After Christendom
By Michael Warren Davis.
Sophia Institute Press, 2024.
Paperback, 213 pages, $17.89.
Reviewed by Thomas Banks.
This is a fairly simple book—part polemic and part spiritual manual. Mr. Davis, its author, is best known for his previous work, The Reactionary Mind, a paean to the spirit of medieval Christendom and those figures and institutions that embodied it, among them the Florentine Dominican Savonarola and the Holy Inquisition. In this second offering, the principal traits of Mr. Davis’s style as a writer are visible on nearly every page: deep sincerity, humble self-effacement, and an emotional and unpretentious reverence for the lives and teachings of the saints; side by side with these, a tendency towards unqualified hyperbole, and an occasionally alarming lack of expertise in several of those religious and historical matters on which he undertakes to advise us.
The mind of Mr. Davis has not lain fallow in the few years between his last book and this. In the Reactionary Mind, his position was outspokenly restorationist, pointed towards a renewed West of the monastic orders and feudal estates, with its peasant economy and crusading rulers. (One may examine the first few pages of that book to learn that the Christendom there depicted was as much a property of Mr. Davis’s romantic imagination as of the genuine historical record.) But in the short interval between his first work and his second, his view of the terrain and its prospects has changed greatly: the Christendom of the friars and feudal serfs is no longer a lost Paradise to be restored, and any wish to do so is unfounded, if not heretical; new Charlemagnes and Coeur de Lions will not save us, and their originals were alien to the spirit of Christ and the Evangelists. The culture wars, viewed from whatever vantage, are long since lost, for which defeat all Christians should rejoice, for Our Lord did not die for nations; these cannot be baptized, made righteous, nor raised from the dead. Their value, which is nowhere denied, is emphatically not of a religious kind.
Davis does not write to infect his reader with despair. There do indeed exist balms for what ails us, and he defines them quite simply: mysticism, martyrdom, and the missionary spirit. Each of these, we are told, is a universal vocation that every Christian is commanded to pursue, quite as much as every Christian must love God and his neighbor. Here is one of the largest flaws of this book. That many of the Church’s brightest lights have been mystics, that many have died for the Faith, and that others have given up all to make Christ known in lightless corners of the world is so obvious as to need no argument. Yet Davis’s certainty that particular spiritual gifts granted to some should be grasped everywhere by all is neither prudent nor even remotely realistic. This curious blindness extends to other points as well. More than once in his book, Davis offers admonitions that past alliances between the Spiritual and Temporal powers ended only in disaster and spiritual dryness. Yet in his chapter on Eastern Christianity, he exuberantly testifies to the revival of Orthodox Christianity in the former Soviet Empire, reporting that “the Russian Orthodox Church has also built roughly thirty thousand churches in the last ten years.”
This did not surprise me, though I wonder if Mr. Davis grasps the contradiction suggested by his enthusiasm for the present state of the Russian Church: is the legal and religious bond between the Russian Patriarchate and the Putin government somehow of a different and purer kind than existed between Charlemagne and Adrian the First, or between Pius VII and the last Bourbon kings of France? Power is an eternal stimulant of corruption, and in the tie between Church and State that existed in one form or another from the Edict of Milan to the dissolution of the Papal States. Undeniably, there were many principles compromised and ideals betrayed. Why should state patronage of Russian Orthodoxy inspire us? It was reported by the Moscow Times a few years ago that the Kremlin has invested the equivalent of forty million dollars in the improvement of the grounds and architecture of Patriarch Kirill’s estate near St. Petersburg. It is fair to keep facts like this in mind while reading Davis’s encomium to the habits of holy simplicity that he advertises as the mark of Eastern clerics, from the metropolitan to the monk: “The Eastern clergyman’s ‘everyday’ clothing is always the same, whether he’s a parish priest or a patriarch: a simple black cassock, perhaps with a pectoral cross and a plain black miter. Outside the context of the liturgy, these clergymen are all simply servants of God[…]In this way, Eastern Christians are able to ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ without compromising either beauty or holiness.” If Davis believes that the Orthodox priesthood is represented by men whose morals and character are, in the main, a credit to that Church itself, he may well be correct, and such examples as stand out from my own limited clerical acquaintance would likely tally with his. Had this been the limit of his argument, there would be no reason to contradict him, and it is unfortunate that in this section of the book, he allows himself to descend from reasoned praise to indiscriminate gushing.
At the center of this work is the sense that the world is essentially irredeemable. Individual persons assuredly may be saved, and to the attainment of this end, we all are summoned; but the world itself, with all its works and uses, is the natural property of the Devil, and we are well advised to keep away from it. Not that pietistic withdrawal is presented as the sole alternative: Mr. Davis is insistent on this point (“Before anyone starts, no, this isn’t ‘quietism’”). Yet even while abjuring a Quakerish retreat from a corrupt and sin-ridden society, Davis enjoins the reader to keep his mind off politics, to keep his children out of public and private schools, and, where he is able, to cultivate “intentional communities.” This is far from the least sensible prescription on offer to a generation perplexed by the evils of the day, and probably the lives of many would be happier for their adopting at least some of this counsel—counsel offered previously in Mr. Dreher’s Benedict Option. Davis, for his part, should admit that quietism is exactly what he is advocating and shouldn’t be embarrassed by the fact. There are ten thousand worse things to be than a Quaker.
As I approached the book’s end, I began to have a feeling that I was reading the thoughts of someone who was at the end of his tether as a writer. If Davis never writes another book after this one, he deserves our wishes and prayers that he prospers in whatever work the Spirit sets him to. He may stretch himself too far as a writer at times, but he is fundamentally a decent man and the world is sick for want of such.
Thomas Banks lives in North Carolina and teaches online at the House of Humane Letters. His writings have appeared in First Things, Quadrant, Touchstone, the New Oxford Review, and elsewhere.
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