[continued from previous message]   
      
   of his chosen patron saint, Augustine. This is his saddest shape-shift yet   
   because the passage that means so much to him—which he references in almost   
   every interview about his new faith—is written in extreme bad faith, a slick   
   con echoing across the millennia.   
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
   On an August morning in 410, Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, looting,   
   raping, desecrating the tomb of Augustus, ending a world, and opening a   
   psychic wound.   
      
   People blamed the empire’s new faith, Christianity. They did this for a   
   number of reasons, including that Rome’s sackers were, well, Christians,   
   freshly converted Teutonic barbarians who had only recently believed in   
   giants and dragons. Knowing this, Augustine responds by … blaming the pagans   
   entirely. It’s an early instance of Trumpian projection politics, which,   
   hilariously, betrays Augustine’s own very imperial Romanness. He simply   
   cannot part with the idea that God shows favor with earthly power, setting up   
   a generally catastrophic project for his later followers on the Catholic   
   right, to which Vance now belongs. In the twentieth century such horrors   
   include the fascism of Franco’s Phalange and Salazar’s Estado Novo, whose   
   greatest cultural output is Paula Rego’s paintings of women suffering from   
   back-alley abortions, horrors bound to be happening, as you read this, in   
   post-Roe America.   
      
   Add to this, now, the ghastliness of Vance himself, taunting refugees with   
   hate speech vile beyond anything on Augustine’s vice list, slandering Haitian   
   migrants as the eaters of their neighbors’ pets, and even, during the debate,   
   blaming them for soaring housing prices. Look at these beasts, sacking the   
   temple of the American home.   
      
   This, bizarrely, is what he’s come for: Catholicism as a worldly faith “that   
   could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized   
   conclusions about their negative social externalities”—or as we might call   
   it, compassion—“but with moral outrage.”   
      
   Why? He finds it grounding, a trip back to his Appalachian roots: “It was my   
   Mamaw’s Christianity,” he writes. “And the name it gave for the behaviors I   
   had seen destroy lives and communities was ‘sin.’” He thinks he’s found a way   
   to change while staying the same, forgetting the words of the Red Queen to   
   Alice in Wonderland: “In my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just   
   to stay in the same place.”   
      
   Spirit, too, can be exhausted, and it’s hard to imagine anything more   
   spiritually draining than standing on national TV and pretending that a   
   junior demon gorging on cheeseburgers down in Palm Beach won the 2020   
   election.   
      
   Such a thing hollows out the soul.   
      
   The German philologist Walter Otto was an expert on Jesus’s forerunner and   
   fellow wine enthusiast Dionysus. He believed Dionysus was, more or less,   
   real. He said it was the height of intellectual myopia to deny the fact of   
   encounters between the human and the divine in all ages. Religion, he said,   
   is the set of rituals marking those encounters, but as the vibrancy and   
   memory of wild contact fades, a religion can dry out, becoming just an empty   
   fossil, undesirable for most but alluring, I think, for an empty man.   
      
   Perhaps Vance might, in his next crisis of self, find fresh beginning in the   
   lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins—words far less angry and more wondrous (such   
   is grace) than misread Augustine:   
      
       And for all this, nature is never spent;   
       There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;   
       And though the last lights off the black West went   
       Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—   
      
   Until then, Christ have mercy.   
      
      
      
   https://newrepublic.com/article/186412/bankrupt-catholicism-jd-vance   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)