In Book IV of Paradise Lost, John Milton introduces “our first father” and “our general mother,” ancestors of the human race: “Adam, the goodliest man of men since born / His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve” (Milton 2000, 86, 83). Together in Eden they lead a perfectly harmonious existence in which conjugal love, productive labor, and worship of God are seamlessly interwoven, their lives together one great hymn of praise. After a day spent tending the garden, they return to their bower for the evening, thanking God for his goodness before joining in the “mysteries of connubial love”….
It is a delightful picture of a world not yet tainted by sin, in which men and women together join their bodies and souls, minds and hearts, in which there is no clear distinction between their family life, their daily labor, and their religious worship—a holistic vision of all human existence as perfectly integrated and whole.
Christians, of course, long for the day when that vision will be restored. In the meantime, however, this ideal of harmony can supply a tempting standard against which to measure actually existing human societies. One such critique has sparked considerable discussion over the past year: Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. In a discussion ranging across politics, education, work, sex, and technology, Dreher depicts the many ways in which contemporary mainstream culture is antithetical to Christian belief and practice. He takes his cue from the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued, in After Virtue, that moral thinking in the modern West has become incoherent and who closed his account of our condition with this half-grim, half-hopeful assessment…
… I am interested here not so much in Dreher specifically—who has written a good book, worth pondering—but with a certain kind of cultural criticism that I think his book represents and that may often be tempting to Christians: the yearning for a lost wholeness that modernity has destroyed. In a very different context, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of this urge in a letter to his friend and confidant Eberhard Bethge, in terms that have a certain pertinence to Dreher’s backward look to medieval monasticism.
Peter Meilaender | “Against The Integrated Life” | 2018
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