“The Center Cannot Hold”

A century ago, Yeats, intuiting the onset of an Apocalyptic Time, wrote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepwere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats

The center cannot hold. Within Judaism, the Conservative Movement, which is actually the moderate of the three streams (Reform being modern and innovative; Orthodox very traditional), is in decline. Currently containing just less than one third of American Jews, it has lost its position of numerical preeminence to the Reform movement. Children of Conservative Jews are moving into Orthodoxy if they are observant; or becoming Reform or secular Jews if they are more modern, free and secular. The Orthodox expressions show more energy, vigor and definition; while Reform gives greater flexibility and inclusivity. Demographically, the Orthodox have larger families, less intermarriage and exit rates, and will surpass the Reform numerically if current trends continue. There is even talk of the Conservative blending with the Reform movement since there is no longer any substantial difference between them.

This is unfortunate because a few decades ago Conservative Judaism was a robust and flourishing blend of the traditional and the modern. It accepted Torah as divinely revealed but humanly written and therefore worthy of reverence and yet subject to critical human study. Brilliant, holy scholars like Abraham Herschel had been trained in traditional Talmudic study and were able to synthesize these traditional roots with the best of contemporary, including Christian, scholarship. (Much like that same generation of Catholic scholars had been steeped in their tradition and able to innovate from within it: Rahner, Lonergan, Balthasar, and Ratzinger.) I personally have warm memories of taking class at Jewish Theological Seminary (their flagship school) and reading happily in their library. The tradition seemed remarkably similar to that of Catholicism with its ability to absorb the new in light of the received. There was about the place a lightness and depth that contrasted sharply with the grim liberationist resentments of Union Theological Seminary across the street on Broadway.

How different our world today is from that America of the mid-twentieth century! That culture was receptive of and reverent towards religion: cultural icons such as Abraham Herschel, Thomas Merton, Bishop Sheen, or Billy Graham could draw deeply from their respective traditions in a contemporary and creative manner and exert immense influence. In the late 60s the culture drastically turned against the Church which herself faced a fork in the road: give in to a hostile world or turn counter-cultural. The ferocity of assault allowed no compromise. In the great schism of 1967 over Humanae Vitae, most of Catholic academia followed Rahner and Lonergan into dissent while a smaller group rallied to Pope Paul VI and resisted the Trojan Horse. (Pun intended!) Today, in society and Church, we inhabit two opposing camps.

In recent decades the Jewish Conservative Movement has been under assault by secular, liberal culture on the issues of female and gay ordination. The terms of peace with secular culture were unconditional: absolute gender uniformity and unrestrained sexual diversity. It has surrendered on both fronts. The conflict polarized the tradition and fractured it into two opposing trajectories: forward into modernity (Reform) or deeper into tradition (Orthodoxy.) In this Culture War, there is no middle ground: the center does not hold.

Politically the same radicalization prevails: we have just elected our most liberal senator (the left extreme) as president; while a genuine middle-of-the-roader (on economic and cultural issues) had to turn to the opposite extreme for a vice presidential candidate in order to vitalize the base of his own party. The extreme right owns the one party as the radical left controls the other. The center does not hold.

In the Protestant world, long been fractured into opposing liberal and evangelical camps, we see the famed “via media” of Anglicanism exploding in civil war. Islam seems regrettably to lack this conflict: a significant but not majority of militant fundamentalists have declared Jihad against the West and modernity while a large but passive group lack the courage and clarity to confront them and therefore become collaborators or enablers by way of omission.

Within the Catholic Church the same dynamic is operative: innovators and accomadationists prefer fashion to tradition and authority; a marginal and eccentric fraction continue to rail against the progressively-conservative Vatican Council; while genuine Catholicism, defined authoritatively by John Paul and Benedict, digs deeply into holy traditions and flourishes in a variety of new movements and orders. Young Catholics are being pressured into secular conformity or are standing directly against this Brave New World, secure within the Maternal and authoritative Church.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.