Crisis Magazine recently published an essay by James Baresel, in which he attacks the idea of Christian community and proposes the ideal of “Benign Misanthropy” instead. His article is certainly misanthropic, but it is hardly benign. Rather, it presents a deeply anti-Christian philosophy under the cover of a supposedly “traditional” Catholicism. Properly understood, the concept of community is an essential part of the Catholic Faith.
Baresel’s Essay
The essay begins with the story of a monk who told Alec Guinness that the most difficult aspect of monastic life was living with the other monks. Baresel then argues that the Catholic interest in community originated as a substitute for an authentically Christian focus on God. According to him, this pernicious substitution began in the early 20th century, and came to its full flower in the 1970s. He laments the fact that this interest in community has infected even “traditional” Catholics, and contrasts the current situation with the supposedly more individualistic spirituality of earlier times. In support of this, he cites Hilaire Belloc’s impatient reaction to being given a direction in church. He claims that in those far off and golden days, it was considered normal “for the less sociable to attend Mass, receive the sacraments, and otherwise remain largely aloof from parish life—or for sociable Catholics to remain equally aloof and prefer socializing at their yacht club.”
He then goes on to claim that while community is all very well for those who enjoy such things, Catholics can take it or leave it. In his view, Catholics who have a theoretical interest in community are bossy bullies trying to impose their own ideas on others. Baresel’s proposed alternative is “benign misanthropy”: fulfilling our obligations while avoiding most people and liking few of them.
He concludes his essay with the following declaration:
For myself, I’ll take the same path as Evelyn Waugh’s Gilbert Pinfold, who “at the very time when the leaders of his Church were exhorting their people to emerge from the catacombs into the forum…and to regard worship as a corporate rather than a private act…burrowed ever deeper into the rock.”
Some Straw Men
The author sets up some straw men to knock down. For instance, he presents the case of an unnamed deacon who rudely insisted on sitting next to a stranger in an empty church. This boorish deacon, according to Baresel, is a good stand-in for those who desire more community. As a matter of fact, such a situation indicates an absence of true community (the deacon was traveling at the time).
Similarly, he claims that the modern world is particularly interested in community. In a rather bizarre passage, he claims that he once “skimmed through a university social-work textbook—which unexpectedly acknowledged that the contemporary West is more consciously interested in “community” than any other society in history”. The conclusion he draws is even stranger: for Baresel, such a modern interest in community indicates that Catholics needn’t or shouldn’t be interested in community. This seems backwards. St. Paul attempted to redirect and transform the Greek desire for piety by declaring the God of Jesus Christ as the “unknown god” already worshiped by the Athenian cult. If the modern world really does long for community, shouldn’t Catholics evangelize on this basis, presenting the Church as the community par excellence that the world unconsciously desires?
Likewise, Baresel does not stop to consider why the modern world might be interested in community. Had he skimmed through a history textbook after his foray into social-work, he would never have presented the hostility of the upper-class misanthrope as a universal norm of Catholic spirituality. Moderns are interested in community as the sick are interested in health. They are desperate for it, not out of some drug-inspired desire to hold hands and chant kumbaya, but because they have been ruthlessly atomized, isolated, and stripped of both large families and trustworthy friends by a vicious and militaristic consumerist society. Like fish immersed in water, human beings in traditional societies were communal by default. They didn’t think about the groundwork of their lives. Today, community has disappeared—and we’re all talking about it. Baresel’s individualistic paradise of times gone by has never existed, except in his own imagination.
Belloc the Individualist? Waugh the Saint?
Hilaire Belloc and Evelyn Waugh were notoriously cantankerous. Whatever their other merits, they are not very good advertisements for a social program of “benign misanthropy.” More importantly, whatever Belloc may have said to an annoying sacristan, he did not agree with Baresel’s individualistic views. Belloc loved interacting with others—even when such interactions turned into violent polemics. He despised the social atomization of the modern world. He writes as follows in The Free Press:
To this day in the healthy remnant of our old State, in the country villages, much of this tradition survives. The country folk in my old neighborhood can read as well as I can; but they prefer to talk among themselves when they are at leisure…That is because in the country a man has true neighbors, whereas the towns are a dust of isolated beings, mentally (and often physically) starved.”
There is not much support there for “benign misanthropy”.
Waugh really does seem to have practiced something like Baresel’s “benign misanthropy,” and his character Gilbert Pinfold was something of a stand-in for Waugh himself. But Waugh did not see Pinfold or himself as completely admirable characters, much less as models of sanctity. In a famous though often misquoted exchange, Waugh was taken to task for his abominable rudeness. Waugh replied that if he were not a Christian he would have been even more horrible than he was.
