Harmonizing Heaven and Earth: A Response to Kingsnorth’s “Against Christian Civilization”

In his recent essay and 2024 Erasmus Lecture, Paul Kingsnorth, writer, novelist, poet, and prophet against The Machine, now deploys his prophetic gifts against a particularly besetting form of idolatry. The target, he tells us, is Christian civilization—or, perhaps, what he calls, “civilizational Christianity.”

This ambiguity is an instructive one. For Kingsnorth sometimes writes as if he objects only to an inordinate elevation of the goods of civilization above the Christian faith: “Civilizational Christianity,” he tells us, “puts civilization first and Christianity second. Its proponents are less interested in whether the faith is actually true or transformative than in what use it can be to them in their ongoing culture war.” This is indeed worthy of censure. Seeking Christian faith merely because you believe doing so will help shore up Western civilization is like choosing a spouse merely because you believe doing so will help lead to a healthier and more meaningful life. Granted, censure should not be our only, or perhaps not even our first, word to those who turn to Christianity out of interests like these. We often approach the question of changing or deepening religious commitment with mixed motives, and God, who is never outdone in generosity, finds ways for his grace to work even with our paltriest efforts to seek him. Yet Kingsnorth’s complaint is a welcome one insofar as it reminds us that our first question in approaching Christianity should not be, “Will it work? Is it useful for our purposes?” but rather, “Is it true? Does it have a claim on us?”

Civilization between Jerusalem and Babylon

After all, Christ teaches those who would follow him, “Seek first the Kingdom and his righteousness.” The temptation Kingsnorth describes as “civilizational Christianity” is to seek first not the Kingdom but the culture—or rather, the civilization. It is for this reason, as we saw above, an idolatrous tendency. The name “Babylon” is one scriptural image or term for what the humanum—the human domain, the world of human affairs—becomes under the deforming influence of this impulse. This is the earthly city, in the language of Augustine’s City of God, formed by love of ourselves even to the contempt of God. But this is not the whole story. Christ’s injunction comes with a promise: “Seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness, and all these”—food, drink, and clothing, and I would argue, all the other goods that contribute to a vibrant, flourishing civilization—“will be added unto you.” It is in this same spirit, I would suggest, that Christ later speaks of the “hundredfold” to be received in this life by those with the will to surrender all things for his sake. This pairing of command and promise deserves our closer reflection.

There are moments, however, when Kingsnorth seems close to suggesting that idolatrous Babylon is not a mere possibility but a near inevitability where the goods of civilization are concerned. Consider how Kingsnorth recounts the result of the fall of the first human beings as narrated in the opening chapters of Genesis:

And when we disobeyed, what happened? Farming happened. Work happened. Hunting happened. Metalwork happened. Murder happened. Cities happened. Civilization happened. It was all a deadly result of our Fall.

This is a list of surprising combinations. Murder is a result of the fall, granted, but metalwork? It is one thing to claim that cities made by fallen human beings bear the marks of their fall; it is quite another to claim that cities are themselves, without remainder, nothing but artifacts of that fall. And while the record of Scripture gives us little light by which to speculate how the human world might have unfolded in the absence of the fall, it does offer us a few crucial points for reflection here. First, God’s commandments to be fruitful and multiply, to fill and subdue the earth, and to till and keep the garden—even his invitation to Adam to give names to all the nonhuman animals—all precede the fall and, I would argue, point the human family toward the goods of family and social life, work, study, and contemplation. 

Second, Scripture envisions that, after the fall’s last corrupting effects have been healed, the unfolding of humanity will find its final consummation not with the return to a garden but with the arrival of a city—the heavenly Jerusalem. Both of these scriptural topoi suggest that Christianity fulfills human beings, not by severing them from the world and from culture, but precisely by enabling them to recall and retrieve their role as what the Greek Christian tradition refers to as the methorion—the liminal creature that, by mediating between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the temporal, images the Incarnate Word who in himself unites and mediates between the created and uncreated.   

