A Tale of Two Revolutions

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, and the Great Tension of History

The Child Jesus & Our Lady (Nelson Ndongala, Unsplash)

We constantly live in tension between two revolutions. These two revolutions, while both cosmological and eschatological, are also charged into the fabric of history, the human condition, and, most importantly, the human story. One is a sickness; the other is an antidote. Both revolutions are well known. Yet both revolutions have almost been fantasized away into legend and myth at this point as well. The “First Revolution” is what we today call the Fall, i.e., Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden and it is most certainly the reason for both its own denial and refutation (viz., the denial that sin exists entails a denial of the Fall) and is furthermore the reason, for a lack of better words, for the “Second Revolution.”

This Second Revolution is none other than the Incarnation, the true and glorious revolution, and the greatest scandal to fallen human nature. The First Revolution can be summed in the words non serviam (Latin loosely for “I will not serve”); the Second Revolution, on the other hand, can be summed up in the words “thy will be done,” the incredible fiat. Each revolution within history, both before and after the Second Revolution, has been either an echo of the First Revolution or a forerunner or child of the Second. The First leads to deformation, the Second leads to reformation.

History has been a long, successive interplay between these two revolutions. It has been an interplay between rejection and renewal, between destruction and renovation, between the no and the yes; it is a matter of striking a balance between unity and plurality and to which degree this balance is appropriate for each facet of life (e.g., an uncompromising unity of spirit is always needed, while a plurality of profession almost just as much). History, as a measure of human life in the past, is a dynamic, changing thing. It is not static. The same revolutionary tension that drove history still drives the present, the now. But, if history measures the change of human living, it is namely a change that begins in the hearts and minds of the peoples of history. History measures the dynamic change and interplay of men’s hearts in a way that goes beyond the single person, although the single person indeed has a quintessential part to play. In this view, history is the measurement of men’s hearts and the degree with which they affect each other. This revolutionary tension is no Manichean dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, but it is a tension that drives the spirit of history which forms the material world. Before the flesh of man rejected God in Eden, the greatest created spirit, Lucifer, rejected God first. So, there is a sickness within both the created spirit and the created flesh. This revolutionary tension involves the whole of the man in both body and spirit.

What exactly do I mean by “revolution?” Generally, I believe that revolution ends in either of two ways. Both ways begin primarily from the same place, but end at two very different destinations. Beyond the history, beyond the philosophy, beyond the given Merriam-Webster definition and etymology of the word “revolution,” I think we all know what revolution is in a deep and primordial way. The true revolution begins with the revolt personally known to each man, that is, the proper feeling of revulsion and rage in response to a perceived injustice (I emphasize “perceived” because what we may perceive as injustice may not be injustice. Regardless, this said feeling of revolt arises from the perception, right or wrong). This feeling of revolt is indeed a good impulse, but, if not fulfilled through a just response to injustice, it leaves open the door for even greater injustice, which will only exacerbate the revolt we feel, thus culminating in the revolution: the moment in which the people rise to act, for better or for worse. I take this relationship of revolt and justice from the likes of French theologian, Jean Danielou, who writes the following:

“The expression of revolt is already to be found in the child who, with fists clenched and in impotent rage sees punishment dealt to someone who does not deserve it. There is the root of revolt in many cases. It is the result of the accumulation of mute indignation at the sight of "right perfection wrongfully disgraced," of what deserves to be respected and loved being misprized. It is swollen by the spectacle of social injustice or political oppression. It becomes revolution when it wakes to awareness a commonwealth of the revolted who are determined to burst their chains. This revolt is sacred.”

I, too, believe that this revolt is sacred, and that, perhaps, many of the revolutions that have rocked the history of the last few centuries began at least with the initial feeling of this sacred revolt.  However, their endings—and sometimes even logical conclusions—are another case entirely.

