Kruptos on Kingsnorth's Anti-Civilization Gospel

And Manent on Christianity and Politics

Hello Pomocon readers! It’s been a while, but as I hope you know, I’ve been publishing most of my writing over at my new solo stack, Dissident Conservative. But as this piece touches upon some particularly pomocon themes, this seems its natural home.

This is one of those debates between Christian essayists which I missed the first stages of, but am now catching up with. It was unleashed by one Paul Kingsnorth and his piece “Against Christian Civilization,” published at First Things back in December, and I became aware of it this April, when a New-Right-friendly Christian substacker I check in on from time to time, Kruptos (or more properly, Κρʋπτος), wrote a long critique of it, initially at American Reformer, though he now also makes it available as a podcast at his own stack, Seeking the Hidden Thing.

Here is a passage which displays the heart of the dispute:

Kingsnorth marks the break in the garden as the decisive beginning of civilization. He explains it this way:

“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. Ever since we were expelled from this garden, it seems, we have been building great towers to the sky, trying, if subconsciously, to return to our true home. But always our towers are brought down, and our tribes are scattered.”

There is subtle a point here that Kingsnorth is missing, and it seems to lead him astray. He draws a contrast between the idyllic Garden of Eden and the subsequent world of sin and then asserts that all the artifacts of human activity after the fall are the result of sin. This here, it seems to me, is his key error… It does not seem to occur to him that the Garden is both a good space and a civilized space. To Kingsnorth, the Garden is without civilization. Civilization is what happens because of sin. But this is not the Biblical story.

Kruptos is right. Kingsnorth’s entire piece, while having the merits of opposing a certain conservative use of Christianity for mere culture-defending purposes (a la Jordan Peterson), of jumping off of some writings by the interesting Native American Christian Ohiyesa, and of being conceptually bold, ultimately owes more to modern thinking, likely to Jean-Jacques Rousseau specifically, though perhaps channeled through those he influenced such as Tolstoy and Gandhi, than it does to scripture and church teachings.

So go read or listen to Kruptos’s critique, though of course the more scrupulous will begin with Kingsnorth.

Paul Kingsnorth: Eastern Orthodox, ex-Buddhist, ex-Wiccan, and interested in environmentalist thought.

Kruptos conceals his identity behind this image, but apparently joins Kingsnorth in believing in the Beard.

There’s little I’d want to add to what Kruptos lays out, other than to compare and contrast it to certain observations the great Strauss-influenced Christian thinkers Ernest Fortin and Pierre Manent make about the Bible’s initial mentions of the city being negative ones (e.g., Cain’s unnamed city, Ur, and Sodom & Gomorrah), in contrast to Greek thought, particularly to Aristotle’s Politics. (I'm having trouble locating where Fortin goes into this, but for Manent, see his magisterial Metamorphoses of the City, pp. 277-78.) One might also look at Leon Kass on Cain as a city-founder, in his The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, where we get this:

The Hebrew word for “city,” ‘iyr, comes from a root meaning “to watch” and “to wake.” In the first instance, a city is a place guarded by a wakeful watch; it is not the market or the shrine but the watchtower or outpost that first makes a city a city. Though Cain retains his pride (in his son), his confidence has been tempered by fear. But civilization as it comes into being, starting from his founding act, is tainted: the city is founded in fear of violent death, but first, in fratricide. This taint, one must believe, is, from the Bible’s point of view, inherent to civilization as such. (The Beginning of Wisdom, pp. 145-145)

That passage might seem to support Kingsnorth, but again, read Kruptos—his account can deal with it. Even those who haven’t read much of the Bible know that it contains a good deal of talk of a heavenly city, and, that a certain fellow named Augustine had a few things to say about that.

And I’d like to utilize the thinking of Pierre Manent in another way here, as a more general corrective against the pull anti-political thinking has on so many Christian leaders; it’s been a perennial problem, but has seemed more hobbling than usual during the few last decades. I mentioned this when I discussed the work of Eric Metaxas, and his pamphlet-like Letter to the American Church, for I have long become weary of preachers whose default inclination is to make their parishioners feel bad for being concerned about or putting some hope in political developments, even given the stakes revealed by the last six or so years.¹ It troubles me that so many of them, even among the ones theologically and socially conservative, have too little respect for political thought and political dynamics. From an academic perspective, they show less deference towards political philosophy and political science than the believing scholars of those fields show towards theology, dogmatics, and church history; and, when they do show an interest in political thinking, they have a tendency to quickly buy into the theories of cruder thinkers, and to seldom consult the political-philosophy attuned members of their churches before they do so. From a common-sense American-democracy perspective, too many of them seem to have never digested the fact that republican government necessarily puts quite a few of the things and burdens “of Caesar” into the hands of the people who make up their flocks.

