Christendom. Few other words are so little understood in modern discourse as this one. The generation of WWII could hear Churchill mention “Christian civilization” and feel kinship. This is no longer the case—the word is understood in only the vaguest sense. It has been seen as a obstacle to many political projects: liberalism, international socialism, and also many forms of nationalism. All these forces have played their roles in diminishing the power of this word. In what follows, we will try to regain a clear and proper understanding. Without it, the heritage of European civilization becomes incomprehensible. To truly understand what defines Christendom, we must learn from the inside. Our guide will be Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P., English Dominican priest and lecturer at the University of Oxford.

In our day, the idea of a social order built upon a total, unifying vision is either naive or disturbing. Our governing institutions—media, academia, government, and business—promote the notion that we are simply a collection of individuals. But in reality, the liberal worldview itself orients the minds and norms of entire populations. Without these institutions, we could not have seen such rapid shifts as the redefinition of marriage or nationhood. Every governing class must have a worldview on which to base their decisions, and through them this worldview gains hegemony over the social order. In that case, the Christian social order could be defined as one where Christian values and archetypes provide a basis for common decision-making.

But this is redundant. What are we really saying? Modernists and postmodernists alike imagine a tyrannical social order where minute details are regulated. Meanwhile, the political Right often speaks about it in a cultural or civilizational sense. Identitarians are prone to seeing merely an expression of broader European civilization.

What makes Nichols a unique source is that he is not a denizen of the old Christian civilization; rather, he is crafting the battle plans for a Christendom to come. I’ll focus on his work Christendom Awake, which is Nichols’ outline of how the Christian foundation shapes a variety of elements in the social order. Though varied, there is a unifying thread in Nichols’ writings: the Christian social order has its values and archetypes insofar as it is founded on a person. It is not any abstract idea or axiom, but the being and fact of the Incarnate God-man. Ave Christus Rex. This theme is key to understanding the nature of Christendom, past and future. We also see the parallels with our own social order, with its more confused roots. This comparison will help us understand how every society is shaped by its foundations.

Christendom Awake begins with reflections on the core aspects of Christian faith—liturgy, doctrine, etc.—and covers increasingly broader applications such as family life, monastic life, and material culture. Through this expansion, the power of Christendom as an orienting civilizational force becomes clearer. Nichols establishes his understanding of human society in the introduction:

For Thomas [Aquinas], every human being is both goalseeking and made for community. For this reason, a human being will naturally desire the goal he seeks to be a shared or community goal. There can be no right pursuit by the individual of his own development which is not at the same time the development of society as a whole.

It is evident that this applies to our own liberal capitalist and socially progressive society, as well. While its defenders would say that they merely allow each the freedom to pursue their own goals, this is untrue. Those who follow social teaching from religious competitors of universal progress are seen as unworthy of the public sphere—or at the very least highly suspect. This game has been played by the Right as well as the Left, especially when it is willing to adopt the language of progress to oppose Islamic practices. Indeed, pressure increases to adapt even in nominally private spaces such as religious schools. Rather than admitting that this is the result of power-holders exerting influence, the myth is promoted that this is merely the result of popular preference. Democratic myths aside, power does not correlate with numbers.

But is the desire by religious groups to be tolerated in secular liberal society even possible? Perhaps the very nature of human community makes this a hard bargain for either side. Having established the social and integral nature of society, Nichols strikes the contrast with ours:

For [Aquinas] the acts of the moral virtues are incomplete until they are unified in religion—in the service of God, and by recognition of his dominion over all creation…Aquinas, then, would regard the malaise and anomie of modern liberal society as deriving from a failure to acknowledge two related truths. First, man’s rational goalseeking consists in finding where the divinely given goal lies, rather than in fixing what it is to be. Second, we cannot pursue any particular goal which is not, implicitly, the pursuit of a wider goal—in the last analysis, that of the whole society.

Ironically, the second claim may be more difficult for liberal society to grasp than the former. The average Westerner can still somewhat understand the concept of God. But the notion that individual desires and actions are inseparable from social order runs counter to fundamental liberal ideas. In particular, the idea of pluralism assumes that individual decisions do not need to affect the life and decisions of others. And yet, the liberal order must increasingly adapt to this truth. Illiberal speech is criminalized explicitly on the grounds that its public utterance could influence people’s decisions in an undesirable way. But this becomes a parody of Nichols’ observation; rather than finding the best ideas to ground the social order on, the quest for these ideas itself becomes intolerable. The belief that behaviors should be considered in the moral sphere becomes dangerous. Thus, the very act of moral judgement is a threat. This has played out in everything from family norms to sexual behavior. The result is an anti-morality pursuing an impossible society where the second truth can be negated.

