Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred.

" Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,' The Misfit continued, and He shouldn't have done it. He thown everything off balance."'-Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

s THOMAS MOLNAR reminds us in Athe latest of his many books, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503; $9.95), The Misfit has not been alone over the centuries in his opinion that the Jesus story-the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection-thowed the whole world, including history itself, out of kilter. Almost from the beginning, it was observed of Christianity that this religion possessed peculiar and irresistible powers, whose ineluctable effect was to desacralize the pagan universe wherever and whenever it encountered it. Henceforth there would be one Mediator and one only-Jesus Christ the Messiah-between man and God, where before there had been hundreds and thousands; henceforth, wherever Christ triumphed, the sun would be only the sun, the stars merely points of gaseous fire, a tree no more than a fibrous shoot of spiritless vegetable life. For Christians, ritual was unavailing without purity of intent, while the City of God provided no direct model for the City of Man, the real model for the Christian life being Jesus Himself; finally, Christianity replaced the cyclical view of history with the linear one, which emphasized the uniqueness of historical events precipitated by the actions of individuals. "In sum," Molnar writes, the presuppositions of a scientifically regarded universe were born, with no room for forces that might counteract God's creative and sustaining will.... The social order of Christian nations was

..no longer regarded as a sacred order like the Indian caste system; instead it had freedom and autonomy, and the vast sphere reserved for historical and political action was now profane, essentially outside the bounds of religion.... The new spirit, based on the new cosmology, carried in itself all the elements of the modern view of a uniform, homogeneous space, where no point was privileged, no one point was distinguishable from any other, except by an occasional local irregularity that further scientific observation and calculation could clarify. In other words, in the Christian cosmology that is still ours today, there was no high and low, no tendency of bodies to seek their "natural" place, no causation in the processes of nature by psychic and suernatural forces. Thus did Christianity, indeed, thow everything off balance. And, like some Titan struggling to project a mighty boulder, its efforts have proved nearly as unbalancing to itself as to others, to the point even-or so many of its critics have suggested-of self-destruction. According to this view, Christianity, like capitalism, is doomed by its own inherent contradictoriness.

Readers of previous books by the same author will know that Thomas Molinar is not of that opinion; he concludes this book by observing how "The soul, at all times a rectifier of matter, appears as the only conceivable counterpoint to the material dynamics implicit in the linear course of history." In other words, he preaches hope, no more-or no less. According to Professor Molnar, the West is suffering-perhaps terminally-from a loss of authority (and therefore of power), produced by the secularization of politics, which is itself a direct result of the desacralization of the cosmos. Our situation, he reminds us, is an unprecedented one, offering no clues to future developments or devolutions; until yesterday, so to speak, our ancestors retained some sense of the ruler as mediator between the supernatural and his own subjects, as the priest was recognized to be the intercessor between God, or the gods, and the human souls for which he was responsible. While acknowledging that "there is ... apparent in [all] great civili- zations a gradual transformation from the community's sacred structure and foundation under a divine order to a popular and individual structure," Molnar insists, with utter plausibility, that ncver in history has the logic of developments been played out so far as it has been in the contemporary West, where not only have politics, society, and culture been thoroughly desacralized, but even religion itself; today, "It is an intriguing question whether our age is capable of generating [another) myth with the power to move nations and civilizations.... we cannot produce a new sacred, and we cannot revive the traditional one." The only perceivable way around the impasse lies in the ability of the individual soul, "at any time, again and again, [to] humbly request divine assistance."

SOME MONTHS AGO I remarked in this space of Benjamin Hart's Faith & Freedom that it was "too Protestant"; perhaps perversely then, I find my chief complaint against Twin Powers to be that it is too Catholic. Professor Molnar, as an essentially Old World philosopher, does not hedge on his argument that democracy is to a substantial degree implicated in the situation he deplores. While I by no means regard mass democracy as Christian theology applied to politics, I was definitely displeased to find the work of the Constitutional Convention described as an attempt to build "a community not founded on the sacred." Of course, the Founders were trying to erect a system of government, not to create a community," which had thrived for nearly two centuries before their deliberations. (Professor Molnar, it seems to me, fails to grasp a fact that Mr. Hart appreciates, but overemphasizes.) Earlier in his book, Molnar identifies the displacement of the sacred from the cosmos to the rclationship betwecn a human being and his God as "the risk Christianity takes." In fact, Twin Powers makes it eloquently clear that Christianity is itself the ultimate risk-and therefore the ultimate challenge-that every Christian since Christ has known it to be, and of which the risks and challenges of democracy are a faint, though real, approximation.