Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages.

THERE is a temptation among writers (abetted by their usually unindicted co-conspirators, publishers) to affect voices of authority, even when their actual command of a topic is limited to the common ground of personal opinion; such opinions generally being the result of some light reading.

I am saying writers are not always as well informed as they may seem. A mortal sin? Hardly. But it is vexing when an honest man, one who by now has grown far beyond the scope of his original celebrity, a man with clear ideas and good stories to tell, allows himself to be distracted from what he does know (and knows well) by a formula demanding what he does not know. Chuck Colson's latest is in the mold of the "learned polemic," of which the most celebrated recent example is Adan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

For some Americans, Colson will never live down the nutcracker image from his days as Nixon's special counsel. Too bad. More than any other prominent "born-again" figure of the last two decades, Charles Colson has truly surrendered himself to the will of God and changed his life. In true Christian spirit, he has established a worldwide prison apostolate (Prison Fellowship Ministries) and tirelessly dedicated his life to the services of others. This is a man on solid ground.

Why then, despite protestations of humility ("I claim no great originality for the thoughts contained in this book . . ."), has he produced a tome with pretensions to Bloom, Toynbee, or, more to the point, Albert Jay Nock? No doubt Colson and his gnome, Ellen Santilli Vaughn, have read lots of books, but Against the Night is the sort of sweeping survey that only true scholarship does well. A plumber flying over the Rockies on a commercial airliner may admire the topography, but that does not make him a geologist, This book seems to have been prepared using Bartlett's and a one-volume encyclopedia. Its historicity is banal; its reference to classical authors (particularly in the pithy epigrams beginning each chapter) is shallow.

While it must be said that there is much good in Against the Night, the formula, which is no substitute for the erudition it apes, too often gets in the way of the reader's appreciation of Walker Percy, Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, or any of the other authors whose work is extensively quoted; when, that is, it is quoted aptly. Colson is at his best relating the crisis of moral values (which is the book's theme) to his own experiences with men behind bars, but in one potentially compelling anecdote about a visit to New York's Rikers Island Correctional Facility, Colson stumbles on the limits of his scholarship: "As I walked that cold cell block, I knew I was looking into the face of a new lost generation. It was a chilling scene, filled with a despair more deadly than anything ever recorded by Hemingway or Fitzgerald."

Ernest and F. Scott? Clearly the formulaic key was punched to read out references to "lost generation," and, to be sure, the stone killers at Rikers are despairing in a way the characters of those two great novelists are not, but the point is neither author ever wrote about inmates or, arguably, about deadly despair. That a cell block should be actually evocative of Hemingway or Fitzgerald is simply silly.

And the Bartlett's-izing of Colson's arguments leads him to some rather tenuous associations, as when he quotes Peter Berger and Arthur Schlesinger on the subject of "community" in the political order. How actually companionable are the views of these two men? In fact, not very.

Still, as jeremiads go, Against the Night is eloquent and readable. Colson's dark vision of our present is best summarized in a quote from Robert Bellab's Habits of the Heart, a work Colson much admires: "We have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin. We have put our own good as individuals, as groups, as a nation, ahead of the common good."

"Night" has descended on the family, the school, politics, and religion, and paths to a new morning are hard to find and harder to follow. We must seek our cultural salvation primarily at the hearth and at the altar. Other sources of power will certainly frustrate our efforts and probably fail us.

Against the onslaught of the new barbarians, Colson addresses methods of fortifying family and church. For the former he makes the sensible suggestions of tightening divorce laws, strengthening penalties against non-support by fathers, and, especially, committing ourselves to "godly priorities." And for the latter? "The church," Colson writes, "must be the church," meaning it must focus its efforts solely upon saving souls. "The church is not a tool to rebuild society."

On an individual level, Colson recommends conversion. His chapter "Metanoia" relates the return to the Catholic faith by, of all people, his old White House buddy, G. Gordon Liddy, and I must say, that man's repentance proves the point.

With conversion must come a passion for orthodoxy, for community, and, above all, for the "moral imagination," a phrase Colson takes from Burke through Russell Kirk. That moral imagination is nothing less than the recognition that reality is rooted in God.

The glibness of any exercise of the survey formula does provide at least one lasting benefit, It alerts the reader to the sources used by the surveyors, and, although this volume is to be recommended, those who wish a more authoritative treatment of the matters at issue (without the formulaic veneer of current events and with genuine scholarship) would be better advised to read Russell Kirk's Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky (Regnery Gateway).