Are we headed for a new Dark Ages? For different reasons, and from different perspectives, many people think we are. But few have any idea of what to do about it.
In the wake of the recent US presidential election, many – both liberals and conservatives, as well as the Left – fear the consequences of the roll-back not only of the welfare state, but of the regulatory and even the constitutional state. Reactions vary from appealing to our system of checks and balances, or our federal structure, to blocking executive appointments regardless of merit, calling for impeachment, or just throwing rocks. On the socio-cultural level, there is a reported rise in intolerance. Some see an accompanying moral degradation – though one suspects that those who decry the president’s licentiousness and vulgarity once themselves merrily participated in dismantling moral standards.
Whether or not we are entering the Dark Ages at home, the Euro-Atlantic situation bears some resemblance to the period of the demoralized and disintegrating Roman Empire. As confidence in vast alliances wanes, nations retreat into a parochial isolationism reminiscent of the jigsaw puzzle of medieval fiefdoms. True, the notion of the Dark Ages has been questioned: the darkness is as much in our own ignorance as in that of early medieval culture. Moreover, the concept of the Middle Ages as the benighted chasm of cruelty, barbarism and superstition between the classical age and the Renaissance, propagated by the Enlightenment philosophes, has been discredited. For one thing, it ignores the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century and the cultural-intellectual rebirth from the 11th through the 13th centuries – not to mention the thousand-year civilization of Byzantium.
It also bears mentioning that today’s political fragmentation mirrors, and perhaps was prompted by, philosophical fragmentation: post-modernists’ aversion to over-arching systems such as Christianity and Marxism, and their focus on discrete, manageable problems like language, are echoed by calls to dismantle NATO and the European Union and to retreat from the Pax Americana. Yet yesterday’s liberals, who denounced “U.S. imperialism” when we were defending South Vietnam, now enthusiastically support dubious U.S. interventions in the Middle East. This alliance of neo-liberals and neo-conservatives is being challenged by a man who defies political categorization. Ukrainians are alarmed, for any weakening of NATO or the EU threatens their security, while the retreat of the great American protector into his continental fortress exposes them to the great Russian predator.
Anxiety about a coming dark age has existed for some time in an altogether different quarter. Cultural conservatives, as well as the religiously inclined, see a coming age of spiritual darkness and moral chaos caused in part by the above-mentioned liberals. But to them, the “new medievalism” also presents opportunities. Historian Eugene Vodolazkin, applying an idea of Nicholas Berdyaev, characterizes both medieval and post-modern times as “night epochs” that are “outwardly muted but profounder” than “day epochs.” “A night epoch,” he writes, “allows for insight into the essence of things and for concentrating strength.” The two issues he identifies as requiring concentrated attention in our time are excessive individualism and the secularization of life (“The New Middle Ages,” First Things, August-September 2016, pp. 31-36).
Others, inspired by medieval monasticism, see the new Dark Ages as a time to base novel civic communities on the West’s lost Christian tradition. Rod Dreher, author of “The Benedict Option,” advocates retreat from the mainstream culture in order to build an alternative way of life. His point of departure is a passage from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” comparing our era to the decline of Rome. Today too, says MacIntyre, what we need is “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (“After Virtue,” second edition 2, 1984, p. 263). Dreher describes his “Benedict Option” as referring to “Christians in the contemporary West who cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of American empire, and who therefore are keen to construct local forms of community as loci of Christian resistance against what the empire represents.” For currently, according to Dreher, “we live in a culture of moral chaos and fragmentation, in which many questions are simply impossible to settle.” Dreher finds applicable principles in the monastic rule of St. Benedict – order, stability, work and prayer, community, hospitality, balance. Though his communities would have boundaries, they should not isolate themselves; rather, they must teach the outside world by the example of how they live.
Could concerned Ukrainians take a similar approach in the coming dark age? It is not clear, after all, whether they will languish once again in the shadow of Moscow, or seek the shade of a Western umbrella. In either case, they will need a strategy of cultural survival. The tradition developed by the Byzantine and Kyivan successors of St. Anthony, the founder of Eastern monasticism, offers a set of guiding values. As the late Archimandrite Boniface Luykx wrote in 1993, they are what “modern man needs in order to recover from his nihilism, and these values are the backbone for building up a new world” (“Eastern Monasticism and the Future of the Church,” p. 179). Eastern monasticism stresses spirituality (especially as practiced in prayer and fasting), community, labor and charity. With the addition of ressourcement (a return to authentic sources of Ukrainian culture), these values prompt us to cultivate a simple, contemplative lifestyle in harmony with nature, build communities (perhaps near monasteries) based on family or cooperative ownership, foster small-scale local production, and care for the poor, sick and homeless. One could call it the Anthony Option.
Could such communities inspire Ukraine’s different political constituencies – liberals, leftists, nationalists, not to mention non-Christians and non-believers, to rebuild their country on a renewed moral and ethical foundation? Their foreign gurus and grantors might object. But the Anthony Option can do no more than offer its example.