The fact that we have the feeling of revolt does not necessarily entail that a revolution is always and everywhere justified, and our ideas of justice and perfection vary. It is not the one or two acts of injustice that justify a revolt, but a continued convergence of true injustices that show no signs of mercy or end that not only justify the revolution, but justly demand it. It is when this endless convergence of justice become blatant to those oppressed that the revolution must happen, but not at the cost of the common good (as St Thomas argues in his work On Kingship regarding revolt against tyranny). To paraphrase the wisdom of the historian Christopher Dawson, when we decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then the good we fight for becomes indistinguishable from the evil that we set out to destroy. The common good cannot be lost in the valiant effort to fight against the evils of injustice and oppression—valiant though they may be. In proper Lord of the Rings fashion, the temptation to use the ring against the enemy will always sing the sweet siren song.

The following question, then, is in what other way can the revolt culminate? As opposed to the “sacred revolt,” what is the “profane” revolt? The sacred revolt entails that we revolt against injustice, with the condition that the common good is not sold in the process. The profane revolt, however, entails a total rejection of not only the injustice, but everything associated with it. This revolt denies not only obeisance to God, to a higher authority, but it must also, based upon this first rejection, reject all else: the created order, goodness, truth, beauty, love, and all that is of God, which leaves you nothing. Evil is but a false imitation of the good but has no viability in and of itself. This revolt lacks the ability to separate the sinner from the sin, seeing both as the same. In its uprise against the sin, it strikes down the sinner as well, but not only this, but also his family, his friends, his history, and his home. This revolutionist forgets that the heritage of his enemy is his own heritage. I turn once again to Danielou who states:

“The real revolt breaks out on the level of what man has not comes to grips with and which he knows, if he is sane, that he cannot come to grips with. No revolution, no amount of scientific progress will ever change the scandalous fact that little children die, that good people are persecuted, that whole populations find themselves hurled into wars. And even if human effort could abate these evils, the fact would remain that they did once exist. Because of the scandal of the suffering of the innocent the world stands convicted, and revolt is justified.”

By this standard, then, since evil exists, revolt is justified. As we know, evil has always existed and, I daresay, it always will: therefore, revolt is always justified; and not just the revolt against the injustice is justified, but against all that is associated with the injustice, whether good or bad. This revolt does not distinguish the sheep from the goats, nor the chaff from the wheat. It inevitably turns upon itself to chew upon its own bones (has this not been the case time and time again within the ongoing communist revolution, for example?). It’s hard to know the mood of past generations, but is this not the case for the revolutions of today? If an evil exists anywhere, apparent or real, modern-secular society, according to its standards of what is good—although it doesn’t make value judgements, so it says—immediately renounces the evil in a process of revulsion, revolution, and rejection; then, only slowly in the preceding generations, does it realize that it threw out the baby with the bath water. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s analogy of the lamppost in his work Heretics, which he uses to illustrate the modern form of revolution for what it is: a mere deconstruction, as opposed to the renovation that is always needed.

But here lies the danger of revolution, even of the revolution that first begins in justice, because the revolutionary streak stems from a very visceral source within men’s souls. We are very reactionary creatures. Remember, the revolutionary tension charges the life of the body and the soul, that is, all the man, each of us with our axioms, reasons, peeves, habits, histories and varying emotions. Acts of injustice can shatter a dam of indignation within us, and we tend to overreact with a flood of emotion. And this emotion can blind us.

How we are seeing things—or perceiving them as already stated—makes all the difference. Our sense of justice depends on our sense of the good, and this latter sense is vulnerable to a host of subversions depending on how we live. (Since I have already addressed this relationship between ethics and semantics, i.e., how we know what we know and how we express it, I will assume my point appropriately justified for now. In brief, the point is that our vision of the good can be warped by untamed appetites, e.g., pornography, even at the psychological and biological levels, subverts one’s idea of what properly ordered sexual activity is.)

There are not a few reasons why the devout Christian and the just atheist, (e.g., Aquinas and Aristotle) who, living much in the same ethical manner, see things differently than the hypocritical, cultural Christian and the hedonistic atheist. In his work Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes, “progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” How apropos for our contemporary age, when the vision of modern society is always changing, and continually refracting what the good is. If appetite does indeed affect vision, then the appetite of contemporary man has become the bloated bully of his vision. The vision—or in a synonymous term, reason—essentially becomes the slave of passion, to allude to the likes of David Hume.

