If in humility we—Americans, moderns, Christians—reacquaint ourselves with an earth of the seventh day, in need of gardeners, namers, dominion makers, then perhaps we can avoid our great tower’s fall….For how, without knowing nature, can we know her laws, or know her God?
There is a capital in the east, a great city full of many peoples from all over the world, and it sits upon a river. Drawn there are the youth of all the states and territories, and of many foreign protectorates, to the halls of power where armies of civil servants administer the law. The city is full of parks and gardens and the treasures of fallen kingdoms. I write, of course, of Babylon.
American evangelicals living and working in Washington, D.C., like to invoke the prophet Daniel. Belteshazzar’s faithful service to an empire that swallowed up his people is a comfort to pilgrims who cannot help but notice their country that they love has ever less love for them, for Christ, or for his church. Daniel’s is a story that, on a superficial reading, might suggest the Christian in politics faces two futures: the power to do good, quietly behind the scenes, or martyrdom in the lion’s den. Few worry much about the far more likely outcomes—mediocrity and assimilation, for the sake of vulgar comfort.
Christians hoping to make policy—working close to power, seeking the good of the city—ought perhaps to look more closely at another character in Daniel’s story. King Nebuchadnezzar’s descent from royal grace to dumb beast, and then blessed return to imperial glory, presents us with a confounding illustration of man’s relationship to creation’s great chain of being and God’s providential work. The sin addressed, of course, is pride, which comes before a fall. But the way of humility and restoration is not an immediate turn to the high, to abstract theological doctrine, but rather a reacquaintance with the low, with the things of men stripped away: Nebuchadnezzar undergoes, we might say, a rewilding.
The prophet writes:
All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of the twelve months, he was walking about the royal palace of Babylon. The king spoke, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?”
While the word was still in the king’s mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: the kingdom has departed from you! And they shall drive you from men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make you eat grass like oxen; and seven times shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He chooses.”
That very hour the word was fulfilled concerning Nebuchadnezzar; he was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.
And at the end of the time I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me; and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever:
For His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
And His kingdom is from generation to generation.
All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing;
He does according to His will in the army of heaven
And among the inhabitants of the earth.
No one can restrain His hand
Or say to Him, “What have You done?”
At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my honor and splendor returned to me….
The moral lessons here are plain and familiar: humility and piety, the beginnings of wisdom. The political lesson, perhaps less so. We are citizens de jure—though maybe, de facto, merely voters and consumers—of a republic, not kings of kings. But empires are empires. And America’s public reason, too, the glory and honor and splendor, cannot return unless there is a rewilding for us of a kind, and thus the conservation of a commonsense account of nature as God’s creation.
Here, now, in this year of our Lord, it hardly needs demonstration—to voters of either party—that the American people have by and large forgotten that the roots of their liberty are deeper than their own mighty power and majesty. We are a house divided, like the garments at Golgotha. The ground on which our political order and all its just freedoms stands is a recognition of the laws of nature and nature’s God, but, what are those?
In turning to a discussion of nature, we find ourselves, as we should expect to do when heading in the right direction, on a narrow road. It is the path to a right relationship with the rest of creation, which is really to a right understanding of ourselves. But two ditches lie on either side of us.
On the one hand—we might be tempted to say the left hand—lies a radical flattening of all distinction between the human being and that other “everything else” that humans call nature. This can be professed to such a degree that our self-awareness is seen as an accident, even a kind of cancer, concluding that our proper relationship to the rest of the earth can only be found in self-effacement. Climate conversations have all the hallmarks of our post-Christian condition: cosmic sin without cosmic grace. We look to the heavens and see not the stars but the vast emptiness of space, and sing the praises of annihilation.
On the other hand—one commonly coded as right-wing or conservative—the earth is reduced to mere matter at hand, and all of mankind has become, not Imago Dei, the sons of God, but a potential demiurge. Nature in this perspective is only flux and chaos, which presents an illusion of order that modern man, as modern toolmaker, can manipulate for his own ends. These ends continuously grow, progress, with the mastery by technicians of new techniques. Mankind, too, then becomes caught up in this self-made emergent arc of history, just more matter for manipulation, as C.S. Lewis observed in the opening of the third chapter of The Abolition of Man.
Many Americans, many Christians among them, have fallen into one of these two ditches, and the leviathan regime we live in straddles this narrow road, a foot rooted in both sides, set to prevent our passage. This regime, one oriented to the total rationalization of life through technology, is both a giant artificial man and tower reaching to the heavens. So let us go back to the beginning, and look at Genesis, chapter 11: