Essays in Idleness

“The modernists in the Church believe that they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity. They have forgotten that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.”

This is from the Scholia (to an Implicit Text) of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, 1913–1994, the incomparable Colombian reactionary, previously mentioned in these Idleposts. I am just reading him again, for he is always topical, and better, he can be topical without ever referring to the news. He is habitual in stating the truth, plainly and persistently in a few words. That was the length of his ambition: he did not try for any kind of fame, and would not have been published, even in the few copies he had printed, had he not inherited considerable wealth, and had just the tiniest wee hint of narcissism. (Like me, except for the inheritance.) He never found the time to attend a university, though he helped to found one. He lived in a house wherein he collected a few tens of thousands of books, and for his research, he read them — in most of the modern European languages, and Latin and Greek.

The quotation above is rattling through my head, almost painfully. It explains, for instance, what is happening in Rome. We live in a time when the Christianity that influenced our minds through recent generations, has slipped almost out of circulation. Our clerisy has, at its best and most inspiring, even at its most sincere, discovered a method by which Christianity will not recover.

The human Christ; the biological, fleshly Christ, who isn’t there: We cannot “recover” what was always beyond our knowledge.

But it will recover, for the reality is, Christ is God. Secretly, we still know this.