Do they go together? Can they be separated? Can faith exist without culture? Can culture exist without faith? These questions are at the heart of today’s readings.
In the broadest sense of the word, faith and culture are inextricably connected because a culture is always an expression of the faith which informs it. If a culture is animated by a belief in the three values of the good, the true, and the beautiful, it will shine forth goodness, truth, and beauty. If it is animated by a nihilistic denial of these transcendental foundations, it will manifest only viciousness, falsehood, and ugliness.
In the former case, the culture cultivates healthy growth in good things; in the latter case, it cultivates nothing and destroys everything. The former finds in the faithful fruits of the tree of tradition the seeds of new and renewed cultural expression; the latter pulls the tree of tradition up by the roots, casting its fruit aside, leaving in its place a desert wasteland of deconstructed despair, barren and fruitless, capable of nothing but the sterile sneer of the cynic. The choice is ultimately between faith and culture or the absence of faith and therefore, and in consequence, the absence of culture also. There is no middle path. Those who have been trying very hard to push faith out of today’s culture are in fact, under the pretext for freeing the culture from “traditional ideologies”, are in fact asphyxiating the culture. They are the same folks who argue that it is okay to “kill a life” (abortion) in order to “save a life”.
As the foregoing illustrates, any renewal of faith cannot be separated from a renewal of culture, and vice versa. In fact, to put the matter more correctly and accurately, no renewal of faith is even possible without a renewal of culture. If we do not give the present generation the fruits of the tree of cultural tradition, we will leave them malnourished and unable to bear faithful and fruitful witness, and unable to sustain the life of faith within their culture-starved spirit.
On the deepest level, the tree of cultural tradition it is not merely a tree but is the very Tree of Life, which is to say it is inseparable from the God who gives it life. Switching metaphors, we can see cultural tradition as the fruits of the marriage between Christ and His Church. Prior to the coming of Christ, the Bridegroom, we can see the marriage being prepared in the theology and history of the Jews, and in the philosophy and literature of the Greeks. In the Old Covenant of the people of Israel, in the moral and metaphysical musings of the Greek poets, and in the love of wisdom of the sages of Athens, we see the preparation of a virgin culture for the wedding feast. With the coming of Christ, the Bride becomes one flesh with the Bridegroom, united in His Mystical Body. Thereafter, the fruits of genuine culture can be seen as the children of that mystical marriage.
The saints are, of course, children of that marriage but so, too, are the great works of civilization. Even as the New Testament baptizes the Old Testament, so Boethius and Augustine baptize Plato, and Thomas Aquinas baptizes Aristotle. Dante baptizes Homer and Virgil, and Shakespeare baptizes Sophocles. This is the bona fide tree of cultural tradition, the family tree descending genealogically from the marriage of Christ and His Church.
