ever returning to life.
But that isn't exactly fair to say; a few faithful Assyrians exist to this day, and a few good Christians existed in each era of death identified by Chesterton. When he spoke of a death of the faith, he never meant that it ceased altogether, but rather that it ceased to be healthy, vibrant and influential. It was not a crisis of Christianity, but of Christian civilization.
But we were never promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against Christian civilization. In Europe, Christian civilization was resurrected five times; there is no promise of a sixth. Christianity may very well need to survive without Christian civilization, as something brutally persecuted, internally conflicted, and societally irrelevant. This really is nothing more than the normal state of Christianity.
There is, among both Catholics and Orthodox, an openly expressed desire to return to the principles of first millennium Christianity. It is a desire I share, insofar as I believe that continuity with the Church Fathers is absolutely indispensable, and that the Roman and Byzantine Churches should be one. But that desire should not delude us about what the Great Church of the first millennium was really like.
Within two centuries of the legalization of Christianity, the Great Church lost two of the ancient patriarchies; within a few more centuries, it lost most of its territory and people to the Mohammedans, and never regained much of it. The story of first millennium Christianity is one of continuous failure and attrition; the Church suffered from Christological and Trinitarian heresies in steady succession, and as easy as it may be to distance the Church from them after the anathemas have been read, all of these heresies arose within the Church. There was a time before the anathemas were read, when each had not yet been condemned, when it was openly professed at all levels of the Church. To live as a Christian in the first millennium, especially in any of the eastern patriarchies, as often as not meant having Christological or Trinitarian heretics for bishops and priests, and most of the faithful either themselves professing the errors or too cowardly or indifferent to oppose them.
For 61 years before the Second Nicene Council, and then for another 28 years after it, the Church of Byzantium was ruled by the Iconoclast emperors and the sycophants whom they were able to place on the patriarchal throne; the images were whitewashed, the monks were tortured and killed, the relics were thrown in the sea, the sanctoral devotions were suppressed. It was the most violent destruction of tradition that has ever occurred within the Church; only a very few caches of icons predating the crisis survived, most of them in the relative safety of Mohammedan rule. There is an admirable length to the historical memory of Byzantine Christianity, which many of its admirers and converts from the occident have not yet attained. Iconoclasm looms large in its mind, and this might temper its boast; for there was a time when Eastern Orthodoxy lost everything too.
There is a truth to this so simple that we often forget it: Satan is smarter than us. And he is stronger than us and he is more patient than us. Were he not, we would have no need of a Savior. We were not promised a paradise in this life but a continuous assault until kingdom come. Satan would destroy, divide and degrade the Church in every way he could devise. He would do this with heresy and schism and war; in the marauding of barbarian hordes and in the plotting of secret societies. He would work through the greed of princes, the lust of kings, the pride of emperors and the folly of popes. He would whisper bad ideas into the ears of well-meaning men. He would wield earthquake and fire and plague, whatever of God's good earth he could subject to his manipulation. He would ruin the Church from within and without. He would work in awful moments and in centuries of unnoticed degradation.
Satan hates the Church and he wants us to hate the Church. And he is smart enough and strong enough and patient enough to ruin everything that makes loving the Church easy. He was smart enough to ruin the seemingly immortal Middle Ages, so he is certainly smart enough to ruin the fragile traditionalist movement today. And he is smart enough to ruin the orthopraxy and theological stability of the Christian East. Were this not obvious as a theological fact, it should be obvious as an historical fact; he has done it before.
And the patristic-medieval Latin Orthodoxy that I desire Roman Catholicism to become, and to which I will devote the efforts of my entire life: he is smart enough to ruin that too. This is what needs to be remembered by those who seek a refuge from modernism in Traditional Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or in their own historicist fantasies of either of them. There is no refuge in the Church Militant. If a Church appears to have withstood modernism, it merely means that Satan is waiting to afflict it with some other error as soon as he is able. The ancient Churches are vulnerable and they have always been vulnerable.
On inspection, they all bear the permanent scars of inimical attack; the losses and ruptures and betrayals of the ancient tradition. Were there a Church without them, it would have no credible claim to be the true Church; it would be something so meager a threat to the principality of Satan that he does not even bother to pay it attention. A Church that is not permanently scarred is not the Body of Christ.
The Apostles understood this, and lived always as if the eschaton were imminent and the enemy nearby. I doubt that any of them expected the society of entire continents to be oriented heavenward for thousands of years. This was something far better than they had any right to expect.
Christian civilization and all of its treasures were a gift; an undeserved and exceedingly generous gift. When a child receives a precious gift from his beloved father, he cherishes it and protects it, remembering always the generosity of him who gave it. Only the most despicable ingratitude would make him neglect it, deface it, decide that it is no longer to his liking and throw it in the trash, or refashion it into something different. This is what is missed by the apologists for the new Catholicism, who constantly assert its sacramental validity as if that were the only thing that matters. The problem with the new liturgy, the banal music, the bare churches is not that they reflect poorly on God; rather, they reflect poorly on us.
But something different is missed by the traditionalists who incessantly complain that the problems are not being fixed quickly enough, or who threaten to leave the Church until they are. If the gift is broken, the child has no right to stamp his feet and demand that his father fix it or buy him a new one immediately. Because he did not deserve it in the first place. The father is perfectly within his rights to withhold his generosity until the child learns his lesson, or to tell the child to fix it himself. It is not our prerogative to demand that the problems in the Church be fixed at our convenience. Nor are these problems necessarily someone else's to fix.
God has entrusted the care of his Church in this world until the parousia to humanity. It is by building it in the territory of the enemy that we participate in the action of Providence in history, and are sanctified. God certainly can assist in extraordinary ways; the remarkable resiliency of the Church at times can only be explained by divine intervention. But nothing of Justice demands that God raise up a new group of saints and heroes and geniuses to fix everything as a matter of course. When the Church needs saints and heroes and geniuses, it may have nobody but us. And most of us are too damnably proud of our false humility to even attempt heroic sanctity.
The state of Christian life now, as always, is one of praying among ruins; of combing through the rubble of a long-destroyed church for pieces we recognize; of clinging to them and treasuring them in a way that men who enjoyed them in their splendor never did. We venerate these pieces of rubble, and study them to figure the way they fit together and the meaning they once had. We induce what we can of the forgotten methods of their construction and the forgotten language of their symbolism and rebuild what we can in our allotted time. We build something beautiful for God, so that the memory of the ancient faith might survive to the next generation, until the forces of evil smash and burn and bury our constructions.
And we do this believing, despite every temptation to despair, that victory has already been won, and that deliverance is near. We were given the task so that in it we might find our purpose and our joy and our sanctity. And persevering, we will inherit a new heaven and a new earth, in which to build in permanence what we build in poor imitation in this broken world.