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God came among us as a man, but the world is still a mess. So what difference did the life of Jesus make? Gary Michuta, author of Revolt Against Reality, explains how Jesus initiated a revolution in world affairs.
Cy Kellett:
How is your world different because God became a man? Gary Michuta is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. And Gary Michuta joins us this time. He has a brand new and wonderful book, Revolt Against Reality: Fighting the Foes of Sanity and Truth from the Serpent to the State. It’s like a little you are here arrow for you, helps situate you in history and give you an understanding of how we got to where we are now.
Cy Kellett:
One of the things that Gary is really good at is a non defensive kind of apologetic. Sometimes maybe we apologists and those engaged in apologetics focus too much on defending the church against the deceptions and confusions that the world has about what the church is. But what about just presenting the reasons for the hope that is within us when we look at the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ? And then what happened in the centuries following, we get a really powerful sense of how what happened at the incarnation kind of returned the world to its senses after the fall. Here’s what Gary had to say about that. The great Gary Michuta, thanks for being with us.
Gary Michuta:
It’s great to be with you, the great Cy Kellett.
Cy Kellett:
We never let each other down with that. A great new book that you have, Revolt Against Reality, we’ve spoken about it before, Fighting the Foes of Sanity and Truth from the Serpent to the State, just came out last year, Catholic Answers Press. And they took a chapter of it and made an article of it on the Catholic Answers online magazine. And then I was like, “You know what, this would be just a great thing to talk about.” And let me tell you why, Gary, I think there’s the apologetic for the Christian faith that is responding to all the modern nonsense, and sometimes sense, I don’t want to just be mean, but all the modern challenges to Christianity. But there’s a more basic fundamental apologetic for Christianity, which is look at what it did to transform the world.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. You can learn things about the cause through its effects. And so just by looking at how the incarnation and Christianity just revolutionized the pagan world, points to a cause that quite frankly has to be enormous. Right? Something supernatural happened in the first century to bring about this radical change in society.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. So much so that I find, Gary, and I wonder if you find this too, often I find that modern … Apologists for the modern world will take certain things like the idea of individual rights, and they’ll say, “Well, this was invented by modern people like John Locke or something, when in fact, if you look at the record, these are things that come from the very first centuries of the Christian faith.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Not only rights, but just personhood.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, okay. But the fact that I’m a person.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. I mean, in the ancient Roman world, women and children were basically properties of the man, and women only had value insofar as their father, who he was, and their husband when they got married. So a widow basically loses her identity because it’s all drawn from men. And of course, children are the property of the man. There was an institution where the father, after the child’s born, would examine the child to see if it’s fit. And if it wasn’t for whatever reason, he would give the thumbs down and the child would be exposed to beasts or killed, strangled.
Gary Michuta:
And with my book, Revolt Against Reality, you follow that string through history. And today, we have the same thing, but opposite. Right? Because now it’s the mother who decides whether or not her child’s fit to live or not.
Cy Kellett:
Wow, Gary. That’s exactly right. So I do feel, however, that we modern people maybe are a little bit like the fish who doesn’t know that he’s in water. Do you know what I mean?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
It’s so pervasive everywhere that we don’t understand that it was the incarnation of God in Christ that changed the world to make it like this. This is not its natural state.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we’re standing on the top of Mount Everest looking down. And what’s funny, Cy, is you will get an atheist today who will take that perspective and then castigate like the Old Testament, how primitive it was. And how could God be so barbaric? When they totally don’t realize that they’re standing upon 2000 years of Christian development and Jewish development on top of that, so it’s really funny.
