What was it about 2025? After Easter that year, some of us wondered whether it would be remembered as the year the poisonous “awokening” began to lose its grip, and something older and quieter began to stir in its place. In 2026 the question has only grown louder.
France, once the “eldest daughter of the Catholic Church” and lately the hardened exemplar of laïcité, is leading the way. This past Easter, the Wall Street Journal reported, 13,234 adults were baptised in its churches, three times the 2019 figure. Teenage baptisms rose to 8,152, ten times the 2019 number. When Pope Leo XIV visited in September, reportedly around 800,000 people attended Mass in the Place de la Concorde, with young people prominent in the crowds, many of them apparently finding faith amid loneliness, war and uncertainty.
Across the Atlantic, The Free Press asked that question. C.S. Lewis did it: a staunch atheist, he reasoned his way back to belief as a young Oxford don and later called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Now two Gen Z philosophy PhD students at Princeton have travelled a similar road. Joe Schmid, 26, spent years arguing against the case for God on his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, until he began to study miracles. “God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” he told Suzy Weiss. His friend Noah McCay, 27, has converted too, and others in the department are reportedly considering it.
Weiss asks whether these young men studied their way into belief or whether the intervention was more divine than that. Catholic theology speaks of the “motives of credibility”: the reasons that make faith reasonable before it is embraced. Today there are many such motives, among them loneliness, emptiness and even plain common sense. And believers know that without grace, none of it happens.
Weiss had taken the train to Princeton because “she wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. She continued, “I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing.”
What I saw in 2025
When I first wrote about this on Garvan Hill, the signs were already accumulating. Dioceses across Britain and Ireland reported sharp rises in catechumens, especially among people in their twenties and thirties. Birmingham had 201, up from 130 the year before, and nearly 70 joined at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. In the United States, the Diocese of Cleveland welcomed over 800 converts at Easter, about 50 per cent more than in 2024.
Two events from that summer stay with me. On 7 July, the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, celebrated Mass in Canterbury Cathedral to commemorate St Thomas Becket. It was the largest Catholic gathering there since the Reformation, and I was privileged to be present. At the end of the ceremony, attended by many people who were not Catholic, the internationally renowned Tenebrae choir sang two hymns, firstly the culminating hymn, the Gregorian chant setting of the Salve Regina. Secondly as a recessional, the quintessentially English anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s Jerusalem.
Then there was Chartres, where thousands of young Europeans walked sixty miles from Paris over three days at Pentecost. Sadly, I was not there, but Rod Dreher was, who first felt the reality of God there as a teenager in 1984, watched the sunburned pilgrims stream into the nave and thought, “These are the people who are going to save Christianity in Europe.” He allowed that it might be fanciful – but clearly his hope was palpable.
After Charlie Kirk
The killing of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 brought another surge of interest. Catholic campus ministry leaders told the Catholic News Agency they were seeing bigger crowds at Mass, with some schools reporting increases of 15 per cent, and many students asking basic questions: what is evil, and how does God allow this? Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, was struck by the size and dignity of the Arizona memorial and compared it to John Paul II’s first visit to America in 1979.
Communion, not just communication
None of this proves a lasting revival. Conversion numbers rise and fall, and enthusiasm in a crowd is not the same as faith over a lifetime. But the pattern across France, Britain, Ireland and the United States is hard to wave away. Christians might remember that on the Day of Pentecost, as recorded in Acts 2, approximately 3,000 people were converted and baptized, marking the birth of the Christian Church. It took a few hundred years to flourish, but those 3000 changed the world forever. It is still a work in progress.
What these young people describe again and again is loneliness, and a hunger for something more than the endless communication that leaves us more isolated. It is the distinction Allen Tate drew in the 1950s between communication and communion, which I wrote about recently. It may be that a generation raised on the first is discovering, in the oldest of places, a taste for the second.
Allen Tate was a Southern American novelist, poet and literary critic, active in the first half of the 20th century. He was well known to the literary establishment of his time – Eliot, Auden, Hemingway and more. For a variety of reasons he is less well known today. There are suggestions that this might be because he converted to Catholicism.
For much of his life he was an atheist but deep down he felt the emptiness underlying his lack of faith. Then, in the 1950s, he converted to Catholicism. This was partly under the influence of Jacques Maritain, his friend at Princeton, where he was for a time Poet in Residence. Maritain was his Godfather. It was a conversion which unsettled the elite WASP establishment of his day.
Marshall McLuhan, a social critic in a slightly later time suggested that his embrace of Rome might equate him with John Henry Newman, making him ‘an American Newman’. Although he died in the faith of Rome his somewhat turbulent way of life bore little resemblance to that of the saintly Newman.
