Gregory Wolfe: The Culture Wars Revisited

In 2004, ten years after publishing "Why I am a Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars," Gregory Wolfe wrote "The Culture Wars Revisited," which is also well worth the read.  Here is a sample:

"Being an intelligent participant in political life is a responsibility everyone should embrace.

But in [a] passion for total war, [some cultural warriors don’t] seem to believe that there should be any civilians tending to other matters back home: everyone should be armed and dangerous. The brilliant poet, philosopher, and political thinker Charles Péguy, who wrote in the heat of France’s culture wars of the early twentieth century, understood the all-consuming demands of modern ideological politics. Péguy’s analysis carries weight precisely because he was an utterly political animal. But he also understood the role of culture in maintaining a healthy polity. So he could write with some authority about political activists who scorn those who look after a society’s mystique, the religious and imaginative symbols and narratives that give a culture its identity:

'For the politically minded always recover their balance, and think they can save themselves, by saying that they at least are practical, and that we are not. That is precisely where they are mistaken. Where they mislead. We do not even grant them that. It is the mystic who is practical, and the politically minded who are not. It is we who are practical, who do something, and it is they who are not, who do nothing. It is we who accumulate and they who squander. It is we who build, lay foundations, and it is they who demolish. It is we who nourish, and they who are the parasites.'

A socialist turned Catholic, Péguy became convinced that in the modern era 'Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique.... THE MYSTIQUE SHOULD NOT BE DEVOURED BY THE POLITIQUE TO WHICH IT GAVE BIRTH.' As Alexander Dru writes in the introduction of Temporal and Eternal, the book from which these quotes are taken, Péguy believed in the need for 'Christianity always to return to its source, its mystique, and to refound its institutions by allowing the mystique the freedom to create tradition afresh.'”