After the Future

Hip to be Catholic?

What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” 

From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox

This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova, " a central fixture of the so-called “dirtbag left,” a cadre of progressive podcasters, posters, and provocateurs, according to Interview. She's also a practicing Catholic. 

The meme article is mostly about trendy silliness that overlaps with themes I wrote about in a post entitled "Reactionary Chic." But it struck me as I read it that one of the main reasons I remained Catholic when I was most sorely tempted to throw the whole thing off was precisely because it was for me a countercultural statement. It's also because I came to believe the Church's fundamental assertions, but I could believe them without being officially "Catholic". But it's that feeling of homelessness in the whole capitalist, materialist, rationalist, soul-flattening, utilitarian world that Enlightenment rationalism constructed, even if with all the best intentions, that drives many like me to search for something deeper and richer. So I sympathize with what Nekrasova is saying and to what the rest of the Vox article points to inchoately even if trivializing, vulgar way. Irony can often be a way for someone to present what he hopes is true but hasn't the courage to commit to it. He can put it out there to test the waters while his tone gives him plausible deniability. The author, despite the mandatory ironic hipness her pop-culture perch at Vox requires of her, has an earnest moment or two near the end of the article. 

And I remain Catholic for the same reason I remain an American. I see what is best in both for all that is embarrassing and corrupt in both. I came to see Catholicism as the great tradition of the West, for whatever its failures and crimes, it is still the custodian of the great marriage of Greek thought with Jewish revelation--and a liturgical tradition that preserves a participatory epistemology/aesthetic that must be retrieved by the broader culture in the future one way or the other. I see it as playing this preservationist role, much as the medieval monasteries preserved classical learning in a brutish society that had no use for it, and of a sacramental sensibility and sense for the sacred that must at some point be retrieved to energize a future renaissance.

The Vox article reflects a broadly experienced longing for something lost. This longing is valid, and even if it leads many to look for love in all the wrong places, it doesn't mean that there isn't a right place that what is longed for can be found. A wrong place is nostalgia.  Many of the northern European Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Catholicism out of such nostalgia for the richly symbolic world mostly rejected by the Reformation. And we see a similar nostalgia as a underlying motivation for the interest in Catholicism to which the article points. But there is no future in nostalgia, and the longing that leads some Catholic restorationists and integralists to go native in the past is unhealthy and fundamentally delusional. And yet, I would argue, there is something in this longing that can be worked with in a positive, constructive way.

In retrieval we have something that is quite different from nostalgia. It's born of the same longing that leads some to nostalgia, but its project is not about restoring the lost forms, but about reconnecting with the deep, living energies that gave them their form in the first place. The experience that leads to retrieval is rather like remembering something that has been forgotten, and wondering how one could have been so absentminded about something so essential, so necessary for life. What has been forgotten is, to use Heidegger's term, "Being", but I prefer to call it the 'Living Real'. It is the source of all true creativity because to be connected to it is to be connected to the origins of all true creativity. To have achieved such a connection is the only what to be truly 'original' in the deepest sense of the word.  Our lack of creativity is directly related to our forgetfulness. Nostalgia is the experience of the loss of the Living Real, but it has none of the creativity of being deeply connected with it. 

The Church, for all its failings and limitations, points to this deep originary source and seeks in its liturgies to connect us to it. All true art, whether or not it is churchy, is deeply liturgical in this sense. That the Church isn't doing this particularly well in this moment is really a reflection of how it has been weakened in a society whose cultural operating system is a rationalist materialism in which it cannot thrive. And so it's understandable that the future for such a church seems rather bleak. Because the Church's life is deeply implicated with the life of the culture in which it is embedded, it suffers the same problems as those that afflict the broader culture. What ails both the Church and the broader culture is its lost confidence in their ability to live something that manifestly expresses its connection the Living Real.

The Church, however, performs an important function for the broader society in its preserving a portal to the Living Real, which at this moment for the most part works underground and out of sight. If in good faith, you knock on this portal, it shall be opened unto you. But to be truly receptive to it requires that you be open to having most of your presuppositions turned upside down. 

It's there. But for now, it's mostly unmanifest. Its presence is subtle, and so its power as a culture-shaping energy is dormant. I don't believe that will always remain dormant, but for now it is. And so we find ourselves rather like the ancient Jews wandering in the wilderness, neither here nor there, neither in Egypt for which the nostalgists long, nor in Canaan toward which some (like me) retain hope that however long we must wander, it will be our destination. In the meanwhile we wander, we put one foot in front of the other, and we wonder. Unlike those who long backward to return to Egypt, we long forward in wonder. 

Such 'wondering' is a big part of what constitutes the content of this blog; hence its title. It's not data driven, to say the least, but what of any real significance is?

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal conversational relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily, seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding of or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home to encourage them to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one too, but unlike Clinton Gina remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whose acuity I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving, dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever intuitions originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is Emily's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre didn't think of himself as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving. Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there were a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

On Reading Simone Weil's 'Gravity and Grace'

There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago someone like Simone Weil would have just been dismissed as a religious nut, now a book about letters she wrote to her family provides a pretext to profile her in The New Yorker, and she gets some serious, very positive attention from a Princeton “attention researcher” on an Ezra Klein podcast. Huh.

This is important because elite discourse shapes how people think for better or worse, and the argument that I’ve been making is that if we are to find a way to break out of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, new ideas about the importance of ‘transcendence’ have to become broadly acceptable by both elites and non-elites. As I argued in the Cathedral Talks, there has to be a consensus that emerges that will be strong enough to provide a moral, intellectual, and metaphysical counterbalance to the dehumanization promoted by the TCM, which so far has been just accepted by almost everyone as inevitable. We’ve all more or less become resigned to dehumanization being our future, and in the meantime we just try to live as humanly as circumstances allow, and hope the best for our kids and their kids. But why think about it? It’s too depressing.

