Light On Dark Water

What was Caelum et Terra all about?

An exchange on the Caelum et Terra blog prompts me to
bring up a question which often presents itself to me: what was
the magazine all about, really? Perhaps the most frequent
description I’ve heard is that it was an agrarian
publication (agrarian and Catholic, of course). I myself always
thought of that as only an implication, one of many, of some of
the magazine’s central ideas, and not necessarily a
necessary implication, albeit a fairly strong one.

Since Daniel Nichols was the founder and editor and the
magazine was very much a reflection of his personality,
he’s the one who, in the end, is most authorized to answer
this question. It was also Daniel who located the contributors
and, for the most part, decided what to publish. Apart from
mostly relatively minor editing, my direct contribution was
largely in what I myself wrote. So in a sense the question
I’m going to answer is not the one I posed above but
something closer to “What did Caelum et Terra mean
to me?”

For me, the magazine was fundamentally about re-connecting
Catholic life and thought with two things: first, the Christian
culture and traditions eclipsed by secular modernism; second,
nature. Let me take the latter of these first because, although
it is the less important of the two, I don’t want to leave
room for misapprehension. I want to be clear that
I’m not talking about a romantic
or Rousseau-style return to nature, and certainly not
nature-worship. I mean first of all human nature, but I’ve
never thought it possible to discuss human nature intelligibly
without acknowledging the degree to which it is grounded in
physical reality generally. Daniel included in the first issue a
quotation from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger which became a sort
of touchstone for me:

In the world of technology, which is a creation of man, it is
not the Creator whom one first encounters; rather, man encounters
only himself.

This is an extraordinarily pregnant observation. In what it
says, and in what it implies, is contains a great deal of what is
wrong with the modern world. To acknowledge that we first and
most often encounter the Creator by means of his creation is not
nature mysticism, but sound common sense and good theology. If
this encounter becomes difficult or impossible, first illusion
and then evil are bound to follow. In the end one can envision
arriving by this path nowhere else but at the place inhabited by
Milton’s Satan: Which way I fly is hell; myself am
hell.

I cannot doubt that man in his attempt to make the world
revolve around himself, and to enforce his sin-bent will to power
not just on external but on his own nature, is constructing a
hell. Acknowledgement of our own nature and our situation in
creation is a necessary instrument of virtue, of understanding
what is and isn’t possible and permissible to us.

As for the first connection, to Christian culture and
tradition, of course I mean attention to what those cultures and
traditions have to say to us (and I use the plural because
Caelum et Terra was always intended to be both intensely
Catholic and deeply and broadly sympathetic to other traditions),
but I also mean something more: a re-incorporation of some of the
Christian (and indeed simply human) mental habits we have lost.
As I’m attempting no more here than a hasty sketch,
I’ll mention only two things.

First: what has become of our appetite for the real? For the
true? We live in a culture which tends to devour every genuine
cultural artifact and then offer it back to us as a flimsy and
often ridiculous decoration. We accept that we should swim in a
sea of half-lies for which those who utter them bear no moral
responsibility whatsoever. The most advanced of us may openly
deny the existence of truth, but far too many of the rest treat
it in practice as optional and negotiable. I noted in

a short piece published in the first issue of Caelum et Terra that
advertisers do not show us the factories in which their goods are
actually produced, but instead romantic images of artisans, or,
if the product is something inherently factory-based such as an
automobile, a fantasy which makes comparatively little reference
to what the actual product actually does, but rather shows it
creating a kind of heaven in which we can live in effortless
pleasure. A real interior appropriation of Christian thought on a
wide scale would eventually render impossible this establishment
of deliberate miscommunication as a cultural habit.

Second: how can we think in all this noise? I was talking the
other day about the 18th century poets who wrote
entire volumes of verse in rhymed couplets, and of other artists
whose accomplishments now seem almost superhuman to us. Surely
one reason they were able to do these things is that their minds
were more free than ours, in the sense that they had fewer
distractions and were less superficially busy. They could attain,
far more frequently and easily, the state of inner silence
required for real thought, or real creative work, to present
itself. But these accomplishments were only the flowers of
culture. It seems reasonable to assume that everyone’s
attention was occupied by fewer but more substantial matters than
is ours—more substantial in the literal sense, harkening
back to what I said earlier about nature. As with our attitude
toward nature (using the term broadly), this doesn’t mean
indulging in a medieval fantasy, but it does mean recognizing
that something important has been lost and needs to be
restored.

It may be said, quite accurately, that there is nothing specifically
Christian in the preceding two paragraphs. One of Caelum et Terra’
concerns was the way in which the Gospel becomes unintelligible to
people who have lost all sense of connection with the fundamentals
of human life. We (I think I can use the plural here) were concerned
that contemporary culture was a soil increasingly hostile to
genuinely human life, and therefore to Christian faith.

Unfortunately I can’t remember his name, but not long
ago I read about a saint who maintained a peaceful little garden
in the midst of a city, and by means of this garden brought many
to step away from the world for a short time and allow the
eternal to speak to them. That garden serves as well as anything
I can think of as a metaphor for what I conceived Caelum et
Terra to be. For me, any specific position articulated in the
magazine—any opinion on economic, politics, education, art,
technology, marriage—was to be judged in light of its
support for those fundamental concerns, which I considered to be
compatible (in principle at least) with quite a wide range of
specific opinions on controversies of the day.