Nevertheless, there were similarities beyond the conversion story. Newman struggled in a very determined way against what he saw as the corrupting liberalism of his day. Tate, particularly after he became a Catholic, battled with corrupting secularism, a deformed child of liberalism, which he saw as an assault on all that was human and divine in our very being.
McLuhan’s great and gently prophetic legacy to the late 20th and early 21st centuries was his acute analysis of communication media, leaving us with the memorable catch-phrase, ‘the media is the message’. Tate, before him, held the view that modern communication was a dead end devoid of any of the character of communion which made human communication of value in the first place.
In Tate’s reading of where the decay began he brought us back to Descartes’ ground-breaking nonsense, ‘I think, therefore I am’. This drove a fatal wedge into the heart of our humanity, splitting our nature in two, separating our body and its power of thinking from our very soul.
René Descartes
Tate held that “When René Descartes’ isolated thought from man’s total being he isolated him from nature, including his own nature; and he divided man against himself. The battle is now between the dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes’ mechanized nature, and the eternal society of the communion of the human spirit.”
In one of his most famous essays Tate addressed the question of what our society had to do to help our culture and our civilisation be everything that it should be and could be. He placed much of the burden of doing that on what he called “the man of letters” That essay, entitled ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’, was published in 1952.
He wrote, “To the question, what should the man of letters be in our time, we should have to find the answer in what we need him to do. He must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true.”
He might have said, he must be Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and more. But it was not just a question of the great stories and the great characters in literature by whom we grow in our understanding of ourselves. There was something more which faced us in his time with its technological revolution already well under way and governing the means of communication.
That was then, this is now when the grip of that governance is much stronger and as Anthropic’s boss, Dario Amodei says in relation to Artificial Intelligence, ”is growing exponentially”, when we don’t even know if we are in the middle of an existential crisis or not”
“But,” he said, “ at our own critical moment, when all languages are being debased by the techniques of mass control, the man of letters might do well to conceive his responsibility more narrowly. He has an immediate responsibility, to other men no less than to himself, for the vitality of language. He must distinguish the difference between mere communication…and the rediscovery of the human condition in the living arts. He must discriminate and defend the difference between mass communication, for the control of men, and the knowledge of man which literature offers us for human participation.”
His preoccupation here echoes the words of T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets (Little Gidding) in what is interpreted as a conversation with the ghost of W.B. Yeats:
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,…
Tate maintained that by these literary arts, one means the arts without which men can live, but without which they cannot live well, or live as men. To keep alive the knowledge of ourselves with which the literary arts continue to enlighten us, to separate them from other indispensable modes of knowledge, and to define their limits, is the intellectual and thus the social function of the writer. He asserted: “Men in a dehumanized society may communicate, but they cannot live in full communion.”
He went on to examine what he called the double retreat from the moral center, of the man of action and the man of letters, that we have completed in our time and suggested an alternative “which would have at least the virtue of recommending the full participation of the man of letters in the action of society….provided we think of society as the City of Augustine and Dante, where it was possible for men to find in the temporal city the imperfect analogue to the City of God.”
Writers, he argued, must reject secularism – which he identified as the idolatry of substituting means for ends. This idolatry had already permeated the culture of the West but it had not gone so far in Europe as it had in regimes eastward of Berlin and in Asia which were deliberately committed to the ideology, preferring barbarism to civilisation. However, even the West’s muddled surrender to means over ends had in his view provoked an intolerable psychic crisis expressing itself as a political crisis.
When he wrote this we were, remember, in the middle of the Cold War.
Man, Tate held, is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do. For doing without knowing is machine behavior, illiberal and servile routine, the secularism with which man’s specific destiny has no connection.
Ultimately Tate recognises that communion for man must be the road to love for each other. This, however, as an objective is simply beyond us. It is something we can only reach through genuine religion leading to the love of God.
“I am not suggesting,” he wrote, “that we all have an obligation of personal love towards one another. I regret that I must be explicit about this matter. No man, under any political dispensation known to us, has been able to avoid hating other men by deciding that it would be a “good thing” to love them; he loves his neighbor, as well as the man he has never seen, only through the love of God. He that saith that he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. (1. John 2,9).
He continues on this theme by stating that he lays it down as a fact that” this is the only solution.” We must, he says, “ love one another or die,” as Auden wrote more than ten years ago. “I cannot believe that Mr. Auden was telling us that a secularized society cannot exist; it obviously exists. He was telling us that a society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, preceded by the usual agonies, secularize itself, – as totalitarian communism has shown us in Russia’s dismal experience. Tate calls on the man of letters to daily renew his dedication to this task. “I do not know who else may be expected to undertake it.”
“The man of letters has, then, in our time a small but critical service to render to man: a service that will be in the future more effective than it is now, when the cult of the literary man shall have ceased to be an idolatry.” This cult was for him the cult which was producing so much dismal writing in the 20th century. Men of letters and their followers, were like the parvenu gods and their votaries of decaying Rome, competing in the dissemination of distraction and novelty.
But the true province of the man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself. The state is the mere operation of society, but culture is the way society lives, the material medium through which men receive the one lost truth which must be perpetually recovered: the truth of what Jacques Maritain calls the “supra-temporal destiny” of man. It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time.
We can find many parallels in our own time with what preoccupied Tate. Indeed Pope LeoXIV’s stark choice as to whether modern man, with all his technological progress, was building Babel or Jerusalem seems incipient in the poet-writer’s thoughts throughout this essay. Remember what happened in Babel? Language as we might have known it perished.
More than half a century after Tate wrote this landmark essay, Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter, Dilexit Nos (24 October 2024),quoted in Pope Leo XIV’ Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, echoes his thoughts and preoccupations about the tragedy which ensues when one half of man’s nature, his human heart, his capacity for communion and love is denied: “If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.”
What is it about 2025? Will it be remembered as the year in which a new awakening finally exposed the shallowness and idiocy of the poisonous ‘awokening’ which has blighted our politics and our societies and mark the beginning of its end.
The Mulberry Bush
That so-called ‘awokening’ nightmare was the surface manifestation of the fatal flaws revealed in the answers Patrick Deneen gave to the question he asked in his landmark book, Why Liberalism Failed.
Liberalism in its late 20th and early 21st century version failed, he wrote, because it did not live up to its promises. We might also say that it failed because it had absorbed the toxic utopian principles of Marxism – as did those earlier Marxist ideologies of the Communist Manifesto (1848), the Russian Revolution and Chinese Maoism, with all their lethal progeny.
All of these, including contemporary Liberalism, promised a more just society but ended up perverting justice – with utterly lethal consequences in their naked Marxist forms, and with socially destructive consequences in its hidden Marxist contemporary forms.
Signs of hope in 2025
What are the signs which 2025 offers that might make us think our civilisation is on a new threshold? Essentially they are signs of a new Judeao-Christian revival – it embraces Catholics, other Christians of various denominations, and practising Jews.
Where do we look for these signs? We might begin with the widely reported phenomenon of Catholic baptisms across the secular West last Easter. Around that time The Economist’s four-minute morning news podcast selected as its ‘word of the week’, ‘Catechumen’. It followed later with a report on the phenomenon we have just mentioned. A sceptical secular world is taking notice.
What is being noticed is that many Catholic dioceses in the UK, Ireland, and the US reported significant growth in conversions to the Catholic faith this Easter, with increases in catechumens and candidates for the Rite of Election, particularly among young adults aged 20s and 30s. This surge is seen in both established dioceses and others across the regions, with some leaders attributing the trend to a societal spiritual crisis and increased interest in the Church’s historical and spiritual truths
Specific examples from the UK and Ireland include,
Westminster Cathedral which saw over 500 attendees at the Rite of Election, with 250 catechumens.
Southwark Archdiocese (London South of the Thames and Kent) reported over 450 participants.
Birmingham saw 201 catechumens and candidates, up from 130 the previous year.
In Motherwell in Scotland numbers rose from 45 to 72 and in
Dublin, nearly 70 individuals joined in the Pro-Cathedral.
These figures, impressive as they are, are dwarfed by the experience of France, which had a surge in adult baptisms this year — at more than 10,000, the highest number since a national annual report on such figures began in 2002. Something is definitely happening!
Canterbury Summer 2025
Something amazing definitely did happen this Summer – Mass in Canterbury Cathedral, celebrated by the Papal Nuncio to the UK, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendia. It happened on July 7, to commemorate St. Thomas Becket. Normally a Mass is celebrated annually in the Catholic Church of St Thomas Becket, but this year’s Mass was the largest Catholic gathering at the cathedral since the Reformation. Disclosure: I had the great privilege of being present at the Mass.
Madeline Tehan reported on this event for the US based Catholic News Agency.“For the first time in modern history, the apostolic nuncio to the United Kingdom has celebrated Mass in England’s most celebrated Anglican cathedral…
During his homily, Maury Buendía said: ‘This Mass of pilgrimage takes place within the context of the jubilee year. It highlights the Christian life as a spiritual journey, moving through life’s trials and joys with hope anchored in Christ. Having travelled as pilgrims today, we do more than just honour a figure from history.’