Cy Kellett:
So I mean, one of the ways to kind of grasp this, and this is what you do in the fifth chapter of the book, Revolt Against Reality, the chapter’s called The Incarnation Transforms the Ancient World, is you actually just do a before and after on a series of things. But you start this way, and I want you to justify this sentence, which is a very powerful sentence, but I wonder how many people in the modern world would accept it. You wrote this to start the chapter. The incarnation is the epicenter of a transformative explosion that swept through the cold and barbaric ancient world, spawning new revolutions of thought and practice that lifted humanity to new heights. Can you back that up?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. Just look at today. And I would refer the watcher to Michael Acqulina has written several books on the subject of how Christianity has changed and dynamized the pagan world. And really, if you do a before and after comparison, there really is no difference. I mean, the old world was dark, cold, barren. People, if they believed in faith, they believed that there was eternal cycles, so human life was meaningless. You didn’t have free will, so if someone was poor, that they were fated to be poor. And you can’t change your lot because eons from now, you’ll be poor again. And so if you’re walking down the street and you see a poor person, you step over them. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Gary Michuta:
You don’t want anything to do with them, unless you want to aggrandize yourself and show how magnanimous you are that you would actually give them money. By and large, the pagan world kind of rolled their eyes at: Who would want to care for the poor, the indigent, or somebody that’s ill? You know?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Gary Michuta:
Just look at today, it’s a complete transformation, where if we saw somebody like that, we would say, “Wow, that’s really cold and inhumane not to care for somebody who’s indigent.” I mean, and that’s just one tiny little aspect of all sorts of things that changed.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It seems to me that were we transported through time to live as a citizen of the Roman Empire, we would actually find it shocking, and not because it wouldn’t have its delights, and it’s really impressive in so many ways, and even good in so many ways. But just the underlying assumptions of that society are so different from ours, it would be like being on another planet.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s why Christ introduces something new into the world. And I always think of that passage, I think it’s in James, where he says that he gave gifts to men. You have to ask yourself, “What gifts did Jesus give us?” I mean, of course there’s the spiritual gifts and things like that. But I think part of the gifts he gives us is just by the sheer brilliance of the incarnation spawns all these intellectual revolutions that we come up with, caring for the poor, and ultimately that evolves into the hospital system. There weren’t hospitals in the ancient world. There was like repair shops for slaves, where they’d just get them ready to go back into the field. There wasn’t care for the poor.
Gary Michuta:
In fact, in my book, I talk about Julian the Apostate, who actually wanted to revive paganism by providing government subsidies to pagan temples to pay them to care for the poor. That’s how foreign this revolution is. And then there’s also that Christ incarnation flattens out time because the incarnation’s unrepeatable. And so when you flatten out time, then that means that our choices do have eternal consequences, that there is meaning for life, where if you think everything is fated, you have a kind of nihilistic fatalism that ultimately, you live, you get whatever you can, and you die, and that’s about it.
Cy Kellett:
And that’s that. I want to do some of these in order of the kind of signs of the revolution that follows from the incarnation, actually series of revolutions. But one of them I want to just take out of order real quickly, is that there really isn’t such a thing as childhood as we understand it before the incarnation of Christ. And it’s so strange to think about that because Christ has actually very few interactions with children. It’s not like he’s going around as a child advocate. But it seems to me, Gary, and I just want to throw this out at you, that because the early Christian people took him so seriously as God, even small gestures from him could result in totally transformative movements out into the world. What do you make of that of Jesus?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. Once he becomes man, his divinity is manifested through his humanity. And of course, we think of miracles, but like you said, everything he did is revelatory. And that I think re-focuses our attention not by looking for God interiorly, but self examination, but looking for god exteriorly. Remember in Matthew 25, that great judgment scene, we will be judged whether we go to Heaven or Hell, based on whether we cared for someone, we fed the hungry, we clothed the naked. And he said, “To each of these, you do it to me.” So Judaism had a very rich and still has a rich understanding of almsgiving and caring for the poor.
Gary Michuta:
But in Christianity it becomes the salvation issue where caring for the poor is another way to worship God because we see that person as our brother and sister. And that upends all sorts of things. And I point that out in that chapter, like slavery, for example.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Well, let’s talk about slavery then. I mean, here’s what people will say. Well, you read the New Testament, nobody abolishes slavery there. I mean, St. Paul, the most prolific writer of the New Testament, he doesn’t abolish slavery.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t because it was so weaved within the ancient world. I think it would be ridiculous to try to exclude it. It would last for about 10 minutes and then the world would snap back to the way it was. Instead, what this revolution does is, it upends it, Cy, because if a slave becomes baptized … If you have a Christian slave owner and a slave becomes baptized, then they have the God given right to all the sacraments, including ordination. Now this about this. You own a slave, your slave is a priest, so you go to the slave to have your babies baptized. You go to the slave to have your sins forgiven. It really does make it kind of oxymoronic that you would have a priest as a slave. And it turns the whole system around, where in the early church, we have a few popes that were former freed slaves, so you have the-
Cy Kellett:
Quite early.
