Natives From Nowhere, by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 9, 2024

Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College

The Church’s task is not to simply make herself manifest in human cultures. That would be to subordinate the Church to local ways. The task is far more challenging than that: to baptize the cultures.

The Vatican has recently approved of some considerable alterations of the Novus Ordo celebrated in the Mexican diocese of Chiapas. These alterations are put forward as springing from immemorial Mayan traditions. The controversy leads me to think again about what it means to have any kind of culture at all, especially as against the phenomena of the masses, which bid fair to make the world into one great Nowhere.

How can you tell Nowhere from Somewhere? One sign is the stale whiff of the faculty lounge—an air of white wine and copier’s ink, left over from last week’s conference on traditional culture. You are then sure to find that what is left of tradition has been overtaken by scholars peddling the same nostrums in Scotland as in San Cristobal de las Casas. These nostrums they get not from close and reverent study of the past but from notions in the current air, such as a chirpy reporter reading from a cue card might pronounce on television. …

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