He continued: ‘The stained-glass windows all around us illustrate the many miracles attributed to St. Thomas in the medieval period. This should be a living story, too. Our world, today as then, is in need of hope. We come in this jubilee year as pilgrims of hope to be inspired by St. Thomas’ holiness and his courageous witness to Christ and his Church.’ ”
In the USA
In the United States ten dioceses, including Memphis, Rockford, and Los Angeles, experienced significant increases in conversions. For the first time in decades, the US Catholic Church has seen more people joining than leaving, a trend that began to shift around 2024.
On September 28, The Spectator reported that in the US, school voucher schemes have seen enrolment in private Christian schools rise dramatically.
What is driving all this? There are definite proximate motives and Christian believers know that these factors are at play – but they also know that without the miracle of grace, nothing like this happens.
Just one moving example – The Burns Family in Ohio
Matthew McDonald, a staff reporter for The National Catholic Register, recounts the story of the Burns family. Their path to the Catholic Church this Easter vigil started with a funeral.
Steve Burns, 43, a mechanical engineer who lives in Avon Lake, Ohio, was raised a Free Methodist. His wife, Corrine, 42, a homemaker who worked for years in a wholesale greenhouse, was raised a Catholic but stopped going to church when she was an adolescent. Their son Ryan, 12, wasn’t baptised.
But when Corrine’s beloved Uncle Tony died in March 2023, she attended his funeral Mass and immediately felt at home. “For the first time I felt right, like I was in the right spot again,” Corrine told the Register. “In my head I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got to get my family in here, too.’ ”
That happened at last Easter’s Vigil Mass at St. Joseph’s in Avon Lake, followed by confirmation and first Communion. At the same Mass, Ryan was baptised, followed by confirmation and first Communion.Steve and Ryan went through the parish’s conversion program – a demanding procedure based on the teaching contained in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
McDonald explains that these are part of a bumper crop in the Diocese of Cleveland, which welcomed over 800 converts at Eastertime 2025, which is about 50% higher than in 2024 (542) and about 75% higher than in 2023 (465). Significant increases in converts are common and widespread. Many are seeing increases not just since last year but also since 2019, the year before the coronavirus shutdowns led to sharp decreases in conversion.
Back in Europe
One of the most spectacular Christian witnessing events of the Summer was surely that reported by Rod Dreher on the pilgrimage of young Europeans – and others – to the Cathedral of Chartres. This was the three-day Pentecost pilgrimage.
“It was astonishing”, Dreher wrote in his blog, which was republished by Bari Weiss on her website, The Free Press , “and gave me a real sense of hope for the future. You will recall that my journey as an adult into Christianity began at Chartres, which I first visited at seventeen, and was overwhelmed by wonder. Back then, in the summer of 1984, I stood at the center of the labyrinth there, looked all around, and felt strongly in my heart that God is real, and that He is calling me to Himself.”
Dreher took a seat near the altar for the Mass, which began with hundreds of the pilgrims, exhausted from having walked the sixty miles from Paris to Chartres in three days, streaming in carrying flags and banners. “They filled the nave, while many more thousands were outside on the parvis watching and listening to the Mass over loudspeakers and a giant screen. I saw the sunburned faces of these kids passing by, and was in awe. I thought, ‘These are the people who are going to save Christianity in Europe.’ Maybe fanciful, I don’t know, but if it’s going to happen, it will be through them.”
The Charlie Kirk Effect
Last, but perhaps by no means least, is what we read in this report by Amira Abuzeid, also of the Catholic News Agency on September 15. She was reporting on what some are calling “the Charlie Kirk effect,” “People across the nation, including many college students who are not ordinarily churchgoers, have decided to go to church since the assassination last week of the conservative Christian political activist Charlie Kirk.”
Matt Zerrusen, co-founder of Newman Ministry, a Catholic nonprofit that operates on about 250 campuses nationwide, told CNA he has spoken with Catholic college ministry leaders throughout the country over the last few days, and “every one of them told me they’ve seen bigger crowds” at Masses and lots of people “they’ve never seen before.”
“I have not talked to anyone who has not seen an increase in Mass attendance,” Zerrusen said. “Some schools are reporting increases of 15%.”He told CNA that many more college students are also asking for spiritual direction. “So many people are asking ‘What do I do?’, ‘What is evil? How does God allow this?” Zerrusen said. “They are asking so many basic questions.”