As for Pinfold, he is a middle-aged writer, too indolent and dissipated to do much work, chronically annoyed by small mishaps, and rather paranoid. As the novel opens, he has been drinking too much and taking a variety of drugs—his overdoses are about to plunge him into the period of insanity which forms the core of the novel’s plot. Like Waugh, Pinfold does not seem to think that his misanthropy is totally benign. After being rude to his mother, he laments, “Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?” Baresel mistakes a literary character for a moral exemplar—but Waugh was not so didactic and preachy in his characters as Baresel is in his reading of them.
The Liturgy and the “Tradition” of the 20th Century
Pinfold’s view of the liturgy as “a private act” is deeply mistaken, but it was a view widely shared by English-speaking Catholics in the early 20th century. It is possible that long centuries of persecution had contributed to their preference for toned-down, silent, and brief liturgical celebrations, as compared to the more communal and lively liturgical celebrations of continental Europe. Whatever the cause, these preferences, combined with the growing individualism of the modern age and the dissolution of traditional communities around the world, led to the supposedly “traditional” model of parish life described by Baresel.
Too often, Catholic “traditionalists” limit tradition to the 1950s in the USA or the 1920s in England. They forget that these eras were deeply infected by modern individualism and puritanical approaches to Christianity, diseases which occasioned the very problems that traditionalists condemn! True traditionalism requires an examination of more thoroughly Catholic societies. For instance, Augustine Thompson’s fascinating book, Cities of God, describes the religious life of the Italian City States in the Early Middle Ages. The liturgical expressions of medieval Italian society were anything but “private.” Baptism was a communal event. In many cases, the baptistry of the local Cathedral was the only baptismal font in the city. Except in cases of emergency, all infants would be baptized in this font, many of them at solemn communal ceremonies during which many priests performed numerous baptisms. The liturgy contained communal elements such as the sign of peace, the Offertory Procession, and the intercessions—elements that were stripped out of the Tridentine liturgy but were restored after the Second Vatican Council.
And this is not a game of comparing fossils, of pitting one Golden Age against another. The communal emphasis of the medieval liturgy better accords with the eternal and living teaching of the Church as expressed by her shepherds today. In fact, viewing participation in the liturgy as private rather than communal is deeply distorted, a rejection of the liturgy’s very foundation. As the Catechism says, the sacrifice of the Mass is wholly directed toward the Eucharist. (CCC 1382). The reception of Communion (as the very word should imply) is anything but a private experience. In the reception of Communion, we do not consume God. Rather, we are consumed, drawn into unity not only with God but with one another.
Are Human Beings Essentially Individualist?
Baresel has taken for granted peculiarly modern ways of thought. He accepts the concept of an “individualist liturgy,” which functions rather like a sacramental fast-food joint, because he accepts the basic structure of our liberal world order.
In attempting to show that community is irrelevant or even undesirable, Baresel points out that intentional communities tend to fall apart or create factions. This is undeniably true. But Baresel undermines his point by blaming this on the individualistic mentalities of the persons involved. He thinks he has just demonstrated that “man’s innate individualism” will always ultimately triumph over the community. In fact, he has only demonstrated the existence of sin, which Augustine describes as a perverse situation in which “each soul finds enjoyment in its private domain” rather than loving God and neighbor. In this, Baresel accepts the liberal view of society, which sees the state of sin as man’s created condition rather than as a temporary tragedy. Instead of celebrating individualism, Baresel should lament the “dividing walls” that sin has built.
Classical liberalism takes the individual’s free choices and desires (the “private domain”) as the foundation of society. Christians can not accept this liberal narrative. The family, and not the individual, is the foundation of society, and the family is simply the oldest and most elemental kind of community. We cannot become fully human without community; we receive our very personhood from others in and through relationship. As God said in Genesis, it is not good for man to be alone.
As such, community isn’t something we can take or leave. The only “alternative” to community is sin, which is not really individualistic except as a pose. Rather, what appears as “private” is the manner in which the sinner relates negatively and viciously towards the community in which he is embedded. Any one who has been actively ignored knows that “keeping to oneself” is a fundamentally communal act.
In Christ the inescapable necessity of community has been elevated by grace. A member of the anabaptist Bruderhof community once explained to me that he was not temperamentally inclined to community life. He had joined the Bruderhof not because he desired “community” as such, but rather because the Gospel points toward such a way of life.
Community as Uncongenial
Starting from the liberal point of view, Baresel sees community as something secondary and chosen. This leads him to imagine that communities are primarily composed of people with the same tastes and mentalities. This may be true of cliques; but authentic communities are received rather than chosen, and contain a diversity of human types. True communities are geographic and include all those who happen to live in a particular area. Intentional communities are, in this sense, an oxymoron. They can only succeed by imitating the human diversity and organic development of geographic communities. As a community member I recently interviewed put it, “In community, people who you would never have chosen become your best friends.” G. K. Chesterton explained the difference between communities and cliques:
It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge. (Heretics, chapter 14)
In a related mistake, Baresel imagines that community should be congenial (for those who like it, at least.) That is why he starts his essay with the story of that grouchy monk; if other people are so hard to live with, what’s good about community? If the community isn’t congenial, what’s the point?
