There is No More Innocence
I have always had a hard time grasping the fascination with Stonehenge. A collection of large slabs, none-too-skillfully carved, and arranged in the most rudimentary layout, the scene never quite struck me as a manifestation of human brilliance. Even taking its great antiquity into consideration, it does not even seem to me to display anything like the spiritual stirrings traced on the caves at Altamira or Lascaux, which predate Stonehenge by many centuries.
Nonetheless, there is something intriguing about the speculation the site inspires. Theories abound as to what the original purpose of Stonehenge might have been, and I am not aware that any of them are accepted as definitive. What inchoate aspirations of the soul rose and were nurtured in that crude sanctum, what bizarre rituals were carried out in worship of what dubious gods – this is certainly matter to enflame the imagination.
What we can discern at work quite readily in the arrangement of the site is one of the most primitive and fundamental of human instincts: the instinct to demarcate the space of the sacred, and separate it from that of the profane. Whatever else was passing through the minds of the people who gathered at Stonehenge, what they were undoubtedly thinking was that some sacred presence was to be encountered within the confines of those stones, and nowhere else. The drawing of lines and boundaries around the location where the divine has made its appearance is a basic – perhaps the basic – act of human civilization.
Mircea Eliade writes of this delineation of sacred space in The Sacred and the Profane. There is, claims Eliade, “a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous.” Wherever the “sacred manifests itself in any hierophany,” there is a “revelation of an absolute reality.” There, those who wait upon that revelation build their temple, a structure that “results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.” Within this “sacred enclosure,” a “communication with the gods is made possible,” and the “profane world is transcended.” On this account, an authentically religious life is one spent guarding the vestiges of the appearance of the god, and relentlessly warding off the besetting forces of profanation.
For most of us, this labor will not be directed towards any sacred visions or miraculous encounters of our own. Those are not the ordinary means of God’s disclosure of His presence to us. The building of shrines and cities is not the form of worship prescribed to most men. It is in the bonds we form with those at the heart of our lives, and the duties emanating from those bonds, that we come to find our sacred dwelling-place, and enclose a space in our lives where the demands of the profane world are held at bay.
This is most especially true of the experience of parenthood: we intimate in the burgeoning motions and thoughts of our children an encounter with a world made new, a “green and golden” world resplendent with the aboriginal “this-is-good” of creation. Often in their presence, we find ourselves seeing with their eyes and looking once more upon “the fields of praise.” In response to this common revelation, we strive as parents to erect an invisible temple around their childhood; we allow them to be “young and easy,” running, playing, laughing in full ignorance of the burden of sin and death that must fall upon them one day. We guard their innocence like a relic. We draw boundaries in the air lest anything degrading or demoralizing come to their attention. The futility of these efforts does not dampen them; rather, we exert ourselves the more to retain the purity of their hearts, knowing the brief spell of its visitation.
When we engage in this effort in communion with our neighbors, we call the enterprise education. Schooling, when undertaken in the proper spirit, is contiguous with the role of parenthood, insofar as both seek to preserve whatever is decent and untainted in the child’s character from whatever is defiling in human experience. It is the mark of every truly educated person that they bear even into their adulthood some vestiges of the native ebullience of their youth. Read the biographies of great persons, and you will notice this fact over and over again: in the zest with which Lorenzo de’Medici threw himself into the pageantry of Florence, in the joyful mischief with which Samuel Johnson would roll down a hill or swim into a dangerous pool, in the awe-struck reverence with which Merriweather Lewis catalogued the virgin landscape of the interior. What was pure in their souls was tended in their youth, and so proved life-giving to them even into maturity.
One of the most ominous and revolting trends in modern times has been the drive to insert grossly inappropriate content into the curricula of schools across the country, including in elementary schools. Lessons and readings containing sexually explicit material that would shame an adult to discuss in private are now presented to children with disturbing regularity. The blind zealotry and mendacity with which the functionaries of our educational apparatus defend these practices only makes their vileness that much more nauseating, and supplies only the latest evidence that the complete dismantling of our public education system is way past due. If it is a basic task of an educator to nurture and preserve what is wholesome in children for as long as it can be nurtured and preserved, then there can be no greater disqualification for the role of an educator than a demonstrated inclination to bring children into contact with lewdness.