One priest at a large state school in the North East told Zerrusen he spoke over the weekend with 15 young men he had never seen before who sought him out for faith advice. Zerrusen said the spiritual “revival” Kirk’s death has amplified what one he has been observing for months.He pointed out that more than 400 students at Texas A&M University in College Station are attending the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) class at St. Mary’s Catholic Center near campus. Social media users say Kirk inspired them to go to church.
Charlie Kirk said many things which ordinary good people found objectionable. Many have been misinterpreted and the jury may still be out on those. But there can be little doubt that the bullet which severed his neck was inspired by hatred for the Christian principles of sexual morality which he championed. It is hard not to see him as a martyr.
Peggy Noonan wrote a column on ‘Charlie Kirk and the New Christian GOP’ in the Wall Street Journal in which she said:
“While watching the Charlie Kirk memorial Sunday, I was swept by a memory that yielded a realization.
“The memorial, in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., has been well described. There was a height to it, and a gentleness, with a few rhetorical exceptions. More than 90,000 people attended. TV and online viewership is estimated to have reached tens of millions.Halfway through it struck me that the memorial might have been the biggest Christian evangelical event since the first visit to America of Pope John Paul II, in October 1979. He was a year into his papacy. ‘Be not afraid!’ he said, and took America by storm.
“At the memorial there was an altar call—at a public memorial for a political figure. It was singular, and moving. So was the dignity and peacefulness of the crowd. They didn’t indulge their anger or cry out against the foe. It was as if they understood that would be bad for the country. I couldn’t remember a time a big Trump-aligned group did that, as a corporate act, in the past 10 years. It struck me as a coming of age. They were taking responsibility.
“There is something you could have said at any time the past decade that is true now in some new way. It is that the GOP is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been. A big story the past decade was that so many Trump supporters, especially but not only working-class ones, were misunderstood as those crazy Christians but in fact were often unaffiliated with any faith tradition and not driven to politics by such commitments.
“But it looks to me as if a lot of those folks have been in some larger transit since 2015, as Kirk himself was. He entered the public stage to speak politics but said by the end that his great work was speaking of Christ. If he had a legacy, he told an interviewer, ‘I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.’ ”
These stories suggest there are seeds of new life in the Catholic Church in many parts of the world. Particularly encouraging is the growth on College campuses allowing hope that the insidious growth of Wokeism may have peaked and that truth as always will out.
In opening scenes of Terrence Malick’s film, The Thin Red Line, the raw recruit, Private Witt (above), who has gone AWOL from his company in the run up to the battle of Guadalcanal, muses about the problem of evil. He is wandering around a peaceful Melanesian village in a South Pacific island, its inhabitants unaffected by the war raging across the world.
The words he utters to himself are the original words written by James Jones, the author of the novel on which the film is based, published in 1962. Jones asked explicitly:
“This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?” Jones was a veteran of that war.
We keep asking this question even though we’ve had the answer for as long as mankind has been inhabiting this earth. Not only do we ignore the answer but we also choose to muddle ourselves in all sorts of ways in trying to deny that there is an answer. We seem to prefer the darkness Jones refers to than to pass into the light.
Ross Douthat, columnist with The New York Times, writes periodically on religious issues. He does his best to help us all cut through that darkness. He deals with evil in the context of the influence it has over our faith in God. Appalled by evil, some conclude that there simply can’t be a creator — or at least not a beneficent one — because the world is too laden with suffering and woe.”
There is, he finds, a muddle in their argument because its proponents often profess to be atheists. It isn’t properly speaking an argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God does not exist.
This argument of course ignores the multitude of good things in this world and what their source might be.
Rather than a straight rebuttal of an argument which is as muddled as this one, he suggests a set of challenges to it.
The first challenge he offers emphasises the limits of what the argument from evil establishes. It does not support an argument that God doesn’t exist, nor that the universe lacks a supernatural order. At best it seems to say that the traditional Christian or classical-theistic conception of God’s perfect goodness is somehow erroneous or overdrawn.
The second challenge is that deniers of a ‘good God’ would do well to note that the books of the Abrahamic tradition, which Jews and Christians themselves accept as divinely inspired, contain some of the strongest complaints against the apparent injustices of the world. They are potentially much more worrying than those found in any atheistic tract. Check out the Bible
Douthat points out that the question of why God permits so much suffering is integral to Jewish and Christian Scripture, to the point where it appears that if the Judeo-Christian God exists, he expects his followers to wrestle with the question. Which means that you don’t need to leave all your intuitive reactions to the harrowing aspects of existence at the doorway of religious faith; there is plenty of room for complaint and doubt and argument inside the fold.
