Man At The Crossroads I: The Practical Atheism of the Modern World
The world is undergoing a radical shift in its economic, political, and social hierarchies, and it is quite important for Christians to realize this and take the opportunity being given to them before it is too late for them to do so. If we wait too long, our next opportunity to help humanity might be in the far future, after a new barbarism has taken over the world. For quite some time, we have lived in a purely secular world, in society which, more or less, exists as a kind of practical atheism. “Since we are more concerned with economic and political questions, religious beliefs no longer mean anything to us.”[1]Recently the pure, positivist rationalism of modernism has found itself overturned, for the good, by the post-moderns. It is time for Christians to take post-modernism’s reaction to modernism to heart. We must join our voices with it. We must overcome modern scientism, positivism, and pure unbridled rationalism. We know, with the post-moderns, that humanity is not the measure of all things. No matter what, we will never be able to comprehend the universe by ourselves. Post-modernism has shown how subjective and imperfect so-called rationalistic approaches to the world have been, and must always be. We must re-establish an open-ended worldview, one which allows for ever-increasing understanding of the world, but also one which realizes we will never comprehend truth by ourselves. It must be one which not only accepts reason, but also the limits of reason. It must allow for positive revelation from those who are outside ourselves, from those greater than ourselves; that is, ultimately, it must be one which no longer sees humanity as the high end of creation, but one which sees humanity for what it is, both great and yet limited, capable of understanding much, but never comprehending the absolute. It must allow for the fact that others can know or comprehend better than us, and if they reveal something, we should listen to them. In this way it will be one, in the end, which has a place for God in the picture, but also one which allows God to be God, to be free to reveal and interact with us as God wishes, at God’s prerogative, not ours.
As Pope Benedict has expressed many times, the current situation we find ourselves in, all that is good and all that is bad within it, can only be understood as the end product of the age of revolutions (American, French, Russian, Chinese, et. al.). Of course, these revolutions were more than mere political revolutions; behind them was the massive paradigm shift of the Enlightenment, creating a new hermeneutical lens in which humanity experienced itself in the world. The philosophies which came out of the Enlightenment were secular in nature; they took the Renaissance’s glorification of humanity to a new end, where humanity was seen as self-sufficient in and of itself. To become the true master of the world, humanity needed to live in and of itself; all that it could understand and comprehend was to be followed, what it could not prove by reason alone was to be questioned or outright rejected. “These philosophies are characterized by their positivist – and therefore anti-metaphysical- character, so that ultimately there is no place for God in them. They are based on a self-limitation of the positive reason that is adequate in the technological sphere but entails a mutilation of man if it is generalized. The result is that man no longer accepts any moral authority apart from his own calculations.”[2] It’s easy to see how this leads to the secular state where God has no place in it. Humanity has rejected God’s place in the world; it tried to create a world in its own image and to become its God, instead of God’s steward. “Hence can be seen the great meaning of the negative [or] the Western development, the great purpose of Western civilization. It represents the complete and logical falling away of the human, natural forces from the divine beginning, their exclusive assertion, the striving to found the edifice of universal culture upon themselves.”[3]Or, as Pope Benedict states it, “In the realm of ideas, this meant that the sacred foundation for history and for the existence of the State was rejected; history was no longer gauged on the basis of an idea of a preexistent God who shaped it; the State was henceforth considered in purely secular terms, founded on reason and on the will of the people.”[4]
Sure, some might say they believe in God, but it becomes apparent that they remove God’s active participation from the world and only give lip-service to God in the hopes that God will reward them in some secondary, non-earthly existence.[5]Religion as a whole is suffering in our world, in part because of how it has been transformed from a communal world view into a search for an individual’s own meaning for their own lives at the expense of others. God enters into the lives of the common folk only to validate their desires, to provide a personal feelingthat “all that I do is fine.” Save for those few moments of praise they give back to this feeling, they live their lives unaffected by God, and indeed, for the most part live contrary to the way God has told them to live. They don’t care. God has no control or authority in the world. And religion in the world is just one of many things in the marketplace of ideas. We can practice religion as we wish, just as we can choose the kind of food we want to eat. And if we grow tired of one spiritual meal, there is always another we can try. Sadly, manly religious thinkers pander to this, disgracing the very name of religion, as Vladimir Solovyov pointed out over a century ago: “Contemporary religion represents a very pitiful thing: properly speaking, religion as the dominating principle, as the centre of spiritual attraction, does not exist today; instead, there is the so-called religiosity as a personal mood, a personal taste: some people have this taste, others do not, just like some people like music and others do not.”