Nichols next addresses the notion of culture. Since Christendom is a society, it must be culturally identifiable. But of course, Christendom included a wide host of races and cultures. When a people became integrated into the Christian faith, they drew on their existing culture to embody it. While both anti-religious and even certain religious thinkers see this as a failure, traditional Christian thought has viewed it as part and parcel of the Church’s mission. However, this is where the failure of merely identitarian Christianity must be avoided. This tendency sees Christianity as primarily useful as a cultural force, say for France, Spain, or “the white race”. It has arisen among various movements, including certain followers of Maurras, the Falange, and the modern alt-right. The problem with this “chemist shop” Christianity (as Lewis calls it in Screwtape Letters) is that it is not the Christianity of the civilizations these groups admire. Nichols emphasizes that the faith animates not insofar as it is a cultural force looking upward, but a transcendent truth manifesting downward. Only in this way can it unite and outlast entire civilizations.

What we may expect for theology in a culturally inauspicious age cannot be determined, however, from sheer consideration of the inherent possibilities of the culture of some time and place. It must also be decided—and more fundamentally so—by the possibilities that are found within that aiding source of newness of life which is the resurrection of the crucified saviour.

Here, we must turn our focus to the experience of liturgy: the public worship of the Church. While those who grew up in a post-religious society are tempted to view it as so much pomp, it represents one of the most powerful collective experiences of any society. To compare, one need only consider political rallies, sports events, or pride parades. Such experiences are unifying; all classes and sub-groups share a set of fundamental symbols and references. For Christians, the liturgy is the chief meeting place of transcendence, culture, and community. It is transcendent because it is build on doctrine and sacraments. It is cultural because it is received from outside but interpreted according to local mores (see the myriad rites of the Church: Latin, Byzantine, Syriac, Anglican use, and so on). Finally, it is communal because the acts of worship are public and unite social classes and families in a single ritual.

Nichols emphasizes that the key work for Catholics today is the re-enchantment of the liturgy. The project of re-enchantment is already speedily underway by the young and rising generation of Catholics, particularly those attending the traditional Latin mass. This work is important because that enchantment is what reveals transcendence, transmits culture, and impresses the power of ritual. It is only a liturgy of high beauty that can be a guiding central force for a society, which is why those churches which strip it have tended to lose younger members. Nichols cites the envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev returning from the liturgy of Constantinople:

We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.

Liturgy has influenced everything from high art to linguistic idioms. Even French curse words are known for deriving from religious objects. This means that a liturgy which emphasizes high beauty will influence a culture on a deeper level than one which tries to be plain and ordinary. The mid-20th century generations who are now the aged ecclesial management saw fit to strip down the language, art, and music of liturgy to make it “accessible”. It is an irony that they did so just as a generation sought out precisely the strange and inaccessible in fantasy, futurism, and eastern religions.

Nichols calls this trend out as the capture of liturgy for the promotion of middle-class networking rather than broad social ritual. If so, this may be a good example of the reduction of all values to the economic plane which typifies the modern West. But this reduction itself may be due to the loss of liturgy as a center of society, and not just a pastime for Sundays. In the post-religious West, what common experiences does the whole society share? It is no longer family (with current divorce and non-marrying rates) nor common heritage (with multiculturalism). The only one which can be pointed to is the job market. The restoration of liturgy is a rebuke to this trend, and one which builds the sorts of ties needed to expand a society biologically, culturally, and religiously. By using ritual and symbol, it communicates vast amounts of information and meditation extremely efficiently. Monks and scholars may spend their lives contemplating only parts of the ritual. Therefore it is fitting that Nichols—and we—discuss it before such topics as philosophy or politics.