Finally, there is the evidence of the enormous good which Judeao-Christian civilisation has bestowed on this world, in the light of which the exclusive focus on the problem of evil seems a little overblown. Douthat suggests that “even if that evil makes it hard for you to believe in a God of perfect power, you still shouldn’t give up hope that something very good indeed has a role in the order of the world.”
But to return to the question posed by James Jones we must, and would be fools not to, resort to the historical sacred documents we have in Holy Scripture.
Romano Guardini shows us what we are really up against. In a chapter on ‘The Enemy’ in his meditations on the life and teachings of Christ in his book, The Lord, he gives us a very clear vision and understanding of the source of all evil in the world. He does this in the context of the accounts of Christ’s miracles in the New Testament – and one in particular.
Then there was brought to him a possessed man who was blind and dumb; and he cured him so that he spoke and saw. And all the crowds were amazed, and they said, ‘Can this be the Son of David?’ But the Pharisees, hearing this, said ‘This man does not cast out devils except by Beelzebub, the prince of devils.’ And knowing their thoughts Jesus said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then shall his kingdom stand? . . . But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you’. (Matt. 12:22–28).
He tells us that what is reported here is essential to any genuine understanding of the New Testament. The account, he says, suggests similar cases of possession that Jesus has cured. “Not as a doctor cures; not even as Jesus himself has usually cured, by simply applying his miraculous powers of healing to the ravaged body. Here, behind the torment of body and soul, the Lord recognizes an evil power: the Demon, Satan. It is he who has made the invalid his abode; the physical pain involved is a result of his terrible habitation. It is he whom Jesus attacks, dislodging him by sheer spiritual force, and with him the accompanying ailment.”
He is aware that sceptical and ultra-rationalist moderns protest against the existence of intangible powers. He says they willingly enough recognise natural reality on the one hand, spiritual norms on the other: given conditions of being and of intention. But then they baulk, afraid of fantastic folly. All reference to the demonic smacks of the unclean, of things belonging to a lower level of religion that must be overcome. Here, he says, lies the crux of our attitude toward Jesus: do we accept him, once and for all, as our ultimate authority in everything, or do we rely solely on our own judgment?
He says that “If we think as Christians, we accept him as the starting point and norm of all truth, and we listen to everything he says with open minds, eager to learn, particularly when we are dealing, not with chance remarks of Jesus, but with a fundamental attitude that asserts itself again and again. The Lord’s acceptance of the inevitable struggle with satanic powers belongs to the kernel of his Messianic consciousness. He knows that he has been sent not only to bear witness to the truth, to indicate a way, to animate a vital religious attitude, to establish contact between God and man; but also to break the power of those forces which oppose the divine will.
“For Jesus there is more than the mere possibility of evil as the price of human freedom; more than the inclination to evil, fruit of individual or collective (inherited) sin. Jesus recognizes a personal power that fundamentally wills evil: evil per se. It is not satisfied by the achievement of positive values through wicked means; it does not simply accept the evil along with the good. Here is something or someone who positively defies divinity and attempts to tear the world from God’s hands—even to dethrone God.”
Isn’t this the answer to the cri de coeur of James Jones, echoed by Malick? Jones asks, “Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known? … Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?” One senses that the question intuits the answer.
Guardini goes on to assert that the demon’s plan is to lead the world into apostasy and self-destruction. This is what Holy Scripture means when it says that Satan creates that darkness which refuses the light that comes from God and is the seducer of mankind; that “He was a murderer from the beginning” for “by the envy of the devil, death came into the world” (John 8:44; Wisdom 2:24).
“The Bible often speaks of him as lord of a “kingdom,” founder of a perverted order in which the hearts and minds of men—their creations, their deeds, their relations to things and to each other—seem sensible and coherent, but actually are senseless and incoherent. Long passages in John’s gospel describe Satan’s attempts to establish a kingdom of evil in opposition to God’s holy kingdom, anti-world to the new divine creation unfolding.”
This was the struggle witnessed by and bewildering Jones and his creation, Private Witt, in the horrors of Guadalcanal. It is the struggle which bewilders us as we contemplate the atrocities of October 7 on the border of Israel, of the devastation in Gaza, in Ukraine, Sudan and the Congo today.
