Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 25 Feb 2008 at 12:23 pm
3MT : Waiting for Benedict in Bavaria
The private chapels of Bavarian farmyards reminded me, most peculiarly, of Alisdair MacIntyre and his search for a new Benedict.
I’ve returned from a short family break away in the Bavarian Alps, the first time I have travelled to Germany for 15 years, and thirty five years since I was in Bavaria. I had forgotten what an imprint religion in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, has made upon the region, its people and culture. “Grüß Gott” is the greeting: every building has a cross on the apex of the steeply gabled roof, and a statue or a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall. Every third farm house it seemed, went one further, and had its own chapel in the yard.
Of course, I know that the cultural expression of religion doesn’t necessarily say anything about the conscious assent of the people. “Grüß Gott” doesn’t make the speaker a Christian, just as “Goodbye” (or “God be with you”) usually doesn’t convey a Christian blessing. Even so, I found myself musing about the possibility of the private farmyard chapels appearing in England, and realised very quickly that it would just never happen. There is something about the English character which is very suspicious of such overt, privatised expressions of religious practice. Such private chapels were more common in England at one point, during the religious controversies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wealthy churchmen, of a particular churchmanship or theological persuasion, whether Methodist or Evangelical or Tractarian, would pay for a church in which God could be worshipped in a way which would please Him, whether Methodist or Evangelical or Tractarian. There are very few of these “proprietary chapels” left, and most of them subscribe to a distinctly conservative theology. Nowadays the English feel there is something improper about proprietary religion. To change the image to an economic one, we don’t like our religious service provider to be a private one: we prefer the nationalised RSP, even if we don’t make use of its services. As Ronald Blythe once said:
The British churchman goes to church as he goes to the bathroom, with the minimum of fuss and no explanation if he can help it.1
However, I think there is a change afoot. I’m beginning to see the beginnings of a move away from publically provided, personally neglected religion. The philosopher and ethicist Alisdair MacIntyre first noted this in his book After Virtue, published in 1981. He detected the beginnings of an ethical dark age within Western culture, and concluded his pessimistic book with this curiously optimistic vision:
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us… We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another— doubtless very different— St Benedict.2
I think the unpacking of this vision has to wait for another time.