Gary Michuta:
The heads of the church as former slaves.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Okay. And the church itself, okay, so slavery, you use the world upends. What happens to slavery in the Christian context is it stops having the meaning that it had before. And really, it disappears with Christendom, only to come back later. That’s another story of great evil within Christianity itself. And we’re perfectly capable of doing evil. I don’t think you or I would deny that. Christians are perfectly capable. But the Christian revolution, within a few hundred years, slavery doesn’t mean what it mean. And it’s really virtually on its way out.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. It becomes unthinkable. And again, then centuries later, then we could look back and say, “Well, why didn’t they just abolish it right away?” But like I pointed in my book, that’s a total misunderstanding of human nature. We’re not robots or computers. You can’t give us a program and we change automatically. It takes time and baby steps and practice and virtue to transform. And if you try to do a shortcut, it doesn’t last very long.
Cy Kellett:
Well, here’s another thing. And I’ll pick on St. Paul again. But now in the modern context, people think St. Paul’s ideas on marriage are backwards. I mean, often as apologists, we end up having to defend what Paul meant by things that he said about wives and husbands. But the things that came out of Christianity regarding marriage, what actually happened was not the degradation of women and children. It was just the opposite. Wasn’t it?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It totally transforms everything. So it’s one flesh and blood relationship, like Adam and Eve had at the beginning. And it also reflects the relationship of Christ and the church. And that’s another radical revolution of thought that Christ’s church isn’t like this community of believers disconnected from him, but we’re members of his body. So we’re connected to him as members to a head. And so in marriage, you have a sacramental icon of that unity of Christ with his church, a one flesh union. And so that ennobles both of course men, but also women and offspring as well, that we look at each other as equals, as one flesh unity. And we care for one another like we would care for Christ. And again, very transformative.
Cy Kellett:
How unusual was it for the Christian commandment from the Apostle Paul, husbands, love your wives? How does that relate to the way husbands were thought of before St. Paul?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. Actually, I have a quote from Mike Lacanilao on that point because he says that the pagans would basically laugh and think you’re a fool to love your wife.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. They used to do plays, comic plays about men how loved women, like you’re just such an idiot if you do that.
Gary Michuta:
Right, yeah. Exactly. But like I said, when you take on the Christian world view, all that changes. And to love your wife is to love yourself, and to lay down your life for your beloved. All of that would be ridiculous in pagan eyes.
Cy Kellett:
Well, but the Romans did have philanthropy, and philanthropy is a good thing. So what was the Christian contribution there?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, well Christianity changes philanthropy into charity, and that’s a huge difference. So we already touched on it a little bit, that it becomes the salvation issue for Christians. And so later on, like I said, when there was an attempt to revive paganism, through the power of government, it fails. It was DOA because the pagans had no notion of why you would want to care for the poor or feed the poor. They’re fated that way, leave them alone. But for Christians, that was a mandate from Christ because we’re going to be judged on how we treat the least of our brethren. And so for Christianity, it just blooms, and then later on in history, we collect into monasteries. We used the economic power of scale to raise charity to levels unheard of.
Gary Michuta:
Like I said, from that comes hospitals, from that comes all sorts of care for the poor, and resources, and ultimately, I mean it literally changes everything. But within the pagan world view, it was absurd. It was totally absurd.
Cy Kellett:
What about the modern view? Pretty much universally, at least the hat is tipped to this idea, whether people really, or especially politicians always believe it, I don’t know. But that government exists for the good of the people, of the people governed. What would the ancient Romans have thought of this? And how did the incarnation change the view of government?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. Well, I think the pagans would look at government kind of like how the gods governed them, so as a deliberative body that used the people however way they saw fit. So they didn’t look at their citizens pretty much as all having the same rights. And it depends on where you’re looking in different societies as well. With Christ, Christ is the suffering servant. Right? He’d take the lowest place. And when that becomes part of Christian government, at least theoretically, because it seems like that was a long haul to get that in practice. Maybe it never actually did.