Still, it is not a handful of weirdos, charged with the latest progressive ideologies, who are primarily responsible for intruding upon the innocence of our youth. It is the totality of American life which, in a thousand different ways, profanes the sanctity of America’s children. From the decline of religion, to the economic conditions that pull children away from their homes even in infancy, to that ambient cloud of distraction, degeneracy, and stupidity called the internet, the way we live now affords children no space in which their native affections for what is good and holy can develop unobtruded by their native proclivities for what is rank and destructive. When they enter into any public space or turn on any device, their minds are almost instantly beset with profanity. A spell in the waiting room of the dentist office means overhearing the vaguely pornographic lyrics of the latest pop “song;” an evening spent watching the game together means diving for the remote control before the not-so-vaguely pornographic halftime show begins. The walls that ought to stand guarding the healthy development of our children’s characters have been torn down, and it is not a few hands that have committed the vandalism, but many.
This is the point that is too often omitted from rants against the depravity of our schools, justified as those rants may be in other respects. It is too often the case in our day and age that the pervert teacher is not the child’s first encounter with perversion. It is too often the case that such teachers find a ready audience for their degeneracy in the classroom because their students have already had their sensibilities debased through various forms of media. It is getting a little tiresome listening to screeds against “groomers” in the classroom from parents who purchased their child’s first iPhone for him at the age of eight. If you are providing your child with unfettered access to the internet and to social media, given everything that we know about what is on there, then you are your child’s primary groomer, not his teacher.
A recent story out of Missouri illustrates my point perfectly. A high school yearbook was published that contained a section in which the students boasted of their various sexual escapades, all part of the “hook-up culture” in which they have been immersed. A few parents fumed at the school administration, which in turn hid behind the legalistic claim that they do not “engage in prior review,” as though their culpability did not lie in that exact fact. Certainly, the school bears the blame for publishing such material, but the content is not something the students learned at the school. Their acquaintance with “hook-up culture” precedes Geometry class. In this, as in so many other cases, the vulgarity we see in our schools is seeping in from the prevalent culture.
The furor leveled at our schools for the obscenity they promote there is richly deserved, but it has become a way of avoiding the fact that we as a society have failed to safeguard the innocence of our children. And of course, what happens when you fail to protect something fragile and fugitive? It eventually succumbs to the adverse forces besetting it. So it is hardly surprising that we see increasing evidence of the erosion of childhood innocence, often in quite horrific form. A first-grade classroom in Plainview, Texas was the scene of a sexual assault carried out by the students themselves and allegedly recorded on an iPad. The usual outrage is being directed towards the teacher and the administration - the first for a supposed failure to supervise, the second for a supposed failure to report. I do not know the details, so refrain from passing any judgements on those individuals. But it is obvious to me that the indignation directed towards them only serves to distract the parents of that school from the question screaming in their faces: how in the world did students that young come to learn what they must have learned in order to behave in the manner they behaved? It is because the answer does not point us back to one particular person or institution that the question is never asked in the first place.
It is that same willful obtuseness which prevents us from recognizing the connection between this steady erosion of childhood innocence and the unhappiness now commonly reported among American youth. But to anyone versed in the classical Christian conception of human nature, this connection is simply unavoidable. That conception teaches us that an orientation towards truth and goodness is rooted more deeply in a child’s psyche than any adverse inclinations for what is not true and what is not good. The full flourishing of a child – his or her real happiness - depends on the extent to which that orientation is protected against warping and allowed to inform the totality of thought and action in a child’s development. It follows that unhappiness is bound to result from a failure to preserve that native disposition towards the true and the good. In the broad-scale melancholy and aimlessness of America’s youth, the classical Christian educator finds an unwelcome confirmation of his working theory of man. If those youth had the words to properly vent the burden of their angst, what they would undoubtedly express is a sense of betrayal: a sense that the adults in their life tasked with tending the sacred fires of their childhood have been derelict in their duties, and that in their negligence or their absence, a thousand sacrilegious vandals have gone ravishing in the temples of their souls.
The Gospel of Luke tells us that when Jesus approached Jerusalem for the final time (during the events commemorated on Palm Sunday), he admonished the city bitterly, crying: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” God came to dwell among them, and because the people of the city did not attend to His presence, the sacred walls encompassing their temple would be replaced by the lines of a siege – a border encompassing death, not peace – and their children would suffer too. Likewise, in our own time, our children suffer, and their peace is threatened, and the walls that hold up their souls crumble to the ground, because in their innocence, in the sanctity of their emergent souls, we too have not known the time of our visitation.