Who knows any of this stuff anymore?

On Barbarism and Benedict

by Regis Martin

For those who have the courage to plunge headlong into the great sea of history, their minds accustomed to taking long views, the attractions of Protestantism are few and never fatal. But for those who know nothing of the past, whose minds are unwilling to travel to such places, the allure of Protestant piety with its security blanket of Sola Scriptura thrown over everything, renders them peculiarly susceptible.

When John Henry Newman found himself immersed in the study of the Donatist controversy of the fourth century, he realized that by Augustine’s reckoning he too was in a state of revolt, having refused to heed the principle laid down by the Bishop of Hippo that it is not well for any man to separate himself from the secure and certain judgments of the whole world, i.e., the Catholic Church. Securus judicat orbis terrarium, Augustine had thundered. And why is that? Because the judgments of the Church are both binding and everlasting. And so the future Cardinal and now Blessed John Henry Newman, awakened by the grace of God amid wheel upon wheel of history, could no longer function in the Anglican church, membership in which having left him no less a schismatic in his relation to Rome than the Donatists had been fifteen hundred years before. Thus he turned to the Church of Rome for the certainty of truth and holiness for which he had always longed. “The Fathers made a Catholic of me,” he would exclaim years later.

Success in securing the various forms and permutations of Protestant religion, therefore, depends on keeping the levels of historical illiteracy as high as possible. Allow but the slightest shaft of light to fall upon the early centuries of the Christian world and, straightaway, the scene is illumined by a blaze of Roman Catholic glory. Indeed, to set out along the historical corridors of all that followed in the wake of the Church’s beginnings—from the founding of hospitals and monasteries, orphanages and universities, to the anointing of kings and princes—is to brush up continually against the sheer intractable fact of The Catholic Thing. What else was there in a world where all the lights had gone out? The world of high paganism could hardly be expected to preserve and protect its own patrimony. During the ages of darkness that fell upon the Greco-Roman world, the centuries following its collapse and dissolution, someone had to baptize and convert the northern barbarians. If the decent drapery of life (to recall Burke’s image) were not to be completely stripped away, leaving only untutored savages to manage the chaos, something would have to be done. In a word, Rome became the culture of the West.

• But who knows any of this stuff anymore? 
• Can there be many Catholics out there (besides faithful readers of Crisis), whose awareness of their faith includes an understanding of the whole historical matrix in which it took shape? 
• Who can provide an accurate plot line for all that amazing growth? 
• Does the average churchgoer know, for example, who St. Benedict was? 
• Or Martin of Tours? What about Ambrose and Augustine, Popes Leo and Gregory the Great? 
• Have we taken the measure of the impact such men had in catechizing a culture that would last a thousand years?

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