The present age has invented Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Bluesky, Truth Social, and Threads, but it hasn’t produced one great aphorist. Strange, since these media feed on the curt thought. But that laconicism all happens within a virtual sphere—pretended immediacy, frictionless scrolling, all flat as the screen. Type and post as soon as the take comes, hot and ready. But everything these apps emit seems rather cool and, almost as often, cruel. “These media communicate the vitality of activity but not the vitality of sheer existence,” as an archbishop writes.
By contrast, the aphorism “makes plain its inadequacy.” It indicates, but does not pretend to comprehend, truths beyond its own words. It always goes a little too far, or not quite far enough. It leaves you wondering. Short proverbs, parables, pointers. What are they pointing to? “They reach for the vitality of sheer being.”
One must begin a review of The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster, by Ross McCullough, with a discussion of form. This is a work that foregrounds form. Its very substance relies on this form, one which points to the Substance beyond itself. And this form, as the archbishop himself describes, is the aphorism.
This book is a fictional collection of letters written by the last Roman Catholic archbishop of Lancaster to various people: a friend, a nun, a young skeptic, a fellow priest, his interrogators, and a liberal Muslim mother, all in an unknown near-future.
A scholar has discovered, translated, arranged, and just now published these letters—only for academic interest, of course. He adds footnotes of references to commentators who dispute interpretations of the archbishop’s thoughts and prejudices and inconsistencies. This scholar seems pleased to have this collection on his CV, but he appears almost totally unaffected by its contents. In his scholarly introduction, he admits some of these letters are “posthumous,” owing to undatable or even unfathomable circumstances. He notes where in the general corpus they might fit but recommends waiting to read them until the end.
McCullough wrote this work under the influence of Søren Kierkegaard. And as any Kierkegaardian knows, you should never trust a scholar. So instead, I flipped back and forth between the general collection and “posthumous” letters, as I marked up each page with underlines and marginalia. This experience heightened the labrynthine, incomplete, and tactile nature of this book, which, I suspect, would delight McCullough. Constantly, I was reminded that this book was a book.
By way of form I may finally approach the content. This near-future is being consumed by media which don’t admit that they’re only media. “Immersive Reality” (or “IR”) a small-room-size technology combining social media, television, Oculus Rift, and pleasure machines, reigns over everyday life. Even the archbishop uses it—including, perhaps, for lustful purposes, when he’s weak. Islam has overtaken Protestantism in a totally liberalized Europe, while radical terrorist cells prowl the continent’s borders. The archbishop adopts his goddaughter as his own after her parents’ death, and he lets her spend a great deal of time with their Muslim neighbor’s family. An anonymous hacker disrupts the IR on a global scale, to the archbishop’s delight and, later, doom.
Until then, the cleric dutifully writes on the place of Roman Catholicism in this world, convicts a young skeptic to read Dostoevsky, explains to his liberal Muslim neighbor why liberalism just won’t do, and readies himself to die. There is much more to the text, but not to the plot, than this. Its content is, foremost, theological commentary of Late-Modern, or rather, Meta-Modern life.
The Modern era is characterized by the ever-expansive attempt by humankind to rationally comprehend and control reality. To be is to think, so reality is to be conquered as it is progressively thought through. The medium of this progress is the text, its paradigm the encyclopedia, and the arc of this titanic task bends along a secularized sense of progressive time. One day, finally, we will know everything.
The Post-Modern era is the realization of the failure of that task: there is, at the heart of reality, an incomprehensible X—some call it Existenz, others Being-itself, still others The Real—which marks the finitude of human reason. “God” plays a strange role for the Post-Modern. To some, God re-presents Reason itself, and since reason has failed, then God is dead. But to others, God signifies that very unfathomable X which modernity overlooks and to whom we must return. Meanwhile, technology has still succeeded in penetrating every area of life, so the project of comprehensive control continues, even as the project of knowledge is recognized to have failed. The medium of the Post-Modern, then, is the image, with all the consequences that seeing rather than being entails. Our sense of history is no longer spread across time but throughout space: various eras, aesthetics, tastes, and so forth are spatialized as they are diffused across our culture. And our culture is unified, not by reason or a rationalized culture, but only by consumption.