People tend to feel that their lives are good enough as it is, or whatever improvements are needed, they can do on their own. They can lead successful lives without having to bring God into what they do.
How did we get to this situation? It is to this which we must turn next.
Footnotes
[1]Paul Evdokimov. Ages of the Spiritual Life. Trans,. Sister Gertrude. Revised by Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 21.
[2]Joseph Ratzinger. Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. Trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 40
[3]Vladimir Solovyov. Lectures on Godmanhood. Trans. Peter Zouboff (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1948), 75
[4]Joseph Ratzinger. Europe: Today and Tomorrow. Trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 20-1
[5] Such gnostic thinking prevails with many Christians today. They do not understand that the incarnation has practical effects upon this world, upon all creation, and that the cosmos, just like us, is being transformed in Christ. They have no problems abusing the world, thinking it is meant to be our plaything. They think we will discard it as we enter the kingdom of God, forgetting that we pray for the kingdom of God to be on earth as it is in heaven. Believing that the world has no lasting significance, they reject their duty to it, and fail to be a good steward over creation. They have become the wicked servant who will find themselves rebuffed for what they have done.
[6]Vladimir Solovyov. Lectures on Godmanhood, 67
Part of the problem is that many Catholic apologetics are not geared towards combating the “new atheism.” Much of today’s atheism seems to be reacting against the wrongs of Christendom’s past. When a lot of people look at world history, the Christians don’t seem to act much different than the non-Christians. The pogroms that frequently occurred in Western Christendom and Imperial Russia, particularly around Easter, seem to directly contradict the idea that Christianity nessesarily leads to a more peaceful and more sane society. The question of what Christian love actually means in practice and how it could change the world also needs to be examined.
What many Catholics don’t understand is that for many Westerners, their attitude towards Christianity is “been there, done that.” This is not the time of the Roman Empire, when the Christian message was new and revolutionary. The West has been more or less Christian for more than 2,000 and a lot of people are just plain bored with it. Plus, I think that many people think that science does things for them that religion never could (e.g, vaccines, electricity, the Internet). It’s easy to fall into the trap of scientism, because it seems to ask so little and give so much in return.
The notion of self-sufficiency has not only plagued our misguided Enlightenment-inspired humanism, but has also infected our metaphysics of Being for a long, long while before that.
This is the intellectual moment for a truly Trinitaritian understanding of Being as poverty-laden, yet fructifying, self-emptying love to emerge and take hold of the Western imagination, christening all that is positive in– and elevating– the postmodern critiques of our lifeless ontologies and communio-less humanisms.
Mark
True, but I think one can say that it took on a new perspective and a new level, in part because it became post-Chrstian (even then), instead of the pre-Christian metaphysics which sometimes could have been used to establish this self sufficiency. I would also say that the Renaissance in its humanism, while it prepared the way, was clearly theistic and its sense of man as mediator could have gone either way. But the wars within Christendom prevented the authentic outcome from coming about.
Plus, I bring out the Enlightenment here for other reasons (such as its more direct influence on the modern situation).
Leah
I do agree — much of the apologetics, Christian and atheist alike, look to the other and say, “See how evil they are.” It’s ultimately an ad hominem, although one would expect/hope Christians at least would be transformed in Christ to be better than they have been in history. Clearly it is a problem which cannot be dismissed (I briefly touch upon it later, btw).
To add to what Leah says, much of the decline of Christianity in Europe can be traced to senseless carnage of the first world war where religious people on both sides invoked the wrath of God on their enemies.
Actually, organized religion in Europe had already deeply declined by the mid 19th century. In industrial cities like Berlin where the communist and socialist movements were very strong, working class church attendance was around one percent (I got this from “Earthly Powers” by Michael Burleigh) around the mid to late 19th century. This is for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
MM
Of course the World Wars have helped shape that, but it was the Protestant/Catholic fighting, again invoking the wrath of God on each other, which inspired the Enlightenment.
Truly it is an issue. It’s one which is difficult to address, and it could take a whole lifetime of work to even begin to touch it. Intuitively, of course, one can bring out partial responses. But even then, I think one must point out that this is more of a concern for Christians than atheists because of the claims Christians make for their faith.
Leah
Yes and no. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the decline It’s really been cyclical in history and each time people think “this is it, religion is dying out” until it is brought back again. But to an extent, in the 19th century, there was a time when it was believed Christianity at least was not going to last much longer.
As I’m working through Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy’ for the first time, I wonder if some light could be shed on some of the questions here if you looked at things in terms of Rationalist vs. Romantic much the same as we look at Modern vs. Postmodern.
