The Wounded Prophet

Aaron Renn writes:

Rod Dreher has a knack for putting his finger on the pulse of what people are going to be talking about next. He did this with his Benedict Option, and I believe has done it again with his work on re-enchantment.

But that comes with a heavy price. Rod is a deeply wounded man, one alienated from many of the institutions and people who shaped his life. He’s written about this publicly many times, including again recently:

As you longtime readers, as well as readers of Living In Wonder, know, I did not understand what St. Galgano had to do with me until 2020, when, in the depths of my depression over my failed marriage, I stumbled upon Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, in which I encountered myself as an alienated writer who was marooned in his head, unable to fully live in the present because he longed deeply for the past.

…

After JBP’s [Jordan Peterson] talk the other night, it has come back to mind. I have traveled far from the paralyzing nostalgia I had for family and marriage that had been lost to me, but I have not yet made the full transition into what my life is supposed to be, in God’s plan. I have a lot of new subscribers here, and what you new folks may not know is that my experience over the last two decades has been one of sustained radical loss.

…

Then, in early 2002, the Catholic sex abuse scandal broke big; by 2005, I had had my capacity to believe in Catholicism stripped from me, in an experience that was like a flaying. I also lost faith in my ability to be certain about Truth, as I had never imagined — literally, had never thought possible — that I could lose my Catholicism. But it happened. (As you know, I became Orthodox, and though I believe in Orthodox Christianity, the palms of my hands were burned so profoundly from 2002-05 that I can never grip, with my painful scars, any form of the Christian faith with the same ease and feeling that I did Catholicism.)

Around that time, I lost faith in the leadership of my country, and in the Republican Party and organized political conservatism, because of the Iraq War, which I had fully supported (this was another reason I lost faith in my own epistemological capabilities.)

Then, in 2012, when I learned the dark truth about how my Louisiana family regarded me and my wife and kids (as “city people,” not to be welcomed or trusted), and their refusal to admit that they had been wrong, the basic emotional base for my understanding of the world vanished overnight. That same awful year, because of the trauma of that catastrophe, my marriage began to collapse, a drawn-out process that immiserated me and my ex-wife for a decade.

It’s so often the case that the people who have the deepest insights into our world and our institutions are wounded men, those deeply hurt and alienated in important ways.

Ross Douthat wrote a column about such a man back in 2018.

The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.

It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …

At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out.

That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)

This link between woundedness and insight is almost a cliché in the world of art. We fully expect great artists to be tortured souls, or certainly at least strange. But it’s true of intellectuals as well.

This is actually one of the great themes of science fiction: Some truths are too terrible to know. Learning them will drive one insane.

… the deepest insights, and most contrarian yet true thinking, often comes from deeply wounded people.