Via Moderna

Scott Hahn is one of the guys I had in mind originally when The League of Bearded Catholics first popped into my brain. He is certainly an Honorary Bearded Catholic, if he will have the title. Below, he and Fr. Robert Barron discuss just what the hell happened with modernity;



I'm grateful to have so many - really, a bumper crop - of wise and inspiring voices in the Church in such a challenging age. We miss the saints in our midst, sometimes.

Since my youth I have been, it's no good to deny, somewhat at war with modernity, and have spent my adult life discovering why. Partly, largely, it is because the modern age is and has been so self obsessed, myopic and amnesiac. It's not so much that we reject the wisdom of ages past - what Hahn calls the Via Antiqua - we simply (the great mass of us, very much including our ruling elite) don't know anything about "ages past", and what we think we know is mostly dead wrong. When we take any trouble to look back (which is not often) we see history in a fun-house mirror. Modernity is a kind of disease of the mind, very much like that suffered by many teenagers. We are not only sure we know everything worth knowing, we are almost sure that no one else - especially anyone older - knows anything at all.

This is why, I think, Tolkien worked on me like a kind of spell when I first read LOTR in college. It was the first beachhead the Via Antiqua really firmly established in my imagination. I had read the bible off and on my whole life, but it had remained mostly opaque to me. Though I gave it my best, Bible reading (I'm sure the language had something to do with it) was like looking at a frieze in some Greek temple. The figures were solid enough, but did not seem to be really alive. With Tolkien, the air of Middle Earth blew in bearing the scents of pastures and woodlands, and carrying faint voices and music. There was life here.

I had sensed early on that there was something just nuts and upside-down about the world (I mean as I knew it... the American suburbia that could not recall a time before television), but Tolkien awakened in me the perception of all that had come before, and which, with breathtaking suddeness (less than a century), had been left behind in a fog and become barely the memory of a memory.

Chesterton happened to be especially awake and alert during this process. We in the modern West grew up in a landscape shaped by the footprints of giants. We have known nothing else, and so the landscape seems normal enough, to us. But Chesterton and the other TLBC patrons were around, thinking and writing, when these giants - great steaming, clanking metal giants, belching smoke - were still striding around. They could smell them at breakfast and see them from their windows. The Four Patrons had a foot in each epoch - ancient and modern - and could articulate the characteristics of both because the contrasts were so vivid and stark. This is the common thread that runs through their art, and that makes them so compelling to me.

Many others caught the same whiff of living air in Tolkien, but so few of us knew what to do with it. I was in college (as are many of his readers when they first find him) and though I was deeply moved - shaken, even (not shaken as in "upset", but shaken as in "shaken awake"), I had no idea where to go from there. I knew I did not want to become one of THOSE Tolkien fans... the ones who dressed funny and learned Elvish and would talk of nothing else. It was harmless enough, mostly, but there was also a kind of sadness to some of these desperately seeking people. They (like me) knew they had found something in Tolkien, but did not know what. Some seemed adrift in the flotsam of Tolkiens tale, all the incidentals -  runes and armor and architecture - and never found the solid footing underlying it all, the riverbed under Tolkien's flowing current.

And many never will. I just finished watching a National Geographic documentary on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings wherein Tolkien's Catholic faith, the Catholicity and religiosity of so much of the story, was either studiously ignored or completely missed. There was a great deal of talk about Finnish saga and something about the rain forests and Cate Blanchett said some things about, well... courage and friendship and all. But the essential spirituality of the work was mostly absent.

One lady got very close, however, in saying that LOTR asks the question, "Could we, today, do this? Could we un-make something that never should have been made?"

It seems an easy enough question when we are talking about un-making (destroying) something clearly horrible like, oh... a giant robot that shoots death rays, or a mutant sewer alligator, or Jersey Shore. But LOTR asks whether we can - whether we have the will - to destroy something we find very useful and powerful and even lovely, in a way... whether we will destroy our precious. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to put the genie back in the bottle... and then destroy the bottle?

Comments

[CatFoundations]

Good afternoon,
Great topic in this post. I had a course with Hahn and he spent a lecture outlining the expansion of the via moderna. I surely think we can put the genie back in the bottle; well, you can, and I can, and so can the other person. God willing, our life is a witness to those around us to "go back" to a simple and small life.

Have you heard of Dr. John Senior? He is worth a look for you if you have not read or heard him yet.

Merry Christmas.
Cheers!
Mark

[Patrick]

I'm a little disappointed that Hahn seems to, at the end of this video, give this interpretation method - "via moderne" - any value compared to the "via antiqua" way. (He says you have to "weigh the Spinoza approach in a balance with the ancient way" starting at 8:10).

Either Scripture is the divinely inspired Word of God or it is not. If it is, then it most definitely is "internally coherent" and it is *our* weakness that prevents us from fully comprehending the completeness of the redemption story contained therein. If it is a bunch of human authors addressing particular audiences, then it seems the Holy Spirit is "written out", as it were, of authorship of the work: in which case we can do things like disregard parts that we don't like or re-interpret Scripture without other authority depending on our tastes. In fact, we can disregard the whole Bible if it is just some peoples' opinions, uninspired by a transcendent God.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-intellectual or anything. It's just that either the Bible is divinely inspired or it isn't. If yes: it's coherent and we need not deal with the specifics of authors addressing audiences: *all* the book's value will be in the eternal Holy Spirit. If it is not: forget via moderne - why be a Christian at all?

Perhaps I've misinterpreted what Hahn said?

[TH2]

My favourite line of the post:

But Chesterton and the other TLBC patrons were around, thinking and writing, when these giants - great steaming, clanking metal giants, belching smoke - were still striding around. They could smell them at breakfast and see them from their windows.

[Athos]

Providentially, Peter Jackson's extended version DVD set of Fellowship of the Ring has extraordinary commentaries that make no bones about Tolkien's Catholic world view. Very much worth seeing.