Catholic and Enjoying It!
is the religion of choice for Hollywood.
Result: a gorgeous film that is a mile wide and an inch deep.
The human soul cannot possibly be restrained from the impulse to worship. There are no true atheists. Nobody can stop themselves from offering their lives in sacrifice to some Highest Good. The only choice we have is what that Highest Good shall be for us. If we will not sacrifice ourselves to God, then we shall sacrifice ourselves to something else. Typically, the big three alternatives are money, sex, and power. And as we do this, we will sometimes construct elaborate scenarios of self-justification for the choice to worship the creature instead of the Creator. Hollywood, you may be surprised to learn, is overwhelming oriented toward the worship of money, sex, and power. Just look at Cameron. That’s what the guy’s life has been about. One of the most notable egoisst in a town famous for egoism. So he makes ham-fisted “socially conscious” stuff that boils down to Ferngully with great special effects and tells himself he’s being spiritual, when what he’s really doing is putting a sentimental veneer on self-worship. For the worship of the creature is ultimately the attempt to save your life by refusing to offer it to the Creator. It is the hope to remain Master by possessing gold, guns, girls, whatever. It’s ultimately the rejection of the sacramental interconnectedness that narratives like Avatar see and promise, but never actually deliver.
That’s part of the tragedy of the New Age. It’s the attempt to have sacramentality without God. It’s a reaction against a previous age’s godlessness–the godlessness of the rapacious scientism which came to fruition in the 20th Century. A godlessness that said of the created world “There it is boys! Take as much as you want!” It’s a godlessness that prompted truly sacramental writers like Tolkien to as hot a protest as anything a James Cameron could level. But Tolkien, being a Catholic, never made the mistake of passing from saying “Creation is sacred” to saying “Creation is the Creator and must be worshipped.” In short, he was not a fool.
Now we live in a time where ignorant armies clash by night. On the one hand, you have voices in the culture who retain the old exploitive materialism of the 20th Century. You can hear them on Talk Radio, for instance, laughing at any notion whatsoever that Creation is sacred or sacramental and emphasizing our power to exploit the natural world without any constraints at all. All concern for the environment of any kind is “envirommentalist wacko” stuff. They have taken the fragment of the Tradition that says “Man has dominion” and expanded it to the size of Creed. In short, they are heretics using a piece of the Tradition to attack the whole of the Tradition.
On the other hand, you have the voices pushing Gaia worship and laboring to extinguish the difference between creature and Creator. They have, in reaction to the rapacious scientism of the 20th Century, rediscovered a real truth: that creation is indeed sacred and sacramental. But they have attributed the sacredness and sacramentality to creation itself and not to her Maker. Indeed, they have ironically used the fragment of the Tradition they have re-discovered to attack the notion that Man has dominion and to assault the very idea of a God who is transcendent over Creation as a form of imperialism. Drunk with the idea of democracy and egalitarianism, modern pantheism sees godhood arising from a sort of gestalt of creatures merging into one Supreme Being. In this, we see a sort of parody of the idea that the right to govern comes from the governed. But, of course, in it’s original formulation, this notion of democracy had in view the idea that the peasant, as much as the king, was a creature made in the image and likeness of God and therefore had a say in how his freedom before God should be used. In it’s present debased form, this democratic ideal (and its expression in neo-paganism) now means that the creature is autonomous and can tell God (the source of his being, freedom and dignity) to go to hell and leave him alone. A perfect satanic parody.
Chesterton says that when you get rid of God, government becomes the god. Ancient paganism produced precious little in the way of human freedom or enlightenment. Where pagans saw progress spiritually, it was primarily in those places where, by the Providence of God, they grasped ideas which would only be fully illumined in the coming of Christ. What paganism did produce in abundance was chains and slavery. Indeed, the only thing in the history fo the world that has ever succeeded in striking off the chains of slavery (and that only after long struggle) was Christian civilization. The very notion of human equality is one of the side benefits of marinating pagan civilization in a Christians ethos for centuries. Because human equality is not something obvious to the naked eye. You can only see it when you accept certain faith propositions like “God is no respecter of persons”. The moment you get rid of the Faith, you lose the only basis for asserting that human beings are equal or that human rights are the gift of God and not something granted by the State.
All of which is to say, the attempt to worship Nature, which our elites regard as the final stage of human liberation, can’t end well. It will necessarily have to end in slavery, because when you try to worship nature, you always become unnatural. Sooner or later (and usually sooner) it occurs to some Bright Boy to realize that he is the living manifestation of the god who is Nature and that his will is what Nature is doing right now. Our worship of Nature becomes the worship of the Dear Leader and the Dear Leader becomes the sole arbiter of what is good and evil. We’ve seen this many times in our race’s sad history and we will see it again if we keep going the way we are.
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