Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  A final personal word, if you will permit me. As a convert to the Church and, accordingly, as one who is familiar with the point of view of a rather typical denizen of the secular culture of the United States, I can address one aspect of the matter of the evangelization of a culture of which born Catholics—that is, those who have, so to speak, never seen the Church from the outside—may not be sufficiently aware. It is, or was for me, the very steadfastness of the Church, which is perhaps its most noticeable mark, a steadfastness which is, of course, a scandal and contradiction to some and a sign to others, as grace permits. To me at one time it was, I admit, a bit of both. Depending on which, the contradiction or the sign, the Church is seen variously in a culture as reactionary, hidebound, medieval, and the like—or it is viewed for what it is, as Peter’s Rock guarding the sacred deposit of the faith amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of culture and history.

  One cannot fail to be aware of the manifold calls for change, from both within and without the Church, a change or modification of this or that doctrine, this or that discipline. I have no intention of addressing any of the current matters at issue, of which I am sure you are more knowledgeable than I. The Church can indeed change, has changed, might now or in the future change in its encounter with a particular culture, my own included. But I need not warn you, I am sure, of the dangers of overacculturation. We know what happened to some of the mainline Protestant denominations who are attuned to the opinion polls, so to speak, and trim their sails accordingly as the winds of culture shift. Instead of serving as the yeast which leavens the cultural lump, they tend to disappear into the culture.

  By remaining faithful to its original commission, by serving its people with love, especially the poor, the lonely, and the dispossessed, and by not surrendering its doctrinal steadfastness, sometimes even the very contradiction of culture by which it serves as a sign, surely the Church serves culture best.

  Why Are You a Catholic?

  THIS ASSIGNMENT AND THE question above (which is sometimes asked in the same context) arouse in me, I’ll admit, certain misgivings. One reason, the first that comes to mind, is that the prospect of giving one’s “testament,” saying it straight out, puts me in mind of an old radio program on which people, mostly show-business types as I recall, uttered their resounding credos, which ended with a sonorous Ed Murrow flourish: This—I Believe.

  Another reason for reticence is that novelists are a devious lot to begin with, disinclined to say anything straight out, especially about themselves, since their stock-in-trade is indirection, if not guile, coming at things and people from the side so to speak, especially the blind side, the better to get at them. If anybody says anything straight out, it is apt to be one of their characters, a character, moreover, for which they have not much use.

  But since one is obliged by ordinary civility to give a response, the temptation is to utter a couple of sentences to get it over with, and let it go at that. Such as: I am a Catholic, or, if you like, a Roman Catholic, a convert to the Catholic faith. The reason I am a Catholic is that I believe that what the Catholic Church proposes is true.

  I’d as soon let it go at that and go about my business. The Catholic faith is, to say the least, very important to me, but I have not the least desire to convert anyone or engage in an apologetic or polemic or a “defense of the Faith.” But a civil question is entitled to a civil answer and this answer, while true enough, can be taken to be uncivil, even peremptory. And it hardly answers the question.

  One justifies the laconicness as a reaction to the current fashion of confessional autobiographies written not only by show-biz types and writers and politicians but by respectable folk as well, confessions which contain not only every sort of sonorous This—I Believe but every conceivable sexual misadventure as well. The sincerity and the prodigality of the confessions seem to be understood to be virtues.

  There is also a native reticence at work here. It has to do with the disinclination of Americans to discuss religion and sex in the company of their peers.

  When the subject of religion does arise, at least in the South, the occasion is often an uncivil one, a challenge or a provocation, or even an insult. It happens once in a while, for example, that one finds oneself in a group of educated persons, one of whom, an educated person of a certain sort, may venture some such offhand remark as

  Of course, the Roman Catholic Church is not only a foreign power but a fascist power.

  Or, when in a group of less educated persons, perhaps in a smalltown barbershop, one of whom, let us say an ex-member of the Ku Klux Klan—who are not bad fellows actually, at least hereabouts, except when it comes to blacks, Jews, and Catholics—when one of them comes out with something like

  The Catholic Church is a piece of shit

  then one feels entitled to a polite rebuttal in both cases, in the one with something like “Well, hold on, let us examine the terms, power, foreign, fascist—” and so on, and in the case of the other, responding in the same tone of casual barbershop bonhomie with, say, “Truthfully, Lester, you’re something of a shit yourself, even for white trash—” without in either case disrupting, necessarily, the general amiability.

  Yet another reason for reticence in matters religious has to do with the infirmity of language itself. Language is a living organism and, as such, is subject to certain organic ailments. In this case it is the exhaustion and decrepitude of words themselves, an infirmity which has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the sentences they form. The words of religion tend to wear out and get stored in the attic. The word “religion” itself has a certain unction about it, to say nothing of “born again,” “salvation,” “Jesus,” even though it is begging the question to assume therefore that these words do not have valid referents. And it doesn’t help that when religious words are used publicly, at least Christian words, they are often expropriated by some of the worst rogues around, the TV preachers.

