[continued from previous message]   
      
   yet another new name, that 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-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)