But it is to philosophy and thought where Nichols turns next. He dedicates two chapters to, respectively, doctrine and philosophy. Doctrine is necessary because it is the formal intellectual expression of what is contained in symbol and experience. In any social order, we must inherit categories of thought before beginning to use or critique them. Two major shifts which Nichols sees as imperative to doctrinal renewal are the “sense of the supernatural” and the attitude of reception when it comes to apostolic tradition. The first is imperative if the sacrifices of Christian living have any sense, and its symbols have any true power. It is a commonplace belief of our world that any sense of meaning or higher order is a fiction of the human mind. In this belief, the modern West is an aberration. This is not only relative to our past but also to the great traditions of nearly all civilizations our world has produced. While this is not an argument, it should perhaps give us pause. Nichols explains this sensibility:

We are speaking…of the absolute transcendence which the unspeakable divine perfection is, and for which it provides symbolic ladders of ascent in putting forth, through the act of creation, a theophanous world. ‘Nature’, declared the poet Mallarmé, ‘is a forest of symbols’[…]

The gospel expects to find us as pagans awaiting conversion, not religious tabulae rasae on which no words are written at all. The recreation of the religious imagination of a sacred cosmology…is a responsibility of Christians who—faute de mieux—are now guardians of the sacrality of being in the West[…]

Since, however, the sense of the supernatural cannot become self-aware in us…except by grasping its object—the realities of faith spoken of in the Creed, the doctrinal corpus of the Church’s teaching is crucial to our being, life, identity as human creatures in the cosmos redeemed in principle by Jesus Christ.

This gives us further insight into why purely identitarian religion often loses its vitality—without a direct connection to the transcendent, the power to shape this supernatural imagination is lost. But since not all can be mystics, the religious traditions of the world are handed down through spiritual authority. In the Catholic church—as well as the communions of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Assyrians—this spiritual authority is the line of Bishops beginning with the Apostles. This authority is vital:

The Christian message insists that thought cannot go beyond the limits of a fallen humanity, of a fallen world, unless it undergoes a death and a resurrection. The ‘death’ in question is a discipline, an asceticism, provided for the human mind by ecclesial experience (worship, meditation on the Scriptures, prayer, religious love) all of which purify little by little the eye of the human intellect. The ‘resurrection’ involves the transformation of fallen reason into that understanding which mirrors the Word of God, in whose image and to whose likeness we were originally made…Doctrine, then, together with dogma, its most hard-won form, and the theological thinking these stimulate, is the vision of the world that results from this Easter ‘passover’ of the mind from death to life…It is a wondrous medium that permits us to see in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, the final truth of the world beyond the illusions (be they hyper-metaphysical or antimetaphysical) of what the Bible calls this aiōn, this age of the world.

It is worth noting that the prejudice against “arbitrary” religious authority in the modern West seems to be purely inward. When it comes to other traditions, Westerners are enthusiastic to the point of stereotype for such a lineage. We can consider how fascinated even atheists will be with figures like the Dalai Lama, Hindu gurus, or indigenous American shamans. We marvel at the discipline of the pilgrim who sweeps a floor before receiving instruction, or the student who spends months and years practicing breathing before meditation can start. Such continuity exists no less with the Bishop at his altar and the catechumen reading scripture.

This same discipline opens the door for philosophy, and for what Nichols views as the Christian role in modern philosophical discourse. What is important to understand here is that metaphysical foundations impact all other aspects of philosophy, and even what its goal is. Marx’s dialectics and class analysis is inseparable from his philosophical materialism. Christian foundations have similar effects. Understanding compatibilities and differences is why Nichols touches on traditions such as analytic philosophy and postmodernism. However, Christianity must bring its own content as well. If its worldview is coherent and true, then philosophical language must be able to mirror what exists in ritual, symbol, and doctrine. As is common among Roman Catholic philosophers, he upholds Aquinas as a rally point. Specifically, he offers us a rigorous understanding of why reality is unified and intelligible. He cites Thomist C. Ernst, O.P.:

What things really are is capable of being understood as an intelligible order, an order of subordinate orders. What makes Thomas permanently valuable is his recognition that…being, truth, and meaning are indefinitely diverse and yet (this is the ultimate mystery) that being does disclose itself in meaning…Thomas’ genuine and permanent originality was to display the internal consistency of a view of the world in which the world effortlessly shows itself for what it is, flowers into the light.

Encouragingly, Nichols expands beyond a merely Aristotelian understanding and points out the Platonist current within Aquinas:

To the truth of being, that pre-eminently Platonic theme, Thomas added Aristotle’s characteristic concern with the becoming of being—where the concept of causality is pervasively invoked as a humble newcomer to the circle of the transcendental ideas, those ‘eternal lamps’. The mystery of being as founds becoming makes itself present to the world.