  So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the tasks of the saint is to renew language, to sing a new song. The novelist, no saint, has a humbler task. He must use every ounce of skill, cunning, humor, even irony, to deliver religion from the merely edifying.

  In these peculiar times, the word “sin” has been devalued to mean everything from slightly naughty excess (my sin was loving you) to such serious lapses as “emotional unfulfillment,” the stunting of one’s “growth as a person,” and the loss of “intersubjective communication.” The worse sin of all, according to a book I read about one’s growth as a person, is the “failure of creativity.” One reason the poet and novelist these days have a hankering for apocalypse, the end of the old world and the beginning of the new, is surely their sense that only then can language be renewed, by destroying the old and starting over. Things fall apart but words regain their value. A boy sees an ordinary shell on the beach, picks it up as if it were a jewel he had found, recognizes it, names it. Now the name does not conceal the shell but celebrates it.

  Nevertheless, however decrepit the language and however one may wish to observe the amenities and avoid offending one’s fellow Americans, sometimes the question which is the title of this article is asked more or less directly.

  When it is asked just so, straight out, just so:

  “Why are you a Catholic?”

  I usually reply,

  “What else is there?”

  I justify this smart-mouthed answer when I sense that the question is, as it usually is, a smart-mouthed question.

  In my experience, the question is usually asked by two or three sorts of people. One knows quite well what is meant by all three.

  One sort is perhaps a family acquaintance or friend of a friend or long-ago schoolmate or distant kin, most likely a Presbyterian lady. There is a ce
rtain type of Southern Presbyterian lady, especially Georgian, who doesn’t mince words.

  What she means is: how in the world can you, a Southerner like me, one of us, of a certain class and background which encompasses the stark chastity of a Presbyterian Church or the understated elegance of an Episcopal Church (but not a Baptist or Methodist Church), a Southern Christian gentleman, that is to say—how can you become one of them, meaning that odd-looking baroque building down the street (the wrong end of the street) with those statues (Jesus pointing to his heart, which has apparently been exposed by open-heart surgery)—meaning those Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Cajuns, Hispanics, Syrians, and God knows who else—though God knows they’re fine people and I love them all—but I mean there’s a difference between a simple encounter with God in a plain place with one’s own kind without all that business of red candles and beads and priest in a box—I mean, how can you?

  The second questioner is a scientific type, not just any scientist, but the sort who for certain reasons has elected a blunt manner, which he takes to be allowed by friendship and by his scientific mien—perhaps a psychiatrist friend, with their way of fixing the patient with a direct look which seeks to disarm by its friendly directness, takes charming leave to cut through the dross of smalltalk and asks the smiling direct question: “Why are you a Catholic?” But there’s a question behind the question: I mean, for God’s sake, religion is all very well, humans in any culture have a need for emotional bonding, community, and even atonement—in the sense of atonement—I myself am a Unitarian Universalist, with some interesting input of Zen lately—but I mean, as if it were not strange enough to elect one of those patriarchal religions which require a Father God outside the cosmos, not only that but that he, this Jewish Big Daddy, elected out of the entire cosmos to enter the history of an insignificant tribe on an insignificant planet, it and no other, a belief for which, as you well know, there is not the slightest scientific evidence—not only that, but of the several hundred Jewish-Christian religions, you pick the most florid and vulgar of the lot—why that?

  Yet another sort could be a New Age type, an amorphous group ranging from California loonies like Shirley MacLaine to the classier Joseph Campbell who, as wildly different as they are, share a common stance toward all credos: that they are to be judged, not by their truth or falsity, sense or nonsense, but by their mythical liveliness. Here the question is not challenging but congratulatory, not: “Why are you a Catholic?” but “So you are a Catholic? How odd and interesting!”

  Episcopalians are too polite and gentlemanly to ask the question—and are somewhat inhibited, besides, by their own claim on the word “Catholic.”

  Jews, whatever they may think of the Catholic Church, are too intuitive to ask the question, having, as they do, a sense of a commonality here which comes of being an exotic minority, which is to say: Never mind what I think of your religion or you of mine; we’ve both got enough trouble at least to leave each other alone.

  So the question remains: “Why are you a Catholic?”

  Asked from curiosity alone, it is a civil question and deserves a civil answer.

  Accordingly, I will answer here in a cursory, somewhat technical, and almost perfunctory manner which, as unsatisfactory as it may be, will at least avoid the usual apologetic and polemic. For the traditional defense of the Catholic claim, however valid it may be, is generally unavailing for reasons both of the infirmity of language and the inattentiveness of the age. Accordingly, it is probably a waste of time.

