Michael Gillespie has recently made a persuasive historical case for the theological origins of modernity. Erasmus, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, et al were, according to Gillespie, working within a nominalist theology, bequeathed to them from the fourteenth century Franciscans, which cleaved nature from grace, God's will from His nature, faith from reason, and particulars from universals. These Enlightenment thinkers inherited and helped to radicalize a desacralized notion of the world and attempted to carve out an autonomous sphere for human morality and political life founded on a new conception of man as imago voluntatis.
Voluntarism, an indifferent will as primary moral agent; nominalism, the rejection of any real reference for universal concepts; disenchantment, the default existential mode of a buffered, self-sufficient “individual”; and desacralization, the “immanent frame” surrounding and conditioning modern social and intellectual life—these were the background assumptions of the Enlightenment, but they seem now foregrounded social, cultural, and political dogmas. The “Regensburg Address” of the Pope, with his account of the three waves of dehellenization, is, I think, a key text for grasping this development. Dehellenized reason closed to intelligible being, a voluntarist God beyond good and evil, a non-participatory cosmos mechanically construed, and a univocal, flattened concept of being supplanting Aquinas’ precarious but precious metaphysics of analogy—these are the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological roots of modernity, and they are deeply planted. As the Pope suggests, these roots have nourished a misshapen cultural tree, nay, a forest; and it cannot be simply cut down and replanted—for it is our home, whether we like our home or not, for, at least for the time being, there is no other domestic domicile into which to move, it would seem.
Now, great fruits came via their heroic attempts: the progress of medicine and human rights; what Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life”; the dignity of persons seen as ends and never means (Casanova); the autonomy of politics, science, and economics from ecclesial control. This represents, as in the words of Maritain, a maturation of the political order and the Gospel seed coming to fruition. This is the true message of Gaudium et spes, when interpreted correctly–that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors, but its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can they reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken.
Simply put, the relationship between modernity and tradition is being renegotiated in our new post-modern, post-secular, intellectual and cultural climate. The question is whether they are going to be transcended, replaced, or further developed; what's going to be next? A return to traditional conceptions and practices? Or, will we see only an exacerbation of those fissiparous and centrifugal tendencies of modernity, a further rejection of Tradition and the philosophia perennis, and a truly nightmarish post-human, not just post-God, world? Or both at the same time?
Exclusive humanism, as Taylor calls it, certainly gets right the dignity of human freedom and personhood, but these good affirmations of humanism come at too steep a price—abortion, hate crimes, political correctness, spiritual anarchy, incessant Western scapegoating, genocide, and war. That is why Taylor, as well as Habermas, insists that modernity—secularity, humanism, democracy, human rights, equality—must recognize its roots.
Where to find the balance between a complete rejection of the secular, on the one hand, and a belief in its complete self-sufficiency, on the other? Reading Catholic Social Teaching, from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI, with a hermeneutic of continuity, can provide much light. Unchanging Christian principles–the social reign of Christ the King; the rights of God; the error of the divorce of Church and state; the inadequacy of an anti-Aristotelian, social contractarian notion of the foundation of political authority; and the moral obligation, objectively speaking, of every political community to recognize the True Religion–are not rejected by later teachings declaring the need for religious freedom and a healthy political secularity.
To see these more recent teachings as blatant contradictions of the paternalist, antimodern, and fanatical teachings of the past, is to see with the eyes of modernity alone and thus to be a slave to the spirit of the age. These teachings are all kept in a delicate synthesis by the Church to prevent both the imbalanced, tout court rejection of modernity, and the blind adulation of it.
However effective the Church’s balancing act, however, the jury is still out on whether, both theoretically and practically, political power can be authorized and exercised in a purely immanent and secular mode, and whether the foundation for political authority has actually been transferred from the traditional sacred to the modern profane. As Remi Brague warns, “Such a contract, precisely because it has no external point of reference, cannot possibly decide whether the very existence on this earth of the species homo sapiens is a good thing or not.” Such ambivalence about human existence itself is intolerable, of course, but is it the price we must pay for desacralization? The vast majority of political theorists and actors for over four hundred years have been telling us that the Great Separation has occurred and is irreversible, with even many Christian thinkers in agreement. Yet, it is not clear that Christians can make complete peace with a thoroughly desacralized political order, though the Catholic Church has come a long way toward rapprochement from the time of Gregory XVI’s Mirari vos and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.
What is—and what will be—the end of modernity? Is modernity the progressive divinization of man and marginalization of God leading, in post-modernity and beyond, to the final rejection of His public reign on earth? Will humanism be succeeded by trans-humanism, as warned about by C.S. Lewis in his, hopefully non-prophetic, That Hideous Strength, where an elite of the powerful few control and enslave the world’s population via genetic engineering, mind control, and technological wizardry? Or is modernity the site of a potential new synthesis, the transcending of stale and dichotomous categories of thought and practice, in which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity and flourishing of man? It does seem that man has been given the freedom and power to determine the answer to these questions as he has never had before. Perhaps that freedom is the essence of our present age.
