Book Review
Cosmic Economics
The Household and the War for the Cosmos by C. R. Wiley
Canon Press, 2019
(120 pages, $14.95, paperback)
Back in seminary days I avoided courses in "practical theology" and only took the ones unnegotiably required for the degree. I don't know whose bright idea it was to start offering graduate credit for things best learned in the environs of the church, apprenticed to experienced ministers (not the academy, the inevitable "practica" notwithstanding), but thought it bad then, and think worse of it now.
Much I come across along these lines, which includes material on the Christian family, I find shallow and unhelpful, but know at least two exceptions: Anthony Esolen and C. R. Wiley, a Presbyterian minister. The work of these men is exceptional because it breathes classical air and because, in good Touchstonian style, it places Christian thinking in its cosmic matrix. Wiley's The Household and the War for the Cosmos was developed from the paper he gave at the 2018 Touchstone conference on Patriarchy, and expands upon themes he introduced there.
In how many books on the family will one not only find reference to the biblical authors, but also commentary on Virgil, Wesley, Orwell, Dante, Harold Bloom, Bernard Knox, Cicero, Wordsworth, Augustine, Plato, Freud, Coleridge, Darwin, C. S. Lewis, Galileo, Sagan, Xenophon, and Marx, all with the intent of constructing a medium of opposing tensions for display of the Christian understanding of the household and its binding pieties as a sacramental microcosm of the greater kosmos of the Creator—the cosmos not as construed by Carl Sagan, but by Christians in concert with classical antiquity.
Foundational to Wiley's treatise is the concept of pietas as understood in the classical world, illustrated in the Aeneid by reference to the strong man's duty to his dependents, and to which our notion of "piety" as effete religiosity of the "In the Garden" sort hardly compares. Piety was the binding force of the household economy, an authority structure with the father at its apex.
In the pre-modern world, a father gave his household its vertical dimension. That's because you must have hierarchy when serious work is to be done. But verticality didn't begin or end with him. Fathers were subject to higher authorities. You could call them the middlemen of the cosmos. He stands between his household and heaven, representing each to the other.
Heavenly laws were the real basis of the economy; the welfare of a household depended on them. That's why a pious man enforced them. He was embedded in a structure he did not invent, and he had responsibilities that he did not choose. Piety consisted in performing his duty. (74)
This pagan household imagery, which would have been familiar to his hearers, St. Paul adapted and applied to the family and the church as the household of God, of which Christian men were called to be good stewards. Wiley's call is for us to do the same to the greatest degree possible in a culture that has made itself increasingly inhospitable to what remains a permanent desideratum.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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