Devastation on the Ukrainian-Russian border (NYT image)
But Guardini reassures us that Satan is no principle, no elementary power, but a rebellious, fallen creature who frantically attempts to set up a kingdom of appearances and disorder. He has power, but only because man has sinned. He is powerless against the heart that lives in humility and truth. His dominion reaches as far as man’s sinfulness, and will collapse on the Day of Judgment—a term long in itself, for every moment of evil is dreadfully long for those who stand in danger of Satan—but only a moment as compared with eternity.
“‘Soon’,” as the Apocalypse reveals, it will be over (3:11; 22:7). Jesus knows that he has been sent forth against Satan. He is to penetrate Satan’s artificial darkness with the ray of God’s truth; to dispel the cramp of egoism and the brittleness of hate with God’s love; to conquer evil’s destructiveness with God’s constructive strength. The murkiness and confusion which Satan creates in men’s groping hearts are to be clarified by the holy purity of the Most High. Thus Jesus stands squarely against the powers of darkness; he strives to enter into the ensnared souls of men—to bring light to their consciences, quicken their hearts and liberate their powers for good.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – a central figure in Girard’s journey
Rene Girard’s first book, the fruit of his thinking and research in the 1950s was published in 1960. It was called Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Writing it resulted in not just a fascinating study of the genesis of great writing but it also transformed his own life forever.
He describes his attitude and disposition as he started work on that book. It was “very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking.” He realised that at the heart of his negative attitude was just one manifestation of his theory of imitative desire, mimesis. He was following the crowd.
In writing Deceit, Desire and the Novel he explores what he takes to be the mind, the thought process and even the souls of great novelists. Among whom, as explicit models of his theory, are Marcel Proust, Dostoevsky and Cervantes.
He argues that with a number of great writers their first conception of their novels was very different from what they ultimately became. “The author’s first draft is an attempt at self-justification, which can assume two main forms. It may focus on a wicked hero, who is really the writer’s scapegoat, his mimetic rival, the one whom he desires to debunk, whose wickedness will be demonstrated by the end of the novel. It may also focus on a “good” hero, a knight in shining armour, with whom the writer identifies, and this hero will be vindicated by the end of the novel.”
But Girard then puts the writer to the test and argues that If the writer has a potential for greatness, after writing his first draft, as he rereads it, he sees the trashiness of it all. His project fails. The self-justification the novelist had intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-examination. The novelist comes to realise that he has been the puppet of his own devil. He and his enemy are truly indistinguishable. The novelist of genius thus becomes able to describe the wickedness of the other from within himself, whereas before it was completely artificial.
“This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer. It is an existential downfall. Very often this downfall is written symbolically, as illness or death, in the conclusion. In the case of Proust and Dostoyevsky it is explicitly presented as a change in outlook. Or to take Don Quixote, on his deathbed he sees finally his own mimetic madness, which is also illness and death. And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible.”
In this imagining of the writer’s mind, Girard sees the following happening: once the writer experiences this collapse and a new perspective, he can go back to the beginning and rewrite the work from the point of view of this downfall. It is no longer self-justification. It is not necessarily self-indictment, but the characters he creates are no longer “Manichean” good guys or bad guys.
“So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions are at least implicitly religious.
“When I realized this, I had reached a decisive point in the writing of my first book, above all in my engagement with Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky’s Christian symbolism was important for me. Demons (The Possessed), presents Stepan Verkhovensky, whose deathbed conversion is particularly moving, but there is also the end of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The old Verkhovensky discovers that he was a fool all the time and turns to the Gospel of Christ. This is the existential conversion that is demanded by a great work of art.
“When I wrote the last chapter of my first book, I had had a vague idea of what I would do, but as the chapter took form I realized I was undergoing my own version of the experience I was describing. I was particularly attracted to the Christian elements, for example, Stepan Verkhovensky’s final journey… So I began to read the Gospels and the rest of the Bible. And I became a Christian.”
Girard, however, later reflecting back on that conversion, realised that it was no more than what he called “an intellectual-literary conversion”, something deeply satisfying, even enjoyable. But he realised that his initial conversion did not imply any change of life. The change in his life came when he found out that he had a cancerous spot in the middle of his forehead. A biopsy revealed a cancerous growth. “From that time on I was pretty scared. For all I knew, I had melanoma, the worst form of skin cancer.”
It turned out to be a false scare but it brought him to a point where his intellectual conversion, which was a very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even, was totally changed. “I could not but view the cancer and the period of intense anxiety as a warning and a kind of expiation, and now this conversion was transformed into something really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious.”
This was an agonising time. But for him it was significant that it coincided with the liturgical period of Lent in 1959. He was aware of this although he had never been a practicing Catholic. He was now thirty-five years old. Then on the Wednesday before Easter, his doctor gave him the ‘all clear’. That Wednesday is traditionally the end of the lenten period of penance, the beginning of the holiest part of Holy Week.
