Geoff Manaugh raises an interesting question:

In a talk delivered in Amsterdam a few years ago, science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds outlined an unnerving future scenario for the universe, something he had also recently used as the premise of a short story (collected here).

As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another.

Upon reaching that moment, it will no longer be possible to understand the universe’s history—or perhaps even that it had one—as all evidence of a broader cosmos outside of one’s own galaxy will have forever disappeared. Cosmology itself will be impossible.

In such a radically expanded future universe, Reynolds continued, some of the most basic insights offered by today’s astronomy will be unavailable. After all, he points out, “you can’t measure the redshift of galaxies if you can’t see galaxies. And if you can’t see galaxies, how do you even know that the universe is expanding? How would you ever determine that the universe had had an origin?”

There would be no reason to theorize that other galaxies had ever existed in the first place. The universe, in effect, will have disappeared over its own horizon, into a state of irreversible amnesia.

Read the whole thing. We would be truly lost in the cosmos.

This dilemma is analogous to the one Christians face today, with respect to our own past and our own future, and to a certain extent Western man’s dilemma too.

Continuing the cosmological analogy, for Christians, the Big Bang moment was the loss of primal unity with God — that is, the Fall, the aboriginal catastrophe symbolized as our expulsion from Eden. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was the center of history. Now, though, in the post-Christian West, we are so far from those events, and from the events of the Bible — all of them in some sense stars that help us know where we came from and where we are going, and therefore who we are — that we are fast losing sight of them. Soon we will no longer be able to see them, except in the same way we see Greco-Roman myths of the pre-Christian past: as stories that were once vital to Western man, but which are today meaningful only as historical curiosities.

This is what church historian Robert Louis Wilken meant in 2004 when he wrote:

In my lifetime we have witnessed the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and what is more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, not only promoted by the cultured despisers of Christianity but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves. …

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

This is very close to the heart of the Benedict Option. It is an attempt to keep alive the memory of the stars and their constellations in a time when historical distance and willed darkness occludes them. The analogy breaks down in that the universe moves in only one direction — outward — while history, though moving inexorably towards the Eschaton, nevertheless may double back in somewhat recursive patterns. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire did not result in the expiration of the Church, because the Church held on to itself despite everything around it falling apart, and because the Benedictine monks kept the faith and cultural memory alive in their monasteries, until such time as the new civilization was able to receive it.

I have written in this space before about the work of social anthropologist Paul Connerton, and his study of what it takes to preserve cultural memory in modernity, which he says is a time of deliberately induced forgetting. Religion is the only thing capable of standing up to modernity’s attempt to brainwash us, said Connerton, because it makes the memory of certain events sacred, locates them outside of time, and tells those events (the group’s sacred story) in rituals that involve the body. (On that last point, Connerton says his research has shown that it is vital that the group’s sacred story be “sedimented into the bone.”)

We Christians have been so formed by the spirit of modernity that we are in grave danger of losing our faith. The spirit of modernity tells us that the past does not and should not have any hold on us, in part because it interferes with our liberty. As Connerton says, our entire late capitalist economy depends on forgetting — on denying that there is anything that should come between the individual and his consumptive desire. Against this, popular Christianity has been feeble. As I write in The Benedict Option:

Don’t miss the statistic there: 91 percent of self-identified young adult Christians either see no problem with materialism and consumerism, or don’t think it’s a problem they can do anything about. No wonder MTD has hollowed out received forms of historical Christianity, and transformed it from the inside. MTD is the perfect religion for a consumerist civilization.

But it is not Christianity. If you, your family, your church, your community practice MTD, and not real Christianity, your faith is going to disappear, either in your generation or your children’s. An Evangelicalism that focuses more on emotional experience, a Catholicism that goes along to get along, keeping its own teachings from its flock, and an Orthodoxy that worships the tribe instead of the Lord — none of these forms of Christianity are going to survive this New Dark Age.

(And for that matter, the liberal forms of politics that emerged out of Christianity in the West may not survive having been severed from their roots in the Christian religion. But that’s another story.)

You will read in the weeks to come some reviewers saying that The Benedict Option is “alarmist.” They will be correct. I believe the alarm needs to be sounded. In my travels, I often talk to Christian academics, both Catholic and Protestant, who say that their students are all but vacant theologically. They don’t even know what they don’t know, and worse, they don’t care that they don’t know. This is not the fault of those young adults. They have been failed by their churches and their families — by pastors and parents who did not form these young people properly in the faith.

This is how Christianity dies.

Let me rewrite Geoff Manaugh’s final two paragraphs from the passage quoted above to reflect my point:

In such a de-Christianized future universe …  some of the most basic insights offered by the Bible and historical Christianity will be unavailable. After all, he points out, “you can’t measure the loss of orthodoxy and orthopraxy if you can’t see a standard of right belief and a right way of living. And if you can’t see a standard of right belief and a right way of living, how do you even know that the faith is solid or heretical, healthy or corrupt? How would you ever determine that Biblical faith told the truth about mankind, about who he is, why he is here, what’s wrong with him, how he can be healed, and where he is going?”

There would be no reason to theorize that Christianity had anything unique to offer and to demand in the first place, because it will have been reduced just to one set of opinions among others. Christianity, in effect, will have disappeared into a state of irreversible amnesia.

This is what The Benedict Option is meant to fight. Michael Hanby told me at the outset of this process that what I needed to do with this project is to ask myself what Karol Wojtyla would do in our position. His point was that Wojtyla faced Nazi occupation by working underground with others through theater to preserve memory of Roman Catholicism and Polish national consciousness in the face of Nazi totalitarianism, which sought to obliterate them. We are not facing an Orwellian style of cultural forgetting, but a Huxleyan one. The effect, though, is the same: annihilation. There is no way that anyone who calls himself a cultural conservative can be indifferent to this.

UPDATE: Think of it this way. How can you, the 21st century Christian, be confident that something like this catastrophe hasn’t already happened? How do you know that the passage of time has not rendered certain truths and realities that we used to be able to see clearly all but invisible to the untrained eye? You look up and see darkness, or perhaps a few faint glimmers, hints that there might be something up there, but you can’t be sure. Do you conclude that there is nothing there? How is it that Christians of ages past saw so much there, and built their lives around it? Did they see more truly, more accurately, than we do? Have we progressed into enlightenment, or have we regressed into darkness?

How would you know?