Treason of the Clerks

National Review, Sept 15, 2003 by Michael Knox Beran

In Denial, for all its virtues, does not go very far in helping us to understand why intelligent people should be so reluctant to abandon the last tattered shreds of the Marxist-Leninist faith. Nor, perhaps, was there any need for Haynes and Klehr to try to answer this question, for the psychological key was many years ago provided by Whittaker Chambers in Witness. Chambers treated Communism as a symptom of a deeper crisis. Faith, he wrote, "is the central problem of this age. . . . Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God."

Men and women who are called to a studious life are precisely those who stand in direst need of a lofty and intellectually elaborate faith. Today's professors are the remote descendants of the clerks of the Middle Ages; but they are a clerisy bereft of the visions that inspired the scholar-priests who for centuries carried on the spiritual traditions of Western Christendom. The old light grew dark; and men lost the art of handing down their liturgies unimpaired. In composing Witness Chambers aspired to revive the lost art of transmission. The book was never intended to be merely a refutation of the Communist heresy: It was an attempt to revive the machinery by which the older, better faiths had for centuries been perpetuated.

A single volume, however, will only rarely be enough to reinstate a tradition of prophetic composition; and the secular academy has never awarded Witness the laurels it deserves. The revisionists depicted by Haynes and Klehr show us how far Chambers was from effecting the reformation he sought; to many contemporary inhabitants of the academic cloister, even so sullen and degraded a faith as that of Marx is more appealing, more intrinsically plausible, than the faith that moved Dante. The spectacle of the modern university is one more evidence of the breakdown Chambers sought to repair. Communism, of course, is dying fast, even if a remnant struggles to keep the sapless trunk alive. But some new weed, equally noxious, will grow up in its place -- unless we find a means of reviving the more splendid plants.