More Thoughts on Catholicism

There is a thing which I've been discovering...well, all my life, really; but at an exponentially accelerating rate and to an awe-inspiring depth and breadth over the last decade or so. That thing is God's Created Order in the universe.

I think it started in earnest with my discovery of the works of Tolkien, at around age 12. Tolkien's secondary world reflects with captivating beauty and majesty the true created order, and is fascinating in the same way that an exquisitely executed miniature is, like a scale model of a countryside, or a ceiling painted with the stars. The reduced scale of it allows us to grasp it, to own it, in a way shutting out the overwhelming vastness and incomprehensibility of the original. This is what C.S. Lewis expressed in his anecdote of the awakening of the Inconsolable Longing when his brother made a crude landscape of the hills near their house in the lid of a tin.

As I've grown and learned, I've discovered increasingly that this order, and the truth and beauty in that order, is the thing for which my soul most deeply longs. This is what draws me so profoundly not only to Middle-Earth and Narnia, but to Bach and Handel, Biber and Buxtehude; why I adore both Raphael and the pre-Raphaelites and loathe Picasso and Pollack. Why I'm fascinated by Mediaeval culture, history, and literature. Why my ideal life would be that of a rural gentleman on a farm-manor like in one of Austen's or Hardy's stories. It's why I love femininity and hate feminism; why I love marriage and hate adultery. And it's why I'm drawn to catholicism--because that is where that order, as it can be comprehended from our mortal vantage point, is most fully explored and expressed.

Catholicism is obviously imperfect. Very imperfect. But so is everything else. The difference is that catholicism is at least in intent and ideal far less imperfect than most everything else in the world as it now is. In execution it is quite a bit further from perfection than its ideal, but that is not an argument against it; it is a reason to do it better. Whereas the more perfectly you do modernism, the worse a thing you become. And Protestantism, though not wholly without merit, is a flawed and very limited vessel, which will not hold the vastness and complexity of the truth. Meaning proper Protestantism, not so much the Anglo-Catholicism which I've practised up until now. You can't fit God in a box made of human reason. Protestantism, and any philosophy based on rationalism, is rigid, and will break if forced too far out of its original parameters. Catholicism--and by that I mean catholicism in all its forms, not only Roman, but Orthodox, Eastern, Anglican, whatever--embraces not only order and complexity, but mystery, and that is the thing which gives it its great capacity to hold truth. Mystery makes it flexible and expandable, so that however much of God and His Order is revealed, the container expands and reshapes itself to fit it.

**edit: I initially wrote "post-Raphaelites" when I meant "pre-Raphaelites". Don't know why: I know better.