Thaddeus J. Kozinski is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College.
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Comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Theological problems are only a very small part of the story, it would seem. One is forced to consider, as well, all the defective political and social systems that had developed in Europe.
Modernism, in contrast to modernity, is actually a kind of metanarrative or world view based on the concepts of "progress", "enlightenment" and the perfectibility of human nature through knowledge, education, and proper government policies. It's a kind of secular, gnostic Pelagianism. This, I think, is what Mr. Kozinski is describing.
Ironically, modernism as a philosophical worldview has long been superseded by post-modernism, a metanarrative that denies the existence of metanarratives, or rather, the reduction of all metanarratives into arbitrary constructs for the mediation of power relationships. Modernism, at least, believed in a kind of truth, but post-modernism denies the possibility of truth altogether, because everything is subjective, everything is relative.
Modernism was a pernicious philosophy that collapsed because of its failure to describe the world or deliver on its utopian promises. Post-modernism is a reaction against the failure of modernism, and in many ways far more dangerous, since its only response to everything is nihilism.
The old Christendom emerged because "the kingdom of God consists not in spoken words, but in power." (1 Cor 4:20) A new Christendom can only emerge in the same way, with a proclamation of the crucified Christ that does not "convince by philosophical argument," but demonstrates "the convincing power of the Spirit, so that your faith should depend not on human wisdom but on the power of God." (1 Cor 2:4-6 Jerusalem Bible)
The "full dignity and flourishing of man," if that is to come about side-by-side with the reign of God, will do so due to man freely submitting to its Truth with the faith that is always required to unleash the power of the kingdom of God. The freedom to do this is nothing new. Doing so would be new in the present age.
The old Christendom was lost, I suspect, because of reliance on spoken words and human wisdom instead of the power of God.
My sister in California told me that after an earthquake, all of her neighbors on her block got together and helped one another. She said it was the most beautiful experience of her life, an experience of community long forgotten. My sister had never even said hello to her next-door neighbor for almost 20 years. The radically autonomous self is being revealed for what it truly is for any serious Christian: a denial of the Trinity, what we are made in the image and likeness of: our essence is relational, not autonomous.
The author believe we live in an age of "freedom and power to determine the answer to these questions." Yes, we do, I agree, but I'm not so sure that previous ages were without this freedom. The difference is not this freedom, but rather, it seems, a paradoxical sort of "enforcement of freedom" whereby such choices can never really matter. (This is more post-modernism than modernism.)
So we have a certain mental freedom, but what of having one's beliefs systematically categorized and regulated to the "private sphere?" However much independence that might give you in your interior consciousness and home?
The upshot of modernist secularization is not, I don't think, greater freedom (which is largely an enforced indifference), but a purified Church. Without any social or political pressure to participate in public Church ritual, we have only the remnant of the authentically faithful.
I wonder how relevant Lewis's discussion in the Intro. to his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century of modern ideas of 'Sovereignty' is, here: not least how it did not correspond to a Papal- and Reformation-minded division, but found proponents and opponents on both sides of that conflict? For example, he says something to the effect that Tyndale (whom in many ways he humbly admired) wanted to attribute to Henry VIII what Richard Hooker would not attribute to God Himself!
Stuart Koehl's observations on 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' invite further consideration. For example, what he describes as the latter I have heard called 'neo-Nietzschean postmodernism', but Nietzsche is also variously treated as a ('second-wave', consistently extreme) 'modernist' - and Nietzche's own terms (for whatever they are worth) oppose the maker (and imposer on human 'raw material'!) of 'new "values" (i.e., the Ubermensch) to the 'nihilist'.
This article certainly attempts to grapple heroically with the main currents and contradictions of global civilization and its origins, but you lost me with the above comment. Is modern humanism really the author and source of hate crimes, genocide, and war? Aboriginal tribes in New Guinea carried out continual warfare, as have all societies throughout the history of Western Civilization, including the Catholic Church with its Crusades. When the Mongols sacked Islamic cities and piled the heads of civilian victims into hills that glowed at night from the phosporescence of decomposing skulls, could that be blamed on "exclusive humanism"?
In the memorable exchange in 1910, in Blondel’s publication, L’Annales de philosophie chrétienne, between Maurras’s Jesuit defender, Descoqs and the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière, Descoqs, a follower of Suarez’s interpretation of St Thomas had allowed the political sphere a wide degree of political autonomy and he was prepared to detach “political society” from “religious society.”
Laberthonnière had retaliated by accusing Descoqs of being influenced by “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice.” It is what led Blondel to insist that we can “never forget that one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order” and that we can find “only in the spirit of the gospel the supreme and decisive guarantee of justice and of the moral conditions of peace, stability, and social prosperity.”
