"According to the present trend, we may suppose that even on the morning after the Day of Judgment—if such a thing were possible—every cabaret, every night club, every newspaper firm eager for advertisements and subscribers, every nest of political fanatics, every pagan discussion group, indeed, every Christian tea-party and Church synod would resume business to the best of its ability, and with a new sense of opportunity, completely unmoved, quite uninstructed, and in no serious sense different from what it was before. Fire, drought, earthquake, war, pestilence, the darkening of the sun and similar phenomena are not the things to plunge us into real anguish, and therefore to give us real peace. The Lord was not in the storm, the earthquake or the fire (1 Kg. 19:11ff). He really was not."
~ Karl Barth
In his final episode as host of "Mere Fidelity," my friend and Mere Orthodoxy founder Matthew Lee Anderson said this after quoting the above passage from Karl Barth:
Barth is writing this in the shadow of World War 2, right when you have massive social upheavals. And the thought is that maybe all of these cultural crises will create a new opportunity for the word of God to break forth into people's lives. It's going to create opportunities for them to meet God directly.
And Barth's line is effectively this: no matter how spectacular the crises are, that's not necessarily the thing that is going to prepare people to meet God. God was not in the earthquake. God was not in the fire, he really was not. That was not the preparation to meet God.
It's actually more quotidian. It's more basic. It's the sort of readiness that you have to cultivate in a manner that is, in one respect, indifferent to the great cultural crises of your day, that's immune to all of the social upheavals, that looks and seeks for God, regardless of the travails of history, the upheavals of society.
I think if I had to go back and, and tell myself one thing a decade ago, it would be something like that. There's going to be considerable upheaval. I feel like I'm about 50 years wiser from the last 10 years of life. ...
I think the one thing necessary is to engage the contemplative life in order to ready your soul to meet God—and to meet God, not in the earthquake or the wind or the fire, but to meet him in the secrecy of your prayer closet.
It means being willing to undertake that sort of ascesis and discipline and to really embrace contemplation as an antidote to all of the upheavals. I think that would probably be the one thing that I would say.
And it relates to things like podcasting, right, because of the din and the noise. I feel like everything that I have done over the last decade online has in one respect or another been been affected and determined by vainglory as a vice, which is a very noisy vice, right? It's loud, brash, cantankerous, quarrelsome. The shifting atmosphere of evangelicalism has exacerbated that in certain ways.
I've been as much a part of that as the institutions and the organizations that I have at points criticized and benefited from. But vainglory is antithetical to the type of quiet confidence of the contemplative life, where you are doing the one thing necessary in meeting God in private and readying your soul for that hour of death.
What chills me as I read the above is the rather ruthless way it cuts through so much media that is produced today; if you were to remove the vice of vainglory from Christian media I expect the amount of media we produce would drop quite dramatically.
Matt makes mention of the idea of the contemplative life there. It's worth tracing that back to its root: St Thomas speak of it in the Summa across four questions in the second part of the second part. For Thomas, human life is divided into two distinct modes: the active life and the contemplative. Here is how the Angelic Doctor speaks of both:
Wherefore also in men the life of every man would seem to be that wherein he delights most, and on which he is most intent; thus especially does he wish "to associate with his friends" (Ethic. ix, 12). Accordingly since certain men are especially intent on the contemplation of truth, while others are especially intent on external actions, it follows that man's life is fittingly divided into active and contemplative.
Recently Susannah Roberts remarked to me that digital technology has created the illusion that a third form of life is possible: the opining life. What is so dangerous about this third form, however, is that it is in reality a parody of both true forms.
On the one hand, the opining life purports to be intellectual in nature, and thus ostensibly resembling the contemplative life. However, Thomas is clear that "the contemplative life" is not simply a synonym for a kind of life marked chiefly by mere thought about truth or goodness, but actually terminates on love of God and delight in him. It sounds, in other words, far more like John Piper than it does internet punditry:
Gregory makes the contemplative life to consist in the "love of God," inasmuch as through loving God we are aflame to gaze on His beauty. And since everyone delights when he obtains what he loves, it follows that the contemplative life terminates in delight, which is seated in the affective power, the result being that love also becomes more intense.
The contemplative life, thus, is not at all a life lived by a disembodied head on a stick spouting opinions about the events of the day; the contemplative life is a life ordered toward love of God, arrived at through the patient contemplation of God and his works.
Ultimately, this is all done so that we are prepared to meet God, as Matt said in the podcast. Here, again, is St Thomas:
Our Lord said (Luke 10:42): "Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her," since as Gregory says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.), "the contemplative life begins here so that it may be perfected in our heavenly home."
So the opining life is distinct from the contemplative in as much as the opining life is largely about dispensing opinions while the contemplative life is aimed at the knowledge of God and the preparation of one's soul to meet God. There might be a superficial similarity here, in as much as both forms of life likely involve the reading of books and essays and times of thought. But the ends are radically different.
On the other hand, the opining life also purports to be political, and therefore in some sense active—ordered to our external actions and the world beyond our heads.
Yet this too is a cheat: the "politics" pursued via the opining life are not chiefly about the persuasion of one's fellow citizens for the sake of common collective action across differences for the sake of the common good. Nor is this "politics" marked by an attempt to define and implement policy on a governmental level. It is not even something aimed at simply trying to make our unavoidable social relationships mutually delightful and edifying.
Rather, the "politics" that the opining life aims at are virtually always implicitly shaped by the digital world and network dynamics. The "active" work of the opining life is usually little more than an attempt at digital identity creation and promotion of one's digital self within online networks. Indeed, in this sense the "active" life achieved through the opining life is not properly active at all, if by "active" we mean something aimed at "external activity," as St Thomas has puts it in the Summa.
All of this, of course, causes the work of popular writing to become surprisingly hazardous to one's Christian formation. Ideally, of course, the Christian writer is a person devoted to contemplation who then seeks to translate what they learn through contemplation of God (and his works) into external action that leads to something fruitful and life-giving. So the Christian writer really does have to live in both those forms of life. But when the writing life slides into the opining mode, the appearance can look much the same but the spiritual life of the writer will have been extinguished.
As we start a new year, then, I thought it might be helpful to propose some questions to help people whose work requires them to write, record, or otherwise produce types of media to distinguish between a properly Christian way of working in contrast to the opining style so common in contemporary media.
First: Assuming that you enjoy the work you do, what part of it gives you more pleasure? Is it the reading, thinking, and writing that goes into producing the work? Or is it observing the reaction to the work as seen on social media or in your inbox? The former suggests a sincere delight in the work itself, even apart from how that work defines your sense of self. The latter suggests that the work is largely a means to the end of identity creation.
Second: How would you feel if something you produced was not noticed or commented on at all online? Would you need to post multiple links to it on social media, perhaps with a comment about how no one seems to be reading it? (Recall the Proverb: "Let another man's lips praise you.")
Third: Do you spend more time actually producing good work or promoting the work you have already done?
Fourth: Which of these three measures of success excites you the most?
Fifth: When someone raises legitimate criticism of a specific essay, podcast, or video, is your instinct to ignore it, to attack the critic, or to seek to grow from the critique in some way and perhaps issue a retraction or correction if appropriate?
Sixth: Consider that one day you will stand before Christ and give an answer for your work. Holding that thought in your mind, how do you now assess the work you have done in the past six months? The past year?
Seventh: Suppose you consider your work in light of that fact and it alarms you. What are you willing to do about that? What price would you be willing to pay to stop doing such things?