The Artificial Dark Age: Dionysius and Vampire Weekend

Few things are shared throughout the centuries. An ocean of time carries the most of the past away into obscurity. There are some great works of literature and art that have functioned as vessels upon which an idea can drift forward through time, uninterrupted by the risings and fallings of societies and cultures. Those ideas that were considered to be great were copied, translated, studied and revitalized into new works- they were living volumes.

But there are eras when even the greatest ideas don't pass in or out of the life of the culture, leaving historians with only a dim footprint of the period: a dark age. A dark age is considered "dark" not because it is primitive, but because it is hard to see once time has poured over it.  

Modernity has created a kind of artificial dark age, not because the lessons and ideas of the past are difficult to find, but we refuse to look. What C.S. Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" is the prejudice against old or ancient ideas simply because they are old or ancient. But the same questions that have already been answered in history continue to rise to the surface, and it is the modern world that is left unable to confront them in a serious and thoughtful way.

Consider the song "Ya Hey" by Vampire Weekend. The main refrain is as follows:

Through the fire and through the flames

You won't even say your name,

Only "I Am that I Am"

But who could ever live that way?

A recollection of Moses in front of the Burning Bush of course, and the writer is asking a question regarding God's Namelessness. It is uncertain whether he means to mock this aspect of God's nature or whether he truly is pondering the God that is wrapped in mystery. Regardless, in our current age that regards individual self-expression as the highest possible virtue, a Being that refuses to express Himself even in name is disconcerting; even possibly malignant.

Many before have wondered at the phrase "I Am that I Am", of Divine Names and Namelessness, most profoundly of all perhaps is Saint Dionysius in The Divine Names (as my most recent post explored.)

In a sense, many centuries apart, both Dionysius and Vampire Weekend raise the same question while only one is equipped to answer. But even more important is that the question has been answered and preserved for us in ancient writing, but is still somehow lost on the culture at large simply because it has detached itself from the source: the Church. The Church has become the vessel for many ideas over time, as they are distributed by the saints then collected by the minds of individuals within the Church and carried out again.

Through this example, we can see how the truth of Christianity is a truth that refracts as it is drifts through time; preserved by the Spirit and manifested in the Body of Christ in individual minds to answer every question. Christians have an opportunity and even a responsibility to share truth in every dispute, bearing in themselves the light of truth to be shared. This is why God has allowed certain heresies to arise throughout time, so they can be answered beyond dispute and stamped out by Orthodoxy.

Only the Light of the World can overcome the artificial dark age and we too are called to be bearers of that same light.