Kingsnorth rightly cautions us that “we can say that this God of ours has an ambivalent relationship to humanity’s earthly power structures,” and this caution is all the timelier when the temptation is strong to misappropriate the trappings of Christianity for the sake of preparing for some purported clash of civilizations. And it is true that created nature and the powers of sin and death are often braided together here below with an almost indiscernible closeness. But Christians are not for that reason exempted from turning their freedom, talents, and passions toward the slow, patient work of repairing and rehumanizing what is broken and dehumanized in human affairs—of turning our course ever so slightly further toward Jerusalem and away from Babylon.

The answer to the fear of Babylon, then—Kingsnorth’s “civilizational Christianity”—is not to relinquish the fields where civilization is made in order to pursue a purer form of Christian service. The answer is rather to seek the Kingdom first with such clarity of intention that every domain of human making can assume its rightful share in Christ’s offering of himself and all created things to his Father.

Here, as often, a soundly calibrated outlook on the relations between nature, sin, and grace can be of some help: all nature, including human nature and the entire humanum, is precisely what is created good, damaged and rendered liable to death and decay by sin, and healed, raised to new life, and made to partake of the divine by grace. If this or something like it is the right track along which to reflect on the goods of civilization, then the risk of idolizing those goods ought to be met by the recognition that they are apt to flow from the Christian life as fruits from the vine. Like all such fruits, then, they ought to be cultivated and offered back to the one whose gift they are. Abusus non tollit usum, after all, and while some may indeed be called to a path of straightforward renunciation—the difference between strict abstinence from drink and festive moderation comes to mind here—for all alike to abandon the forms of labor that contribute to the goods we call civilization would amount to denying the Spirit of Christ any opportunity to prolong the work of its incarnation in human affairs.

Renewing Christ’s Cosmos—Monks, Bishops, and Laity Alike

Kingsnorth helpfully invokes the Desert Fathers in the name of resisting the temptation to misappropriate and idolize such fruits. Their example is a helpful one, insofar as the conditions in which we find ourselves in the West today resemble not so much a Christendom as a second apostolic age. Think here of St. Anthony the Great, Father of All Monks, leaving behind all things to follow Christ without hesitation. Yet the example of Anthony does not exhaust the early Christian response to life in Babylon. North of Anthony’s desert, along the Mediterranean coast, another Christian response to Babylon was taking form in the writings of Clement and Origen of Alexandria. Thus in Origen’s Letter to Gregory Thaumaturgus we find the exhortation to “accept effectively those things from the philosophy of the Greeks that can serve as a general education or introduction for Christianity and those things from geometry and astronomy that are useful for the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. For just as the servants of philosophers say concerning geometry, music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy that they are adjuncts to philosophy, we say this very thing about philosophy itself with regard to Christianity.” 

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept,” indeed—but we also studied the works of Babylon. And just as Anthony’s example would inspire the various forms of Christian monasticism—from the monks of the Egyptian desert, through Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian, to Benedict and all their spiritual children east and west—so too Origen’s example would be followed by those luminary defenders of Nicaea, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, who made the first valiant efforts to build from the materials of their culture a literature and a network of institutions suffused with the faith they professed. It is difficult to imagine the Cappadocians succeeding half so well if, in place of their admiration and affection for what was best in Greek and Roman culture, they had only the fear of idolatry.

The point, however, is not to set these different forms of mission against each other; the full stature of Christ’s body needs the work of many members, after all. It is rather that both forms of life—set apart from the world and immersed in it—have their part to play in the right relation between Christian faith and the ongoing task of preserving and contributing to a rich, though wounded and complex, civilizational inheritance.

As we have just seen, that first renewal of culture was in large part the work of monk and bishop, desert-dweller and city-dweller. To conclude by way of a final suggestion, renewal in our own time must draw not only on the resources of these monastic and patristic traditions, but also on the fullest appropriation of the mission of the lay Christian, understood precisely as the task of prolonging the mystery of the Incarnation in earth and time. For “Christ,” as Saint Maximus so unforgettably expressed it, “wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his embodiment.”

 Image by jonbilous and licensed via Adobe Stock.