Remember the Z Axis

For the secularist, social ethics is a clear and logical continuum from depravity, concerned only with the isolated self in the present moment, to altruism, involved in mankind to our remotest futurity; but for the Christian thinker, the beginning of wisdom is surprisingly closer to the former.

When we look down at a piece of paper depicting a basic graph, we describe the Y axis as vertical. In reality, however, it runs from our back to our front, intersected by the X running from left to right. Only the three-dimensional imagination can perceive the Z axis rising from the flat page to meet us. Above the trenches at the dawn of aerial combat, one of the great challenges for fighter pilots was learning to scan their Z, lest the bloody Red Baron should gut them from below or come falconing from the empyrean while they dutifully perused their horizons. If one denies the transcendent, nothing is more natural (in the exact sense of the word) than to neglect the true vertical; and in social ethics, the circling Barons can be very bloody indeed.

The great atheists of each generation, from Wells and Shaw to Bertrand Russell with his “unyielding despair” to Harold Bloom, our own apostle of pomposity, espousing the “secular transcendence” of literature, have all concurred upon the common duty to serve the species and its enigmatic descendants. The further one proceeds along the X axis from pure id to sweeping philanthropy, and along the Y axis from the conundrums of the moment to the distant dilemmas of one’s intergalactic progeny, the greater one’s virtue. There are two problems with this view.

First, the exasperated reductio: I can bear neither blame nor credit for what seven billion people may do in a hundred thousand years. I can decide what I shall do at this moment. The sole intersection of Time and Eternity is now—but the secularist, rejecting Eternity, has nowhere to go but ever deeper into the chthonic abysm of Time.  And secondly, a functioning society is not ultimately made up of isolated selves. It is, and always has been, made up of Families.

Here we find our Z axis, for the basis of the family is the Holy Family, and the basis of the Holy Family is the Holy Trinity. The ultimate mandate for human society is thus an appeal to the superhuman. Now, could it not be otherwise? Could we not base a social order on the day-to-day cooperation and mutual liking of individuals, without recourse to preternatural Charity? G.K. Chesterton, surrounded by Utopians with no concept of Original Sin, was forced to contend at great length with that question (“They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon”). Our generation is more fortunate in this regard, as we can simply point to the unholy cataclysm of the preceding century and say, “Well, actually, no.” The State exists to serve the Family, and the reversal is the logic of the gulag. Yet even Stalin, in the crisis of Hitler’s imbecilic invasion, ignited his people by calling them to fight not for the Party or the Cause, but for Holy Mother Russia.

The eternal work of the family is the creation of new selves, new souls, for the populating of Heaven. It can’t be done by a single self, but neither can it be done by a trillion. The extension of one’s involvement with mankind along the X axis, providing kale and solipsism to ever larger numbers, and along the Y axis, scribbling up hydroponic Edens for ever more distant generations, can never furnish the bedrock of a terrestrial social order. The roots unfold below us, and the branches above us, along an axis hidden from the secular mind—and our intersection with that axis is neither through the one nor through the many, but through the tiny trinities that make up the blocks of society.

However. As in Norse mythology, the dark worm Nidhogg gnaws at the root of the World Tree until the great chaos of the final war, so in reality a tenebrous viper gnashes endlessly at the foundation of the Christian family. In 1950, Archbishop Fulton Sheen gave a retreat for priests in which he divided the history of the Church into 500-year cycles, each distinguished by its particular adversary. In the first cycle, we were attacked by Christological heresies—the extremes of Adoptionism and Docetism, the muddles of Monophysitism and Patripassianism, the tepid compromises of Nestor and Arius (the latter of whom faced the magnificent pugilism of St. Nicholas at Nicaea). In the second cycle, the Head of the Church was attacked, finally resulting in the Great Schism of 1054 in which the Eastern Church repudiated the authority of the Pope. In the third cycle, the Body of the Church fell under assault, first through ever-mounting internal corruption and ultimately through the frenzy of unrestrained sectarianism. And in the fourth and current cycle, Archbishop Sheen argues, it is the world itself that is assailed, the air that we breathe and the earth on which we stand. Nearly seventy years ago, he decried the lengthening shadows of divorce and abortion. The situation has not improved.

In Sacred Tradition, the world is spoken of in two contradictory senses. There is the world upon which the Lord has looked and found it very good (Gen. 1:31); there is the world of which the Devil is the king (2 Cor 4:4). The latter makes furious war upon the former. Last century, the Enemy’s legions toiled assiduously in his service without ever knowing the name of their lord. Hannah Arendt immortally encapsulated the ho-hum, coffee-sipping Zeitgeist of the Holocaust in the phrase “banality of evil.” But this century may be different. In 2013, pro-lifers singing “Amazing Grace” outside an abortion clinic in Texas were drowned out by a crowd of pro-choicers who broke into a spontaneous chant of “Hail Satan.” In 2015, former “high wizard” Zachary King confessed to performing over 150 Satanist rituals during abortions. In 2017, the Satanic Temple in Missouri worked with Planned Parenthood to oppose anti-abortion legislation on the grounds of “religious liberty.” At Auschwitz, a million people died in four years. Nearly a million will die from abortion this week. (40-50 million per year worldwide.) The furnace-god of Carthage begins to show his face.

We all know the solace of John 3:16. But we must not neglect the admonition of Revelation 3:16—“Because you are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, I shall spew you out of my mouth.” The upside to Hell arising on this good Earth is that lukewarmth becomes an ever less tenable position. We need to remember that just as the family, and hence all of society, is patterned on the Trinitarian creation of persons through love, so the desanctification of sex (contraception, pornography, &c.) is patterned upon the Enemy’s desire to wield the Divine Power of Creation without the self-giving and self-sacrifice of Divine Love. We can’t strike a blow in the social, “horizontal” battle without taking part in the spiritual war that rages along the upper axis. Our advantage is that the same God Who sent His only Son down into the world also sent His only Son down into the netherworld.

When Simon Bar-Jonah became the Rock of the Church, Jesus promised him that the Gates of Hell would not prevail. It’s an odd image, in a way—the infernal hordes swarming up the temple steps with sharpened gate-posts in their claws? Unless perhaps we weren’t meant to endure a long slow grinding siege but rather to take the offensive, to smash the Black Gate (already hanging by a hinge after the Resurrection) and scourge the maggotry with Heaven’s fire. Catholics know that the Rosary is one of our most powerful weapons, and we should surely continue to pray for our family and country and Church, and for abundant graces to irradiate the earth; but I beg to propose one more prayer to add to our arsenal.

The turning point in every exorcism is the moment when the priest compels the possessing spirit to cease hiding behind the victim and speak its own true name. I propose we pray that Satan be compelled to reveal himself in the ills of our society. The clearer it becomes that Evil is real and active, the more difficult equivocation will become for the lukewarm. But note two things. First, it’s crucial that no one speak directly to an unclean spirit except for a priest of God in the authority of his bishop. Let us command the Devil only by supplication to the Lord. And secondly, if and when this prayer is granted—things will almost certainly, in the short term, become worse. Those who suddenly realize whom they have ignorantly served may either turn back to the light or knowingly embrace the darkness. Let us offer this prayer knowing that when the horns become visible, so too will the fangs.

In defense of the Family and the State, a mighty offense against the Adversary is increasingly our best chance. We’re most of us no great clerics or statesmen, but we can pray with our families that the Most High shall drag the Most Low into the sunlight for all to see. When the devils stop peeping from behind their perfidies and show themselves, then the real combat can begin. And where the Z axis strikes our flattened earthly realm, there are the lines of the Cross. In hoc signo vinces.