Gary Michuta:
But the idea is that government is the servant of the people, that it’s there to support the people, and that the church itself, it was a capping element that capped the authority of the state, so the state couldn’t do whatever it wanted with its citizens. Rulers had to abide by a higher law. And then again, you pull that thread through history, and you find when the atheistic states come on, what happens, large portions of their population are deliberately executed because they don’t fit in with the program.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And again, this seems like the one where moderns want to take credit for it, but you think of something like the Magna Carta, which is so deep in Christendom, I mean, there’s not even a thought of a modern world at the time of the Magna Carta, this is not something that would’ve been possible in ancient Rome or ancient anywhere.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s hard to explain to somebody. It isn’t like it just popped out of thin air. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Gary Michuta:
There has to be a sufficient cause, a reason for the Magna Carta and all that stuff, and the reason is ultimately, Christianity and ultimately the incarnation.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And then you talk about the kings, how long it takes. But you do think of a saintly king like Louis the Ninth of France, and this is also not a thing that would’ve been possible in the ancient world. And Louis the Ninth is not a perfect man or anything like that, but a saint is not a perfect person. A saint is a holy person. But this holy kingship that was possible in the middle ages, not often realized, really is transformative to think of the king as a servant, not just as a despot.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. And the reason it took so long is the temptation. It is so tempting when you’re in authority to exercise. You don’t want limits. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Gary Michuta:
So there’s always that tension between the secular governors and the church. And there was a while where it got so mixed up that many church people were acting like temporal rulers. But ultimately, Christianity does kind of get the … What do I want to say? Maybe not a victory, but does get the upper hand in that whole battle, at least through the investiture issues and things like that.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. So it just permeates out through time. And let me ask you this. I want to get you to the last paragraph of your chapter five, which is also an article that people can read at catholic.com. But I wonder how much you think that there’s a way in which the stories that we have of Christ in the scripture and what Christ said, which is preserved in the scripture, is always there kind of as a corrective, as Christian society goes down through the ages. But then there’s this other thing too, which is that Christ is actually present in the sacraments. And I know this is a little bit off of where you went in this article. But I just wonder about your sense of this period of Christendom, for example, from say about 500 to about 1500, where so many advances are made. You’ve already mentioned some of them, but you didn’t even mention things like the university. I mean, you could go on, and on, and on with the social improvements, like voting for leaders. That’s a medieval achievement.
Cy Kellett:
So how much of that do you think is just the fact that scripture there gives us this standard of Christ, and people keep referring back to it? And how much of it do you think is the fact that the sacraments actually change the souls of human beings, so that they are empowered to live in ways that they were not before the sacraments?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah. Well, that’s a great question. I think it’s not an either/or. It really is both/and, that it’s that collective memory of the church as the body of Christ. It imposes this view, this heavenly view on the world, and a very realistic view too, of the world. But it’s also, you need grace to live virtuous. And you need grace to convert the world. And so it’s also part of the mission of the church. So I think it really goes hand in hand. It’s all part of the body of Christ, both in that remembrance and sacred tradition in scripture, and also through that dynamic of grace and conversion.
Cy Kellett:
It’s funny that you use the world realistic because that is one of the words that I feel like you … It’s in this last paragraph. I’m just going to read a sentence for you and ask you to defend this sentence for me. But I think that this would drive many modern kind of apologists for the uniqueness of special reasonableness of the modern world insane that you use the word realistic to talk about what Christianity brought to the world was realism. But here’s what you wrote. In short, the incarnation introduced a highly realistic view of the world, as well as nature’s goodness and intelligibility. Well, help me out with that because I think many modern people would say, “You’re insane, Gary Michuta.”
Gary Michuta:
Well, many people would and do, especially in my family.
Cy Kellett:
Perhaps some professionals.