A further complication is that this appetite-vision dynamic is far from black and white. It is hardly a matter of either having a perfect-appetite-perfect-vision lens or an evil-appetite-evil-vision lens. The scale between these two poles is beyond our comprehension (meaning that we can always be better or worse) and we are all somewhere in between. Regardless of where we fall on the scale, however, the point is that true revolution depends on one’s notion of justice and injustice, which further depends on one’s notion of good and bad, which further depends on one’s vision of the good, which finally depends on how one lives. So, the question is: how does one live? I don’t presume to have the ultimate answer to this question, and it is the question we’ve been asking for a few thousand years now. All I can say is that there have been some damn good answers and a long history of experience. The greatest revolution of our day is that we’ve refused now to listen to, and engage with, this history. And I don’t just mean learning, I mean really listening, and speaking and humbly seeking together.

As traditional, conservative Catholics, many of us perhaps shy away from the idea of revolution due to its strong association with the modern age of revolutions—whether directly or indirectly—against the Christian religion or the authority of the Church, e.g., the Protestant Reformations (I believe the term “reformation” to be a misnomer, but perhaps that is a topic for another time), the French revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and so forth (and to note: by no means do I equate these revolutions). These examples certainly find their source in the type of revolution outlined above, in the way that Danielou describes, but a revolution is known by its fruits. Perhaps where many revolutions have ultimately failed is that, while there was certainly an injustice that needed justifying, there was also a sickness in the revolutionary seed; or the original rationale for the revolution, while at first just, was hijacked by impropriety or by the de-integration of priority (i.e., certain priorities or goods were not properly ordered, or thrown out altogether). In such cases, the seed came to fruition not so much as reformation, but as deformation, and thus the unjust revolution. A true and good revolution is evidence of the need for reform, and reform is the fruit of a true and good revolution.

To conclude, I want to touch on a few words from G.K. Chesterton that struck me, and also seem to challenge—but not contradict, perhaps—my notion of “two revolutions.” In his work Saint Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton makes the remark: “Perhaps there is really no such thing as a Revolution recorded in history. What happened was always a Counter-Revolution. Men were always rebelling against the last rebels; or even repenting of the last rebellion.” Continuing, he further states that “revolutions turn into institutions; revolts that renew the youth of old societies in their turn grow old; and the past, which was full of new things, of splits and innovations and insurrections, seems to us a single texture of tradition." Even within the Catholic church, traditions such as the Traditional Latin Mass, for example, were once revolutionary, or, in the case of the Council of Trent (in response to the Protestant Reformations), was counter-revolutionary—which, regarding the Church, was just reformatory. But lest we forget, and despite the words of Chesterton just stated, the Incarnation of Christ, the human “enfleshment” of the God-man, is the greatest revolution within the human tragedy of the First Revolution. The Fiat of the Blessed Virgin Mary was the beginning of this new and glorious Second Revolution, the Great Counter-Revolution, and Christ’s death upon the cross was the breaking down of the Bastille of Beelzebub and the overthrow of Satan’s Senate. In the same way that the Church does not have a mission but is a mission, so, too, the Church does not have a revolution but is the revolution. The task? To keep the revolution alive! The Second Revolution is now, the Second Coming is upon us. The return of the King is at hand. And this Revolutionary King does distinguish the sheep from the goats, the chaff from the wheat. He has one ultimate criterion, and it comes in the form of a question: how have you loved me?

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“Kierkegaard recognized that the world does not square with what we call justice. But he appeals from it to another justice. Kierkegaard's faith is faith in hidden ways the wisdom of which is greater than ours. And perhaps it is better so. When we see what men make of the world when they organize it by their lights, we may well wonder whether it is not preferable after all for somebody else to be pursuing a design in it that is hidden from us, but where through the chinks in the mystery provided by suffering and joy, death and life, we glimpse greatness. The world as it is gives scope for only two attitudes: revolt and faith. Faith does not exculpate the world for us. On the contrary, it presupposes scandal, for it consists in surmounting scandal.”