Now, however—in the near-future of McCullough’s making or the moment wherein we already find ourselves—the era of the Meta-Modern has begun. The crisis of the Post-Modern is overcome with a shrug and a “well, never mind all that.” If we can’t access The Real through rationalism, at least we can get everything else we want. So let’s just choose the re-presentation over the presence as much as we can. The human project, therefore, turns into a project of anti-realism: The Real must be obviated, its tactile resistance rendered frictionless, all for the sake of comfort and consumption. Of course, The Real cannot be destroyed, it can only be escaped. Hence, finally, the medium of the Meta-Modern is the virtual.
Each of these ideologies suffers from the failure to usher us into relationship with Being-itself. How can human beings just be in the present, rather than re-present it by thinking or watching or—well, whatever it is we’re doing when we immerse ourselves in the virtual? How to reach the “vitality of existence”?
The Zen Buddhist has his way, the various continental philosophers theirs. Kierkegaard and Nicolás Gómez Dávila—another great Christian aphorist who looms over these pages— both imply the Christian way. So too does the archbishop:
The real thing does not have to try: it is given to be itself; it is itself by gift. You do not find your way back to the real by striving for it but by receiving it.
Alas, for the archbishop, that Christian way is definitively Roman Catholic. The archbishop often writes like a Catholic convert, and indeed, his biography proves he is, from the Quaker faith of his childhood.
Orwell once complained of literary converts that, for them, everything had to reflect their Catholic identity: Chesterton’s preference for beer over tea had to be a matter of Catholic jollity over Puritan prudery, not just a matter of taste. The fresh breath of true life is suffocated by that sort of prudishness. At times, the archbishop appears to succumb to the same stifling air: to exist is to be Catholic, while everyone else doesn’t quite yet exist. But God so clothes the lily, which today is—and He does not wait until the lily is in communion with the Bishop of Rome to do so. Granted, Jesus Christ is before all things, and in him all things consist, so I’m more than willing to grant that Christ is the only way for us humans to access The Real. But the archbishop often puts himself as representative of Christ in the place of the presence of Christ. Quite like all the other confusions of the Meta-Modern age, this is to put the re-presentation in the place where only the presence belongs.
(I do not blame Roman Catholicism per se for this failing, because it also has its more radical and self-dispossessing examples, the greatest in recent years being Pope Benedict XVI.)
I quibble over Protestant-Catholic disputes, largely because that is the substance of many of the archbishop’s aphorisms. I might be paranoid or too beholden to the tradition of esoteric reading, but I suspect that when the archbishop is debating with his liberal Muslim neighbor, he is really debating with contemporary Protestantism. He asks her if the subjective interiority of New Age Sufism is really any different “from the hand-wavy Post-Protestants.” He chides “the textualization of God’s Word.” He claims “the textual is the first IR.” He cites Pascal as the best anti-Protestant. Kierkegaard, again, is an influence but also an awkward foil. The archbishop can’t help but correct the Dane, even when he enlists him.
The archbishop laments the “substitutability” of the Meta-Modern era: particulars can be traded for any general products. But again, he does not reckon with the possibility that his own (and the Roman magisterium’s) identification of the Roman Church as the visible Christ is its own substitution. By contrast, the Protestant, read charitably, understands there is no perfect presence unless it be of Christ himself, at that time when we “see face to face.” Until then, we must live by faith. And the means of our faith will be fragmented, veiled, dare I say aphoristic: the testimony of Holy Scriptures pointing to the Gospel that binds them together, the body of Christ with, in, and under the elements of the bread and wine, the body of Christ, visibly broken across the communions but invisibly united in the Holy Spirit.
Of course, the form of the archbishop’s life and writing, if not some of his more polemical musings, attests to this same aphoristic existence—“the absences it makes present,” as he writes of nostalgia, but it applies in the best sense to himself. The archbishop is a figure of nostalgia. And if done right, nostalgia is a worthy counter to the Meta-Modern age.
Gómez Dávila’s great work was Scholia to an Implicit Text. My remarks are but scholia to an explicit text. I heartily recommend readers to pick up that text for themselves. Ross McCullough takes on the “tricky business to write the word,” and indeed, he succeeds in drawing “people on to the unwritten Word, even in some way to the unwritable Word.”
