Holy Name of Mary
Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Name of Mary. In January we celebrated the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, following the celebration of the Nativity at Christmas. It is therefore fitting that we celebrate the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, following the feast of her Nativity. In 1683 Jan Sobieski defeated the Ottoman Turks who had reached the gates of Vienna, and Pope Innocent XI decreed that the feast of the Holy Name of Mary should be held at the time of this victory over the Ottoman Turks.
There is much that we can learn from this conflict at the present time, when militant Islam is very much in evidence. In the seventeenth century it was defeated at the gates of Vienna. It had already overthrown the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century and was gradually advancing further into Europe. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks at Vienna in 1683 was the furthest that it reached into Europe, so the event was one of the decisive turning points in history. Despite the division between Catholic and Protestant at the Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was still enough of a common European civilisation to withstand the threat posed by militant Islam.
But why was militant Islam seen as such as threat to the Christian world? The reason is that Islam is a very different religion from Christianity. In saying this we are not saying that there is not much of value within Islam. The faithful observances of prayer and fasting in Islam and the strong sense of the divine sovereignty over this world are witnesses of the vitality of Islam. However, in saying this we must be careful not to fall into the common contemporary error of syncretism. While it is true that Jesus is recognised as a prophet in the Qu’ran and the truth of his virginal conception is taught, Islam emphatically repudiates the doctrine of the Incarnation, that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The prophet Mohammed brought only good advice, whereas the message of the Christian faith is that of a Saviour who brings not simply good advice, but good news, the good news of salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But why was the Christian world able to withstand the forces of militant Islam centuries ago, but a seemingly more advanced post-Enlightenment Western world is in retreat against the forces of militant Islam? The central answer to this question lies in the nature of the European Enlightenment itself. The European Enlightenment sought to replace Christianity as the basis of Western societies with the notion of a civilised, but non- religious humanity. It was taught that reason and scientific progress had been held back in earlier ages of faith, and a new order could now be built based on reason without recourse to transcendent authority. The guiding principle of the new societies was not belief in anything higher than material self interest. In the short term this produced many important technological gains, but in the long term it has left western societies as materially enriched, but spiritually desolate. The ruthless application of the principle of material self interest to every area of life has left people without any belief that they are prepared to die for. But without any ultimate guiding principle beyond short term economic interest Western societies have nothing to stop the forces of militant Islam. People are prepared to die for the cause of militant Islam, but not for the idea of a civilised but non-religious humanity based on material self interest.
In 1948 T. S. Eliot wrote these words: “An individual European may not even believe that the Christian faith is true, but what he says and makes and does will all spring out of the history of this European culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren, and, if we did, none of us would be happy in it.”
In other words, we cannot let go of the Christian faith and assume that society will remain the same. It will not, and it has not. The situation has now degenerated much further than it had when Eliot wrote the words just quoted. The Enlightenment ideal of a civilised, but non religious humanity has now been largely replaced by what is called post-modernism, in which people have ceased to believe in truth and rationality, but now seem only to believe in a virtual reality created by themselves. This is a now an age of post-truth and “after virtue” (as one philosopher has put it).
But, having diagnosed the situation, what can we do to remedy it? We must learn to follow the example that the Church followed when the Roman empire collapsed in the West in the face of the barbarian incursions. Though the decayed Roman civilisation was too weak internally to withstand the barbarian incursions, civilisation was preserved by the Church through the long so called dark ages. The rule of St. Benedict was intended to help Christians to withdraw from the world, but yet it also helped preserve the rudiments of civilisation for future generations. The rulers of the new barbarian tribal kingdoms saw that the monks were literate, they kept accounts and planned ahead, and they gradually adopted the Christian faith themselves.
Many speak of a so called Benedict option in our own time. We too are faced by a society in seemingly irreversible decline, and unable to withstand an external threat from without (the barbarian tribes then, and militant Islam now). The bleakness of this situation should not lead us to despair, but rather to seek to deepen our own spiritual life. It may be that in so doing others will be drawn to follow this way, as the rulers of the barbarian kingdoms of old came to adopt Christianity. As G. K. Chesterton famously put it, “it is not that the Church will drag us back to the Dark Ages. The Church is the only thing that got us out of them.”
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
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