The Line of Despair

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Schaeffer is a direct predecessor of TLA’s project — a thinker who argued, with unusual cultural breadth, that the crisis of secular modernity is at its root a theological crisis, and that the arts provide the most honest index of a culture’s actual beliefs. His analysis has significant limitations, but his basic insight remains one of the most important in twentieth-century Christian thought.

The Theological Roots of Culture

Schaeffer’s central argument is that ideas have consequences — that the philosophical and theological commitments of a culture eventually work themselves out in its art, its literature, its social arrangements, and its political life. The “line of despair” that he traces through Western intellectual history is the line at which cultures lose the ability to affirm both the rationality of the world and the significance of the individual, because they have abandoned the Christian framework that makes both affirmations possible.

This argument is the theoretical foundation of TLA’s practice. When TLA reads Wells’s fiction as the expression of a secular humanism that his own imagination keeps refuting, or reads Atwood’s Gilead as the exposure of what happens when faith becomes coercion, it is pursuing the Schaefferian insight that the deepest commitments of a culture appear most clearly in its literature.

What Art and the Bible Reveals

Schaeffer’s short book Art and the Bible is his most directly relevant work for TLA’s purposes. It argues that the arts are not peripheral to Christian life and thought but central to them — that the God who commanded the elaborate beauty of the Tabernacle and the Temple is a God who takes aesthetic form seriously, and that the Christian artist is not choosing between faithfulness and artistry but is called to both simultaneously.

His criteria for evaluating art — technical excellence, the relationship between the work and the artist’s worldview, and the degree to which the worldview expressed is adequate to reality — provide a framework for the kind of literary criticism that TLA practices, even when TLA would nuance or extend his analysis in significant ways.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict that Schaeffer understood as the conflict between the Christian and the non-Christian worldview — between the framework that can sustain human dignity, rationality, and moral seriousness, and the frameworks that, having abandoned the God who grounds these things, find them slowly dissolving.

His life’s work was the demonstration that this conflict is real and that the Christian framework is not merely a private option but the only adequate account of reality that Western culture has produced. TLA shares this conviction, and pursues it through the specific evidence of literature — reading the archive of world writing as a record of the conflict that Genesis 3:15 describes, and finding in that record the testimony of authors who, whether they knew it or not, were writing about the enmity that the serpent introduced and the seed of the woman was sent to resolve.