This part of the discussion has led us through weighty intellectual material. But this is only one aspect of Christendom’s power. The consequences of these foundations are total and express themselves in daily life: state, family, art, asceticism, and moral issues. Christendom Awake goes on to meditate on a variety of these areas. Most radical for the modern reader is his challenge that the political state cannot ignore truth—not even religious truth—for the sake of order. Such orders will be corrupted by their falsehood. The problem with secularism is that it results in a total failure to address those aspects of human society which are the most psychologically important. More than this, its initial neutrality increasingly gives way to colonization and the rise of “civil religion”. The American mythos of liberty and equality is an example of this.

Secularism (something far more radical than anti-clericalism) was never voted in at all. It is simply what happened when traditional societies entered a liberal thought-world. Liberalism is the imposition on the person of the priorities of secularity and prosperity over against deeper needs, and why should that supinely be accepted? To a duly functioning Christian sensibility it can only be an impossible project, for it results from the extreme separation of the supernatural from the natural when in fact these realms interpenetrate utterly[…]

Since virtue is the formative element of the community and the human flourishing which leads to its goal, Aquinas…did not imagine that the State could dispense with the active presence of the Church: civil religion would furnish at best a national, provincial, or otherwise partial rendering…while ‘another “religion” [if the Church be rejected] is bound to fill the vacuum which inevitably forms by the fact that no community can exist without an active moral authority’. In effect, secular humanism is now, in what were once Christian nations, that religion.

This is evidently true. Former liberal neutrality is now proclaimed across schools and media as the positive content of progressivism—not only the state, but also individual citizens, must refrain from moral judgments of behaviors. But in that case, this moral doctrine itself is open to criticism. Nichols is unflinching in proclaiming that Christianity is not compatible with the underpinnings of modern secularity. The human polity exists as a “post-Ascension state”. Of course, the same is true of any other exclusive truth-claim: the same conflict has come to pass in Muslim societies between Islamists, nationalists, and liberal secularists. Likewise, the future desired by communism was not compatible with that desired by liberals or traditionalists. Truth matters, and conflict cannot be written so easily out of human life.

Just as these truths permeate political life, so too with those communities which make up the polity. The smallest and most vital of these is the family: man and woman bound in covenant to raise children, produce the home economy, and preserve social bonds. In this area, Christendom discerns subversion not only by the modern state but also the modern marketplace. The mobilization of all to economic life has left people unable to perform those duties necessary for families to go on. Libertarians will no doubt be discomforted by Nichols’ restatement of Catholic views on property: it is bound, like individuals, to virtue. He cites Archbishop William Temple of Canterbury: “wealth [is] essentially social and therefore subject at all points to control in the interests of society as a whole.”

On the one hand, it is the duty of the state to limit the conditions for this subversion to exist. On the other, much can be done by families to reclaim territory, such as homeschooling. The family is both pragmatic and transcendent. It provides incentive to strive on through “pain or tedium” for a greater good, but also reflects the love of the Trinity and the Holy Family. Uniting in love and duty, it alone provides the grounds where the wars between the sexes can be ended. Nichols devotes two chapters toward the role of material culture and gender in this struggle. Christian family can only be understood in the narrative of redemption. The natural good of the family is given supernatural meaning in the post-Ascension world. It works in this world to point towards the higher. Even newborn children play a role as “lamps” of the Christian universal order. In a further chapter on the abortion, Nichols goes beyond the usual arguments about bioethics. He meditates on the infant as a symbol of innocence and the theological virtue of hope. This is an important insight into what lies behind the rejection of abortion not only on the level of policy, but of morality. The theological foundations of Christendom impact not only lofty philosophy but also the hard facts of life.

However, there exists a counterpart: those who exist already consecrated to the higher, and as its representatives in this world. These are the religious: monks, nuns, hermits, ascetics. This aspect of Christian society has little counterpart in the modern world and is the hardest to understand. It is necessary to remember two principles of Christian belief: that the higher and more fundamental world exists, and that our world is a vehicle for its disclosure. If this is so, then some are called to give themselves over to that world entirely. Nichols explains:

Still, the primary pertinence of the monk or the nun, the Religious brother or sister, lies elsewhere, and Régamey cites in this connection some words of [Pope John Paul II] at Rio de Janeiro in 1980: ‘You are called to realize salvation as signs and instruments of the invisible world…Do not conform yourself to this world’s opinions and tastes.’
[…]

…the spirit of the world has entered the Church, and, as so often in Church history (only the labels on the concepts change), Religious are now required to be signs of rupture and contradiction against the skyline of the secular city. And this is an obligation laid upon them, not simply for their own sake but for the good of all the Church.

Catholicism teaches—reflecting St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians—that celibacy is the higher state of life. This must be properly understood. First, marriage is nonetheless a sacrament. Second, not all—indeed, only a few—have a vocation to this higher state of life in the world. But how, the secular Brahman rightfully asks, can both these things be true? This principle of hierarchy is essential to reconciling the two states. Nichols cites Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Christian State of Life:

…because it is the prescriptive will of the Church’s Founder that those called to the state of election should be a permanent minority in the world in contrast to those forming the general state of believers, it is likewise his prescriptive will that the many who are not called to the special state of life should remain in the general secular state. By reason of this prescriptive will, we must, therefore, regard the secular state, not as just the negative side of the state of election but rather as a true state in the realm of redemption and of the Church. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to designate this will as a second vocation to the Lord’s service of equal rank with the first. Being placed in the secular state can be described only as a not-having-been-called to a qualitatively higher state.

At this point in our reflections, it is useful to re-center on what brings together these many aspects of Christendom. It is this common thread which must be understood if the modern inquirer wants to understand what differentiates Christendom not only from the modern West, but also from other civilizations which share more with it than ours does. It is the foundation of the Incarnate God-man: crucified, risen, and reigning in glory. Societies such as pagan Rome or the Islamic world share the view of a higher sacred order, but not its direct manifestation in the world. Identitarians who reduce Christianity to only a culture are cut off from the total and formative power of the Logos. What drove European heroes from the saint-king Edward the Confessor to Tsar Lazar of Serbia was not socially useful archetype, but direct animating loyalty.

Christendom Awake is an extremely useful work not only for Christians. Understanding the depth and layer of Christian society should be of interest to anyone from open-minded progressives to secular reactionaries. In addition to what has been covered here, other topics in the book include Scripture, the priesthood, ecumenism, and more. It may be of interest that Nichols sees the West-East relationship as most important for the future, and emphasizes Catholic cooperation with the Orthodox communion rather than modernized mainline Protestantism. Another work of Nichols, The Realm, takes the form of an extended essay and applies these same themes to the more concrete context of re-converting England.

To close, we can reflect on the Christian understanding that history itself is but the stage (or battlefield) on which saints are made. Though the world passes, this gives it meaning. The Church carries out in fact what the forthrightly non-Christian Julius Evola attributed to a new elite in his Pagan Imperialism: “We are not destroyers, but restorers. When we appear to be destroying, we are in fact rearranging and replacing what is on the wane with higher forms, forms more vibrant and glorious.” The taking up by the higher world of this realm into which we are thrown is what makes Christendom, even as a civilization, a sign of contradiction. It is also what gives its power. Nichols reflects on the nature of the apocalyptic within the Catholic context, and these words make a fitting close for this reflection on Christendom:

At the moment God’s Kingdom, present sacramentally in the Church, in her preaching, in the holy signs of her worship, and in her saints, is hidden ‘kenotically’—like the Christ of the Nativity, the ministry, and the cross—in the ambiguities of time. But then the veil will be rent, and the hitherto invisible presence become plain. We already share in the transfigured cosmos whose nucleus is Christ’s risen and ascended body and are activated by its energies. But then we shall see the glorified Saviour as the Lamb of the new temple…Because God is God he must come into his own. He cannot ultimately be defeated.
[…]

An example may help. The present portion of Christendom Awake was originally written to be spoken in Iceland…[The] Kingdom is presented as a banquet, for the story of the world will turn out to be essentially a commedia: it has a happy ending. And finally there is the motif of a story itself: for the sagas which are Iceland’s enduring contribution to the literature of the world are narratives, stories—and the Gospel confirms that the key to all reality is the story of one who was born of a virgin and suffered under Pontius Pilate, for the preconditions of that story are found in the Trinity, the only true God, and its consequences stream out through history ultimately to affect the order of the cosmos itself.

When in Snorri’s Edda, Eilifr exchanges the worship of Thor for that of Christ, the latter is acclaimed as ‘Rome’s mighty king’.