Gary Michuta:
That’s right, yeah. Well, all I would say is all you have to do is compare the world views of non Christian religious entities or religious communities or cultures before Christ and compare it to Christianity. There’s so many things that just don’t fit with reality. We mentioned one like the circular understanding of time. There’s also this interiority aspect that people look inside themselves, and so the external world really isn’t that important. There’s all sorts of features like that, and Stanley Jaki and Dr. Stacy Trasancos has done some really nice work in comparing all these things because remember, it’s only in the Christian West that you have science being born as a self sustaining enterprise. And that’s not by accident.
Gary Michuta:
It’s because every culture outside the Christian West had an unrealistic view of time and space and the relationship of the gods to creation. That’s another big thing because if God is creation, like pantheistic, then there’s no rhyme or reason to it. God can change. God can move. Why study it? Right? And if God is so disconnected from creation, again, it’s just everything is chance and things are fated. But when you have a proper relation of God to his creation, then nature becomes intelligible, and there’s an incentive to investigate nature in order to understand God’s wisdom. And that’s what Christianity with its Jewish roots does.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I really appreciate it, Gary. I love the book, as you know. And Revolt Against Reality, this is just chapter five. It goes on to describe many of the ways that we have … I suppose in a certain way, it’s a revolt against a revolution. The revolution that was introduced into the world by the coming of God in Jesus Christ is a revolution that’s humanizing, and because it’s realistic, as you said, and now we’re in revolt against that for whatever reason. Would that kind of sum up the premise of the book?
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we’re at the end of a whole stream of errors that has begun by trying to revolt from the incarnation, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. But if we return to the sense of allowing Christ to be the sovereign of our lives, then I suppose a revitalization or a re kind of invigoration of the original revolution that is started by the incarnation is also possible.
Gary Michuta:
Yeah, absolutely. And it will sustain and continue because it’s based in reality. Inside, there’s no other game than reality, so it’s the only game in town. Plus, I think there’s going to be remarkable … I mean, I don’t think we’re done unfolding these intellectual revolutions that are implicit in the incarnation. So there’s lots of great stuff to come if we can get back to where we ought to be.
Cy Kellett:
Right, and not blow each other up in the meantime. I’m so happy to hear you say that. I mean, there’s a way of looking at Christianity that says, “Well, we’re at the end.” And then there’s another way of saying it’s coming back, it always, like its Lord, it rises. And when it does, there’s new things to come, not just a restoration of old things, but new things to come that God intends for us. He gave gifts, as St. James said, and you said. Please get the book, Revolt Against Reality. You won’t be sorry that you did connect those dots. That’s what Gary does. Again, Gary Michuta, thanks very much.
Gary Michuta:
Oh, you’re welcome.
Cy Kellett:
It’s sad to think that only after we’ve lost many of them might we as a society, as a world, come again to appreciation of how beautiful the gifts of the incarnation are. But we have good reason to hope that we will return, and maybe with our prayers, the time will be shortened until the world again embraces the incarnation of the Lord and begins to live in the light that he shed and continues to shed in the world. It is wonderful to have a person like Gary who can remind us about that original revolution in world affairs. The primary and most beautiful revolution possible in human affairs, all brought about by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Keep praying, keep working for the kingdom, and that appreciation of Jesus will come back to the world. Thanks, Gary. You should get his book, Revolt Against Reality.
Cy Kellett:
And if you want to communicate with us, you can always send us an email, focus@catholic.com. Maybe you have an idea for a future episode, focus@catholic.com. If you’d like to support us financially, you can do that by going to givecatholic.com. Maybe write a little note that this is for Catholic Answers Focus, at givecatholic.com. If you’re watching us on YouTube right now, would you subscribe and hit the little bell? That way, you’ll be notified when new episodes are available. We’ve got this new channel on YouTube, and we’d really like to grow it, so your comments that maybe draw other people to the podcast are also very helpful and welcome. If you’re listening on one of the podcast services and you like and subscribe, you too will be notified when new episodes are available. And there, if you’d like to give us that five star review, maybe a few nice words, you’ll be helping us grow the podcast. That does it for us. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.