After that experience, he went to confession and had his children baptized. His wife and he were remarried by a priest. So on Holy Thursday he went to Mass and received the Eucharist. “I felt that God liberated me just in time for me to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.”
He later reflected that the prior conversion was too easy. “it entailed no demands or commitments which I perceived at the time, but it prepared the way. So with the definitive conversion I was both emotionally and mentally prepared to accept God’s grace and believe.”
In his interview with James Williams, the editor of A Girard Reader, a collection of key extracts from his books, he describes himself as just ‘an ordinary Christian’.
In that interview he revealed some things about what being a Christian meant to him and what he saw as some essential commitments for any true Christian. Williams asked him about his dispositions towards non-Christians and a pluralistic society? He was asked “Do you favour converting all non-Christians to Christianity?”
Girard simply recalls what Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that he told his disciples to go into the world and make converts. “If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we respect other religions more than our own and act only according to politically correct principles, peace will break out all over the world is fantasy and delusion. I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really believe. The fear of religious tyranny – meaning the forced imposition of our Faith on others – is an anachronism. It is a false issue which puts political correctness ahead of the truth and the only way of telling it (the truth) is by connecting with people”
On a question related to the mission Christ gave his disciples, Williams also asked should one’s Christian faith enter into one’s approach to other religions and cultures? Or is it necessary to “bracket out” one’s faith in order to do scholarly work or to be a thinker?
To this he answered, “I don’t think you can bracket out a faith which is responsible for the best in the modern world. That is totally artificial. I don’t think you can bracket out any idea or ideal that you really hold — or that holds you. If you bracket out something that is central to your life, you become a shadow of yourself and your intelligence is not effective.”
Asked about those who advocate the suspension of their own belief in their approach to other religions he said, “No, that is a Stoic term, and you can practice that if you believe in Stoicism. But it has nothing to do with being a Christian or with real Christianity.
“If you believe that Christianity is the truth, including societal truth, you are not going to reach the truth by bracketing it out. You can see the result of this method all around us, in the current academic debacle for instance. The biblical scholars who are still talking in terms of bracketing truth out are still thinking in nineteenth-century terms. They are on their way to a goal which the deconstructors reached long ago. If we must have nihilism, let us not dilute it with water and let us drink it full strength, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the deconstructors. In order to reach the end of the present crisis we must…not interminably repeat attempts which already failed a hundred years ago, like “the quest for the historical Jesus.” Mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate orthodox theology.
The interviewer then raised the question of freedom and totalitarianism. Girard responded by drawing attention to what he saw as the two forms of totalitarianism. One tries to destroy the concern for victims openly and directly. Its proponents basically attempt to kill as many victims for as little reason as possible. To him this was effectively a process of mass scapegoating.
Then he went on to point out that today there is in place a process of insidious totalitarianism. In this it is hard not to think that he was foreseeing the bizarre way in which political correctness has degenerated in all the excesses of ‘woke’ culture.
“Communism in many of its forms was insidious, but it will probably be replaced by ideologies still more insidious which outflank the Gospel on the left, presenting themselves as better than the Gospel…Some of these people see themselves as super-Christians, but they are heirs of the predecessors of Marx who thought they could achieve a new humanism. Feuerbach, for example. But they laid the groundwork for a disrespect of truth. I think it would be helpful to study Feuerbach, who was a primary agent of the transformation of Christianity into Marxism.”
On the question of death, dying and assisted suicide he had this to say.
“The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe,…euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times, It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence.
Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.
Rene Girard firmly believed that Christianity had all the answers to the existential problems which confront us in this world and we are presented with choices which our mimetic desires suggest to us.
“One should always look to the Gospels.”
“What are the prescriptions of the Kingdom of God? Basically, give up a dispute when mimetic rivalry is taking over. Provide help to victims and refuse all violence. I find the allegory of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 to be a key text; it’s all there. When we identify with the person in need or who has been victimized, we encounter the Son of Man, Jesus. What the mimetic theory as such facilitates is the understanding that these ethical prescriptions or principles are against the mimetic spirit of the mob. The Gospels show that faith emerges when individuals come out of the mob.
“All the excesses of the modern world are distortions of Christian truth. The fact that there is a new type of individual in Christianity is the most important thing in the world. The Christian person is new and would have been viewed by traditional cultures as subversive. The only difference is that our narcissistic culture is a deviation and a caricature of the Christian person, not its fulfillment.”