In my mind, so much of the uninformed, emotionally driven decision making/posturing we’re seeing in politics, for example, is a result for a longing for personal meaning and satisfaction with our country. Unfortunately, the object of the romanticizing is, as Henry has said, a vague combination of national character, generally Christian values, and above all, the primacy of personal judgement over the disproven modernist/rationalist model where authority is to be mistrusted, and only the individual can see clearly.
It’s not the whole answer, but I think that a dose of humility would go a long way…..
After all, by romanticizing the primacy of personal judgement, we get to have our cake and eat it too.
But Jews wouldn’t be going to church, of course (a mistake on my part). German Jews didn’t go to synagogue much either during the 19th and early 20th century. At the time, assimulation was considered the best way to end antisemitism, and this meant getting rid of the religious practices that marked Jews as being different. After World War I, a lot of traditional Jews from Eastern Europe started coming into Germany, which made the German Jews queasy, as the former were everything the latter was trying to get away from. There were even some calls among the German Jews to disenfranchise their Eastern brethren.
Jason
I would say the rationalism vs romanticism is more objectivism vs subjectivism, with the subjectivism joined to a kind of idealism, while the rationalism joined itself to a materialism. The modernism/post-modernism differentiation is much different, although one can find “post-modern” like critiques of modernism from the times of its foundations (de Maistre’s critique of the Enlightenment has been read by many as being post-modern and one of the reasons why so many people have misunderstood him; I think to a point, this understanding of Maistre is right, although not entirely).
My own appreciation of post-modernism comes from my apophaticism and with it, my interest in Buddhism philosophy, which I think really has much to offer to deal with the post-modern issues like Aristotle did for the scholastic era. I’m not saying we should all go out and become Buddhists, but I am saying that a Christian engagement with Buddhism on the level of the schoolmen with Aristotle will effectively take on what is good in post-modernism (which is a lot) and to be able to go beyond it into something new, of its own.
From the beginning of times humans found ways to muse about religion and philosophy.
It is not likely to stop ever.
What is likely however is that just like in the past the details of this worship will change quite substantially.
“Religion” and religious practices in our time just surface in much more diverse ways.
A person might for example get into all kinds of Yoga, Meditation, and Reflection about Nature – for me it is the very same intimate and fine human notion that for example our Rosary and our repetitive prayers were able to express.
Folks here in the West in particular also enjoy rather long and physically punishing ‘recreational’ activities these days- they bike and run and walk mile after mile –
Is that all that different from a long pilgrimage of the past really?
For me as humans we have finite ways to express yourself – it is not a big surprise that many of those have found entrance into our religious practices – it is equally not surprising that new ones constantly join the fold.
Yes I think that some fundamentalist religions deserve to vanish and yes I think that various aspects of our religion deserve to be put to rest.
Religion and Science can coexist and will coexist.
In my view this is a free society – Science will actually allow us to get rid of religious Mumpitz and will help us stay focused on plenty of the stuff that really matters.
If religious folks however think they can compete with science in the domain of reasoning and new discovery they will always set themselves up for failure.
The more religiously or ideologically fervent people are, the more likely they are to murder those who are different. Today, in Oregon, I saw an old cemetery that had a ‘Catholic entrance’ – segregated into Protestants, Jews and Catholics. Trivial, but an interesting reminder. People used to kill each other over liturgical/theological issues. Syncretism certainly is good for social peace.
Henry,
What you have said is truly terrifying. I enjoy most of your posts but this is too much to even think about.
Cara
Well, there is hope behind this. While the current situation is, as I said, a practical atheism, it does not have to be that way, and we have the opportunity now, as we go through another paradigm shift, to change it. It doesn’t mean God is not there, it just means we ignore God and act like God is not there.
Even if Christians don’t do so at this time, it is quite clear as Christians, we should overcome the secularism and follow through with our own life so God is important and not secondary. If we start doing that, I think that will bring a change as well. And I am not talking about dogmatics — forcing people to think like us — but more in following the moral imperatives (like the Sermon on the Mount).
Yes Gerald. Once people did kill each other over liturgical/doctrinal issues. Now they kill each other over oil, or lines on maps, or geopolitics.
Isn’t progress a wonderful thing.
We still have churches armed to the teeth that regularly go to war against each other and kill each others adherents: the USA, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, China etc etc, in fact there are 193 of these powerful pseudo-ecclesias on the planet today, and many are doubtless brimming with future schisms that will increase that number sharply.
1648 did not bring an end to killing, it merely changed the reasons people gave for killing. Try reading an interesting book entitled “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation”: it’s very useful in challenging your smug modern notions that we are so superior to our supposedly benighted pre-Westphalian ancestors.