Many of those advocating community also make this mistake, and so lend color to Baresel’s criticism. Modern individuals are inexperienced in community life, and so some of them think community life would solve their problems or let them escape from the problems of the world at large. In fact, when individuals enter into a community in such a spirit the community will inevitably fail.
To treat community as a product to be consumed by an individual who likes or does not like its effects is simply a convoluted attempt at destroying community as such, and to assert the reality and primacy of the liberal order in its stead. The real point of community is that it is uncongenial, as Chesterton pointed out. In fact, community life is hard. That monk? Having to put up with the other monks is probably what will get him into heaven. For this reason some religious orders have a tradition that nobody can become a hermit without first becoming a good monk. In our modern world, it is easy to live in an unreal, self-selected world of “benign misanthropy.” So long as we have enough money, we can select our own friends, arrange life as we please, move across the country, block out dissenting voices by surrounding ourselves with an echo chamber. Community, by contrast, gives people a beneficial taste of reality.
The Sacrificial Giving of Self
The hard reality of community demands sacrifice. As Christ says, we are to take up our cross and follow him. We are to lay down our lives for others. That “laying down” may come in a dramatic way, but for most of us it comes about simply through giving up our own preferences and ideals. Baresel imagines that in a community each individual is simply attempting to impose personal preferences on others; the thought that they might be giving up preferences for the sake of others seems not to have occurred to him.
Similarly, the community corrects the faults of individuals. Frequently, this occurs simply by making faults obvious. Community shatters our fantasies. It can be easy to imagine that we’re perfect when we are in our rooms alone with “God,” who can easily become a mere projection of our own ideas. How we interact with other people shows us up for what we really are. Baresel is correct to be annoyed at boorish intrusions into silence and personal devotion, but by associating such obviously bad habits with as an example of “community” he misses the rather obvious point. Only the difficult love of community can correct the boorishness of the boor or stop the blabbering of the blabbermouth. The individualism Baresel preaches produces the very asocial “communal” types he despises, while the communal life he despises tends to produce careful, quiet, patient, and thoughtful people who have learned, through experience, what effect they have on others.
A focus on one’s own spiritual life, to the neglect of one’s embeddedness in a community, is deeply unhealthy. Christianity is not about individual programs of self-improvement. It is about giving up our own self-interest and self-centered vision. It is about growing in charity in imitation of Christ, who had no will of his own apart from the Father and who poured out his life in sacrifice for others.
Such charity can not be reduced to “giving charity.” In what is perhaps the most poisonous passage of Baresel’s essay, he suggests that Dives wouldn’t have been condemned for avoiding Lazarus so long as he made sure that “his servants provided Lazarus with the care he needed.” This is wholly alien to the Christian way of life. We are supposed to treat others as Christ. I certainly hope that Baresel is not in the habit of sending Christ around to the servants’ entrance! A Christ in the City volunteer was recently explaining to me that it is fairly easy for the poor to find free meals. They can get those from organizations. By contrast it is hard for them to find human respect and sympathy. They can only receive such respect from individual human beings. We might not be able to give money to every beggar on the street; but we can and should give them our attention, since Christ has said that he is in the least among us. And Christ doesn’t want our service, as such; he wants our hearts and souls, our attention, our very selves.
The Relational Nature of Christian Theology and Politics
Baresel’s stunted view of society and of the Faith could only have grown up in an affluent society. It is the affluence of our society that allows individuals to determine their own trajectories without reference to their surrounding communities. It is the affluence of our society that makes community optional. In poorer societies, someone can’t just decide to head off to the yacht club or decide to avoid contact with fellow parishioners! Fundamentally, wealth is about control and power. Wealth gives an individual control over life. With access to sufficient wealth, Baresel’s “benign misanthrope” can “happily spend his time doing whatever he actually likes to do.” Wealth provides a certain kind of security and independence. This personal security based on wealth, however, is condemned by the Gospel. Instead, the Gospel recommends a different kind of security. Gospel security is based on the mutual self-giving of a dedicated community, as depicted in Acts.
In fact, all of our Christian theology is deeply communal. As I’ve already mentioned, the Eucharist is fundamentally relational. As the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church itself is no more and no less than a divine community. In Laudato Si, Pope Francis said that everything is interconnected, because all of creation flows from the inner relationship among the persons of the Trinity. Everything that exists is patterned after the “community” of God.
We can’t wall off any area of our lives from our Faith; it must be integral to everything we do. Since the Faith is so deeply relational, a spirituality of personal relationship should mark everything about the Christian life. With this Trinitarian model before us, we must oppose the world of liberalism, the dust of disconnected individuals overseen by the omnipresent state and the impersonal market, in favor of a truly personal and relational politics of community.
Malcolm Schluenderfritz hosts happyareyoupoor.com, a blog and podcast about voluntary poverty and radical Christian community.