It is what Maritain meant, when he declared “Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theology, and it is precisely as a theologian that St. Thomas wrote De regimine principum . . . the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being. . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account”
Thus, it is a one-dimesional philosophy that seems to have shape only when it reacts to our primal fears--for example, threats to physical survival and safety leading to a neurotic government nannyism. This new philosophy (that corrupts Western Christianity) has only one absolute value: the ironic pretext that all things are of EQUAL worth and only those who fight for the full meaning of this premise in the Public Square are worthwhile.
Yet, the historic problem with this philosphy is that it divides the world into 2 groups, the Strong vs. the Weak. And, the intellectual elite so learn the social and environmental divide that they set themselves up as the "champions of the Weak"...only to become the most controlling and heartless source of human misery the World has ever seen.
Thank you for elucidating the distinction between modernity as a chronological term, and modernism as an ideological term. But I do think there is a distinction between "a" modern age and "the" modern age, with the latter being unique, that is, our post 1500 world, as Taylor maintains, and the former being the more generic, chronological reference. I do also think that "modernity" does connote both the chronological and the ideological simultaneously, that is, the two terms are conflated in today's usage, so I don't think I am guilty of doing my own conflating, but perhaps I should have discussed this ambiguity briefly.
Mr. Martin:
It is a credit to First Things that they are now allowing for positions, like mine, that challenge the neoconservative/Americanist view of things. I am glad that you can see, Mr. Martin, that siding with Leo XIII and the confessional state as the Catholic ideal against neoconservatism and normative pluralism doesn't make you a schismatic or one who hates his country. The tide is changing, as it appears.
One of the must read books that is a part of this paradigm shift is Christopher Ferrara's "Liberty: The God that Failed": found here: http://angelicopress.wordpress.com/liberty-the-god-that-failed/.
I think the main point concerns a seismic shift in thought and consciousness during the "Enlightenment" period that created a completely new frame of reference. Luther's writings were revolutionary not only because of their theological content, but also because they cut God's apron strings from the human intellect. Over time, we looked at the physical world through the lens of science. The Sacramental view of the world was eclisped by the material. Eventually this view would dominate not only the material world, but the immaterial one, as well. It is more than just being "sceptical". By the mid 19th Century, the Church could no longer explain itself. Christians today (both Protestant and Catholic) use the language and categories of modern science when they speak of their Faith. Even the language of Post-Modern Value Theory is injected into religious discourse so often that few even realize it anymore.
This emphasis on language and philosophical categoris may seem trivial; but, overtime it has caused grave problems. When a priest or minister speaks of Christian "values", unbeknowst to themselves they are admitting that Christianity is just one "value" in a sea of infinite ones. Few religious leaders today use terms like evil anymore (at least the traditional theological term). The ones that do are usually made intellectual outcasts. And yet, all around us we see the results of Modernity (as well as Post-Modernism). People who call themselves devout Catholic routinely defy Catholic authority. And their enablers and cheerleaders rightly point out that these true Christians are only following their conscious. Today's Bishops, as a whole, do not discipline them out of moral weakness. Intellectually, they were fed the same ideas and philosophies as those defying them. They simply do not know what to do. They see themselves on the same side as the people who dissent from Church authority.
It appears we've reached a critical state of affairs. Post Modernism is doing to Enlightenment what Enlightenment did to Christianity. It took 1600 years and much bloodshed and toil to create Christian Civilization. Beginning with Luther and continuing with Enlightenment, Christian Civilization has been on the wane. But the "irrational" in the form of Post-Modernism is having the last say. Christians of all stripes are caught in the middle. Your reference to St Augstine is abt; but, I don't think the danger lies with radical Catholics or Protestants. Nearly 100 million people were slaughtered during the 20th Century not due to religious extremists. Fascism and its spawn are clearly Post-Modern in nature. Look to those who wish to tap into people's religious instincts and use them to advance the public "good (ie the Private is the Political). Channeling religious faith into politcal theatre has been a specialty of Post-Modern politicans for 100 years.
The Enlightenment was, in many respects a secularised version of the Reformation. The Reformers isolated and exaggerated elements of traditional Christianity: (1) Individualism, through salvation through faith alone, the priesthood of all believers and the invisible church, (2) Egalitarianism, through the infinite value of the individual redeemed soul, (3) Progress, through the notion of history as the history of salvation, having a definite direction and goal and (4) Universalism, through a revealed truth, valid for all humanity.
The Reformers’ belief in the authority of Holy Scripture could not long survive their own principle of private judgment and the progress from Protestantism through Unitarianism and Deism to Atheism can be seen as no more than the consistent application of their own rejection of ecclesial authority.
It fell to Post-Modernism to point out that their principles of individualism, egalitarianism, progress and universalism now rested on nothing.
I am glad to see you here, Kozinski. I have to firmly side with your views and hope to read you more often. I admit I do make a rejection of may aspects of economic and social modernity that is near complete. There are other areas of modernity that are much less harmful, and do indeed appreciate. Unwillingness to question the present day social and technological order is the seat of many of our problems.