Those are my complaints, but here’s what Pierre Manent has laid down, especially in his Seeing Things Politically, although here I’ll present it as it gets summarized by Daniel Mahoney in one of his books:

[Manent] …does not hesitate to confront what he perceives as a gaping political deficit at the heart of Christianity. Manent is with Pascal in affirming that the Christian religion “has understood mankind.”² At the same time, he expresses doubts about the ability of Christianity to translate that understanding into an account of the human condition that can do justice to the political nature of man. The Christian temptation is to “despise the temporal,” as the great French Catholic poet Charles Péguy put it, to treat human beings as already having been transformed... The pagan virtues—honor, courage, confidence in the human capacity to govern oneself in freedom—have been distrusted by Christians who are tempted to see the natural order as already having been transformed by grace. (Mahoney, Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton, pp. 26-27)

Getting proper kingdom-of-God perspective on the “temporal things” is one thing, whereas the sinful error of despising them is another.

Mahoney, author of a Plutarch-like celebration of modern statesmen-thinkers like Lincoln, Churchill, and De Gaulle, continues in his summarizing of Manent’s thought:

Not only is Christianity in tension with the legitimate pride, the self-respect and confidence in one’s forces that allows human beings to live in freedom, but it has difficulty giving a persuasive account of human experience on its own terms. The temptation to despise the world has given rise to quasi-utopian political options beloved by both the Christian Left and Right: mythical “Third Ways,” authoritarian corporatist states, dreams of socialism that will somehow dispense with violence and coercion. Sins that are coextensive with the human condition are attributed to a liberal order which, for better of for worse, is the “temporal order” of the modern world. Manent is one of those rare thinkers who neither genuflects before the modern liberal order or denies the considerable goods—civic peace, prosperity and dignity for masses of human beings, religious liberty—to which it has given rise. In Manent’s view, there is a “noble risk” in accepting our liberal “temporal order” and bringing Christian conscience and classical wisdom to bear in humanizing and elevating it.

Mahoney and Manent likely still believe that, as I ultimately do also, though the last five years have made me more open to considering theories which regard the liberal order of 1989-2019 as having become radically, if secretly, corrupt, and perhaps due to flaws inherent to it. I’d guess Kruptos is even less willing to commit himself to the risk of defending modern/liberal democracy, or to accepting it as the necessary temporal order for maintaining enough liberty in our times, but I don’t know his thought well-enough to say. In this post, we’re focusing on Kruptos’s defense of civilization and politics simply against Kingsnorth’s Tolstoy-like attack on these, and so I don’t want my references to Manent make him seem to also be a defender of liberal democracy.

But back to Manent-via-Mahoney:

But if Christians have difficulty “thinking politically,” a point stressed by Christianity’s most polemical opponents, such as Machiavelli and Rousseau, it has a more fundamental difficulty remaining “faithful to human experience.” The language of piety often covers over tensions between body and soul, nature and law, faith and reason that constitute the human condition. As Manent bluntly puts it… “[We] have to admit that religious people sometimes lack certain scruples where experiential truth is concerned, when they propose an understanding of humanity already pre-treated for the uses they have in mind. In such cases, the Answer has smothered the questions.” He adds that “a work that satisfactorily brings together fidelity to human experience and commitment to a religious perspective is rare,” indeed. Yet…he adds that there is one great book where the two are “strangely, paradoxically reconciled.” That book is the Bible. In that work, one finds “at once, directly and immediately, human experience in its greatest ignorance of God and, mysteriously, a presence of God that does not impinge upon, that does not cover up the authenticity of experience.” In the Psalms in particular, Manent finds “an experience of something radically different from all other human experience but which does not prevent this experience from being lived and described in its whole truth, in its nakedness.” (Mahoney, Recovering, pp. 27-28; and the Manent quotes mostly come from Seeing Things Politically, pp. 62-63.)

There are many more riches in those books I could mention here, but it should be evident how Manent’s thought might be used to enrich Kruptos’s already quite-rich defense of Christian maintenance of civilization, and to more generally correct the anti-political impulses of too many Christian leaders.

1. The choice which has been posed, in my judgment and in that of many others, has been nothing less than either a.) the consolidation of a pseudo-democratic quasi-despotism of notably anti-Christian tendencies, or b.) the continuance, with certain populist jerry-rigs making the continuance possible, of liberal/constitutional democracy.

2. This month has seen the release in English translation of Manent’s book on Pascal, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition.