You be can right when you are wrong
All these boys and girls had stuffed themselves on Dostoevsky, Soloryev, socialism, Tolstoy’s teachings, Nietzsche’s doctrines and the latest poetry. They had jumbled it all up into a heap which was left lying alongside them. But they are completely right. It all comes down to approximately the same things and constitutes our present-day thinking, the main peculiarity of which is that is a new, unusually fresh phase of Christianity. (Pasternak)
A new phase of Christianity? Was the intellectual earthquakes at the turn of the 20th century a revival of this moribund religion? Pasternak gives the answer himself:
Our age has understood anew that part of the Gospel which from time long past has been best felt and expressed by artists. It was prominent with the Apostles but then dropped out of sight with the church fathers, in the church, in morals and in politics…. It is the concept that communication between mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.
The Ancient City of Christianity was a ruin by 1920. Yes, there were some intact churches, a few monasteries; and bibles could be seen on street bonfires; a few pages floating into safety.
Of course, as with all ruins, some buildings survive. But is Pompeii a working port?
By 1900 Christianity was no longer the all-encompassing worldview of medieval Europe, that fortress that protected our conceptual life. By then new thought systems had emerged – the State, Communism, Symbolism, and Science. Some were ramshackle camps that have since faded… museum pieces themselves now, which we view alongside Byzantine crosses and Orthodox Icons.
But Pasternak is also right! The last 400 years has seen the decay of a religion, a system of thought and practice; starting slowly in the 17th century and picking up speed in the 19th. By the end of that century the old Christian ideas and symbols could no longer adequately represent this new world – it had changed too much; while the old concepts were inadequate, and undermined by new knowledge: by science, and by biblical and historical criticism. The pressures to understand and capture this world were intense: the freshness and excitement of new discoveries! A new worldview was there in the making, but as yet all options appeared open – what would our new world look like? Of course, to understand these changes people often looked back, using ideas and images from the past – as Pasternak does here. But it wasn’t a new phase of Christianity that he was seeing; it was springtime of new birth, before a new religion (ideology in the modern parlance) was established. Thus a certain immediacy of experience, and of life – there is a certain lifelessness about ideas that deaden our experiences. Remove them, and we have to think and create, and act for ourselves. Old ideas are like the clothes we wear, take them off… how hot the sunlight feels; how sharp that breeze! No wonder he talks of the time before the Catholic Church, the time of Christianity’s formation, when again everything was fresh and alive; before the Church Fathers put their clothes on.
So he was right to see the mistakes of his generation as a failed attempt to return to the past (and to praise them for it). However, he was wrong to take that failure literally – it wasn’t a return to Christianity, but a return to Religion, a new one yet to be formed…
A new phase of Christianity? Was the intellectual earthquakes at the turn of the 20th century a revival of this moribund religion? Pasternak gives the answer himself:
Our age has understood anew that part of the Gospel which from time long past has been best felt and expressed by artists. It was prominent with the Apostles but then dropped out of sight with the church fathers, in the church, in morals and in politics…. It is the concept that communication between mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.
The Ancient City of Christianity was a ruin by 1920. Yes, there were some intact churches, a few monasteries; and bibles could be seen on street bonfires; a few pages floating into safety.
Of course, as with all ruins, some buildings survive. But is Pompeii a working port?
By 1900 Christianity was no longer the all-encompassing worldview of medieval Europe, that fortress that protected our conceptual life. By then new thought systems had emerged – the State, Communism, Symbolism, and Science. Some were ramshackle camps that have since faded… museum pieces themselves now, which we view alongside Byzantine crosses and Orthodox Icons.
But Pasternak is also right! The last 400 years has seen the decay of a religion, a system of thought and practice; starting slowly in the 17th century and picking up speed in the 19th. By the end of that century the old Christian ideas and symbols could no longer adequately represent this new world – it had changed too much; while the old concepts were inadequate, and undermined by new knowledge: by science, and by biblical and historical criticism. The pressures to understand and capture this world were intense: the freshness and excitement of new discoveries! A new worldview was there in the making, but as yet all options appeared open – what would our new world look like? Of course, to understand these changes people often looked back, using ideas and images from the past – as Pasternak does here. But it wasn’t a new phase of Christianity that he was seeing; it was springtime of new birth, before a new religion (ideology in the modern parlance) was established. Thus a certain immediacy of experience, and of life – there is a certain lifelessness about ideas that deaden our experiences. Remove them, and we have to think and create, and act for ourselves. Old ideas are like the clothes we wear, take them off… how hot the sunlight feels; how sharp that breeze! No wonder he talks of the time before the Catholic Church, the time of Christianity’s formation, when again everything was fresh and alive; before the Church Fathers put their clothes on.
So he was right to see the mistakes of his generation as a failed attempt to return to the past (and to praise them for it). However, he was wrong to take that failure literally – it wasn’t a return to Christianity, but a return to Religion, a new one yet to be formed…
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