How can the Church express sacred things to a desacralized world? It is an urgent question that defies easy answer. The commendable desire to make the sacred attractive and approachable too often slips into making it cheap, arid, even tacky. Yet the well-meaning corrective impulse risks obscuring the sacred by expressing it in forms and practices that many find incomprehensible. Fifty years ago, the French Jesuit Jean Danielou devoted a fascinating little book to the question. Prayer as a Political Problem addresses the politics of the poor—the problem of creating the conditions that make the gospel accessible to the mass of mankind. The problem is not new but is newly pressing, Danielou argues, in a technologized, scientistic, and profoundly materialist world that values production over contemplation, tends “to turn men away from their spiritual calling,” (p. 17) and makes a lively interior life—a life of prayer—difficult or impossible. At times somewhat quaint in its descriptions of the Age of Technology and at others rather too optimistic about technology’s potential for good, the book nonetheless makes a sound case for Christian engagement in public life for the sake of the poor. More particularly, it insists that making the sacred accessible to everyman, embedded as he is in technocratic materialism, is an inescapable Christian duty. The trouble is how; how to present the ineffable to a world that has been conditioned to think that everything is, well, effable? Danielou’s enticingly simple answer is: art.

Before assessing his answer, we need to lay out the components of his argument in more detail. “Politics” has a broad and thick meaning here: it is the whole sphere of the temporal common good, and all of the various institutions that contribute to it. “Poor,” too, means not just the materially poor but “the undistinguished and unprivileged, those who lack money, education, and rank,” who “form the great mass of mankind” (pp. 11, 10). “Prayer” is the interior life of man seeking God and is a constitutive element of all religions, Christianity included. Religion, in turn, is a constitutive element of the common good. It follows, for the sake of the common good, that politics—again, in the broad and thick sense—must concern itself with creating the conditions that will allow the mass of mankind to engage in prayer. But even a minimum life of prayer requires a certain minimum of time and of solitude, which fast-moving technological civilization and “relentlessly collective” urban life make nearly impossible (p. 32). More pointedly, prayer is impossible—for most—in a desacralized world, a world organized without reference to anything sacred, one in which the “framework of living” is no longer shaped by “constantly renewed contact with sacred things” (p. 34). It is with that world that the politics of the poor must contend.

Danielou’s chief target is a Christianity that is inaccessible to any but a spiritual elite. Jesus Christ came to the poor, to the tax collector in the corner, to the bureaucrat in the faceless office building, to “all and sundry, the undistinguished and unqualified, the men in the street” (p. 29). Yet most of us live and move and have our being in an environment that is, to put it mildly, not conducive to a life of prayer. More on why in a moment, but first a clarification. Danielou is not a Christian populist. He is not suggesting that the Church dilute her teaching or yield to democratic whims. He is invoking St. Augustine’s image of the Church as a large and motley catch of fish. He is also a thoroughgoing sacralist who sees that a life of prayer is impossible for most people without some help from outside. “If monks feel the need to create an environment in which they will find prayer possible, if they think that prayer is not possible without certain conditions of silence, solitude, and rule, what are we to say of the mass of mankind? Should prayer be the privilege of a small spiritual aristocracy, and should the bulk of Christian people be excluded from it?” (p. 28) That is the danger: that Christianity will become a sort of detached Pythagorean brotherhood accessible to those only who can retreat from the world of relentlessly materialistic production and consumption to the conditions that make a life of prayer and contemplation possible.

That danger has always existed, of course. But the danger is heightened, Danielou submits, in a world that recognizes no mediator between the temporal and spiritual orders, which we have not just artificially split but violently divorced from each other. That claim calls for some elaboration, although its elements should sound familiar. On the one hand, the Church maintains that the temporal and spiritual are aspects of one reality, and the study or experience of the one should lead to the other. Physics points to metaphysics, “the sphere of the spiritual is as rigorous a discipline as that of any of the profane sciences,” and theology is “as much a science as physics or linguistics” (p. 39). But on the other hand, centuries of insoluble doctrinal controversy, the privatization of religion, and the segregation of theology as a discipline have left a chasm between the two orders. In simple terms, the spiritual and temporal aspects of reality—assuming the former exists at all—are generally supposed to have nothing to say to or about one another. Meanwhile, scientific discovery and technological development have filled the disenchanted void left by the retreat of the sacred. That is not a Luddite observation. Danielou is, if anything, a little too keen on the ability of scientific progress to “awaken a new consciousness” that is “more creative, more universal, and more organized” (p. 69). But he also denounces technological culture’s ignorance of “whole realms of reality” (p. 61) and scientism’s dogma of salvation through technocratic progress.