  My answer to the question, then, has more to do with science and history, science in its root sense of knowing, truth-seeking; history in the sense that, while what is true is true, it may be that one seeks different truths in different ages.

  The following statements I take to be commonplaces. Technically speaking, they are for my purposes axioms. If they are not perceived as such, as self-evident, there is no use arguing about them, let alone the conclusions which follow from them. Here they are:

  The old modern age has ended. We live in a post-modern as well as a post-Christian age which as yet has no name.

  It is post-Christian in the sense that people no longer understand themselves, as they understood themselves for some fifteen hundred years, as ensouled creatures under God, born to trouble, and whose salvation depends upon the entrance of God into history as Jesus Christ.

  It is post-modern because the Age of Enlightenment with its vision of man as a rational creature, naturally good and part of the cosmos, which itself is understandable by natural science—this age has also ended. It ended with the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

  The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

  As the century draws to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it can be described.

  It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.

  I will give it a name which at least describes what it does. I would call it the age of the theorist-consumer. All denizens of the age tend to be one or the other or both.

  Darwin, Newton, and Freud were theorists. They pursued truth more or less successfully by theory—from which, however, they themselves were exempt. You will look in vain in Darwin’s Origin of the Species for an explanation of Darwin’s behavior in writing Origin of the Species. Marx and Stalin, Nietzsche and Hitler were also theorists. When theory is applied, not to matter or beasts, but to man, the consequence is that millions of men can be eliminated without compunction or even much interest. Survivors of both Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s terror reported that their oppressors were not “horrible” or “diabolical” but seemed, on the contrary, quite ordinary, even bored by their actions, as if it were all in a day’s work.

  The denizens of the present age are both sentimental and bored. Last year the Russians and the Americans united to save three stranded whales and the world applauded. It seemed a good thing to do and the boredom lifted for a while. This was not true, unfortunately, of the million Sudanese who died of starvation the same year.

  Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.

  Now euthanasia is beginning.

  Don’t forget that the Germans used to be the friendliest, most sentimental people on earth. But euthanasia was instituted, not by the Nazis, but by the friendly democratic Germans of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic was followed by the Nazis.

  It is not “horrible” that over a million unborn children were killed in America last year. For one thing, one does not see many people horrified. It is not horrible, because in an age of theory and consumption it is appropriate that actions be carried out as the applications of theory and the needs of consumption require.

  Theory supersedes political antinomies like “conservative” versus “liberal,” Fascist versus Communist, right versus left.

  Accordingly, it should not be surprising that present-day liberals favor abortion, just as the Nazis did years ago. The only difference is that the Nazis favored it for theoretical reasons (eugenics, racial purity), while present-day liberals favor it for consumer needs (unwanted, inconvenient).

  Nor should it be surprising that for the same reasons liberals not only favor abortion but are now beginning to favor euthanasia, as the Nazis did.

  Liberals understandably see no contradiction and should not be blamed for favoring abortion and euthanasia on the one hand and the “sacredness of the individual,” care for the poor, the homeless and oppressed, on the other. Because it is one thing for a liberal editor to see the poor and the homeless on his way to work in his own city and another to read a medical statistic in his own paper about one million abortions. A liberal may act from his own consumer needs (guilt, sentimentality) and the Nazis may act f
rom theory (eugenics, racial purity), but both are consistent in an age of theory and consumption.

  The Nazis did not come out of nowhere.

  It may be quite true what Mother Teresa said—if a mother can kill her unborn child, then I can kill you and you can kill me—but it is not necessarily horrifying.

  America is probably the last and best hope of the world, not because it is not in the same trouble—indeed, the trouble may even be worse due to the excessive consumption in the marketplace and the excessive theorizing in academe—but because, with all the trouble, it preserves a certain innocence and freedom.

  This is the age of theory and consumption, yet not everyone is satisfied by theorizing and consuming.

  The common mark of the theorist and the consumer is that neither knows who he is or what he wants outside of theorizing and consuming.

  This is so because the theorist is not encompassed by his theory. One’s self is always a leftover from one’s theory.

  For even if one becomes passionately convinced of Freudian theory or Marxist theory at three o’clock of a Wednesday afternoon, what does one do with oneself at four o’clock?

  The consumer, who thought he knew what he wanted—the consumption of the goods and services of scientific theory—is not in fact satisfied, even when the services offered are such techniques as “personal growth,” “emotional maturity,” “consciousness-raising,” and suchlike.

  The face of the denizen of the present age who has come to the end of theory and consumption and “personal growth” is the face of sadness and anxiety.

  Such a denizen can become so frustrated, bored, and enraged that he resorts to violence, violence upon himself (drugs, suicide) or upon others (murder, war).

  Or such a denizen may discover that he is open to a search for signs, some sign other than theorizing or consumption.