Christianity & Culture: Pt. I

The Four Types of Pessimism

Silver Door explores the intersection between poetry and the digital. You can find the primer to this series here if you haven’t read it already.

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The terminally online will know. Forgive me.

If there is any historical future at all, it may well happen that this future is reserved for another civilization, and probably for one which will be quite different from ours.

Fr. Georges Florovsky, Christianity & Culture

Writing in 1974, Fr. Florovsky believed that our civilization was undergoing a polycrisis. As a Christian, he saw the collective retreat from Christianity as at the root of this impasse, though crucially he cautioned that the faithful “should not dispense too summarily with the responsibility for the failures of others.”

Early on, he admits to the difficulty of defining culture, though he does provide a pair of snapshots: “Culture,” he says, can be thought of as a “system of aims and concerns, and a system of habits,” while on the other hand, it is “a system of values, produced and accumulated in the creative process of history, and tending to obtain a semi-independent existence…”

Now, he asks, how should we as Christians orient ourselves towards culture if it is assumed that our civilization is indeed facing a form of “apocalyptic test” due to a retreat from Christ?

Should we not concentrate all our efforts on Evangelism, on the proclamation of the Gospel to an oblivious generation, on the preaching of penitence and conversion?…Does one need “culture,” and should one be interested in it, when he encounters the Living God, Him Who alone is to be worshiped and glorified?

Fr. Florovsky teases this line of questioning out for some time, providing nuanced points and counterpoints for both sides of this debate. Ultimately, Fr. Florovsky believes that culture is indeed something to seriously contend with and be interested in, and that our attitude to it “is not a practical option, but a theological decision.” That we would have a multitude of stances towards culture within a divided Christendom (post-Christendom?) is no surprise. Still, while eschewing impossible to implement uniform solutions, “one cannot avoid discarding certain suggested solutions as inadequate, as erroneous and misleading.”

He raises four “pessimistic” types: the Pietist, the Puritan, the Existentialist, and the Plain Man. Although written in a 20th century context, these types hold true in our present day and can be profitably extended to believers and nonbelievers of various stripes across many cultural pursuits.

The Pietist, he says, partakes in “a radical reduction of Christianity in which it becomes no more than private religion of individuals,” where the primary concern is “the problem of individual “salvation.”” For this type, the world is merely vanity, vanity, an unfortunate entanglement only worth limited engagement on the level of doom-prophecy.

The Puritan, on the other hand, does not shirk from engaging with culture. At the same time, the Puritan’s role in history is accepted as an obedience to be endured, miserable sinner that he is, rather than “a creative opportunity.” Culture is a training ground in which the person proves their loyalty to God, and anything outside of this aim “should be discarded and no room is permitted for any “disinterested creativity,” e.g. for art or “belles-lettres.””

Next up is the Existentialist, who Florovsky characterizes as motivated primarily by protest against “man’s enslavement in civilization, which…obscures the hopelessness of his entanglement.” For the Existentialist, “creatureliness” just “condemns him to be but “nothing,” at least in his own eyes, in spite of the mysterious fact that for God His creatures are obviously much more than “nothing”…His terms of reference are always “the ALL of God and the Nothing of man.” It is this type which most resembles what has become and is becoming a growing bloc among the young—the “doomer” or digital nihilist/existentialist/nomad.

Finally, we come to the Plain Man. Simply, The Plain Man “will find no religious justification for the human urge to know and create.” Similar to the Pietist, the Plain Man unsurprisingly prefers simplicity, particularly in religious matters, and is suspicious of Reason muddying up his placid puddle of unexamined beliefs.

Florovsky begins the ending of this chapter by stating “We need a theology of culture, even for our “practical” decisions.” Shortly after, he hits us with this:

The "Modern Man" fails to appreciate and to assess the conviction of early Christians, derived from the Scripture, that Man was created by God for a creative purpose and was to act in the world as its king, priest, and prophet. The fall or failure of man did not abolish this purpose or design, and man was re-deemed in order to be re-instated in his original rank and to resume his role and function in the Creation. And only by doing this can he become what he was designed to be, not only in the sense that he should display obedience, but also in order to accomplish the task which was appointed by God in his creative design precisely as the task of man.

I will end here, and pick up Part II by going a bit further afield to explore Fr. Florovsky’s comment that our creative purpose “was to act in the world as its king, priest, and prophet.”