Nevertheless, while it’s a small thing, I think this interest in Simone Weil might be an indicator of a shift in the zeitgeist that shapes elite thinking, at least in some quarters of it. Simone Weil is among the most interesting women of my parents’ generation. I see her as someone who experienced her woman’s body as too frail to contain the raging fire that enflamed her spirit and intellect, and so saw it as always getting in the way. As I point out in the essay below, that’s problematic, but it’s a problem that’s hard for us lesser mortals to understand or sympathize with. She was a force unto herself, and as such she’s not someone who can be reduced to or understood by ordinary human psychology, which the New Yorker profile is duty-bound to do to some extent. But the writer also conveys enough about the force and fierceness of her spirit that cannot be contained by that psychology.

In any event, this recent attention to Weil prompted me to dig up an essay I wrote about her in 2021, which follows. In most of what I’ve been posting, I’ve not focussed on the Christian dimension of my thinking, focusing instead mostly on what Christianity shares with the other great Axial Traditions. But I am a Christian, and it makes claims that other traditions do not that I believe need to be taken seriously. If you’ve never heard of Simone Weil, I recommend your reading the New Yorker article first for context, then this essay:

On Reading Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

I've avoided reading Weil's essays until recently because I was put off by what appeared to be her body hatred, her need to be pure, her angelism. But now that I've read her, I have to say I am strangely moved. There's something there to be grappled with, and I feel in her a kindred spirit with whom I would love to have conversed and to have befriended. Our becoming friends, though, could happen only after we spent some time arguing. 

Where is the line that separates a pure-hearted commitment to truth and goodness from a fanaticism for perfection? Not sure I know for myself, and I don't think Weil found it either. But I think that the striving for moral perfection is basically un-Christian because it leads to a tight-assed rejection of the messiness of being human. Our ultimate destiny is to be perfect as God is perfect (emphasis on the 'as'), but this isn't something we accomplish by exertion of will. We must act, but action that is motivated by superego or other psychological/religious compulsions are not the kind of action that is called for here.

The testimony of the great saints is clear about that; it's something that happens to us if we're open to it, and if there is any will involved it’s in creating the negative capability, the emptiness, in which the movement of grace makes itself known to us. So perfection is something to be achieved in time, but not primarily by the will, and so the willfulness and body-hating angelism in the young Weil is just wrong, but I believe had she lived would have been tempered, but it's something that has to be called out. She was only thirty-four when she died.

Our perfecting, or theosis, plays out in different ways for different people, but mostly it's not about trying to be a perfect human being but about doing what's there for us to do, which is to accept the burden and yoke of discipleship more in the spirit of St. Therese's "little way". It's the small, everyday things that build habits of perception and will that prepare us to do the big things if we are called upon to do them. But the little things are enough if that's what's given you. Most of us haven't achieved the level of humility that would permit us to go big and not to be damaged by it. 

But if Weil's angelism led to something that I think was unbalanced, that doesn't mean that so much of what she perceived and understood was wrong. And in reading Weil, I find something I haven’t encountered in a long time, and it’s this feel for transcendence in a late-modern key, and this way of talking about what it’s like for humans to touch it.

There is in her this sense of its subtlety and beauty, its gentleness and serenity. It is that feeling I get from time to time when in the presence of true beauty. I think that it’s what medieval Christians experienced in the cult of the virgin, but it’s something found in all the great spiritual traditions, this sense of mercy, of grace, of whatever is the opposite of force. Weil gets that and talks about it beautifully.

For instance, this sensibility is at the heart of her insight about the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. In her essay “The Romanesque Renaissance”1, Weil makes clear she is not a fan of the Gothic because she associates with it, I think rightly, a kind of force that had no patience for the gentle, simple beauty of the Romanesque. The Romanesque balanced masculine and feminine; it gave us chivalry and the Grail stories, Hildegard of Bingen, and the cult of the Virgin. The  Gothic that gave us those astonishing cathedrals and the control-obsessed, centralizing Church militant. 

I remember when I made my first trip to Europe thinking that the Gothic cathedrals were impressive, but the Romanesque chapels were purer, simpler. There is grandeur in the Gothic, but better is that sense of gentle beauty before which one feels not compelled but invited. The Gothic cathedral has more in common with the assertiveness of the modern skyscraper, the Romanesque chapel with the roadside shrine in an arbor. The mood for the latter is not awe so much as it is of being moved to tears. Weil understands this difference. The latter is more deeply Christian. 

Weil was respected and read by a certain kind of mid-century Christian intellectual because she was such a prodigy, but I think mostly she was not understood. Did Gustave Thibon, who wrote the Introduction to Gravity and Graceunderstand her? I think mostly not. But he encountered in her something that he respected, a sincerity of spirit that was rare. So give him credit for that. (Perhaps I’m too hard on him, but I found his writing style in his introduction to Gravity and Grace jarringly out of tune with the spirit of the essays he introduces.) And amazingly her essays are still in print, which means there’s still enough of an audience that, like me, is intrigued by her and even now seeks to understand what she was pointing to.

***

But now I want to argue with the Weil who wrote “Human Personality”.2 At first I was struck by its Buddhistic tenor. I have no objections to Buddhism--I see it as pointing to parts of the human project that Westerners need to understand much better than they do. We have much to learn from Buddhists. But Christians emphasize the individual and the incarnate in a way that is mostly not found in Buddhism and that emphasis is, imo, misunderstood by Buddhists probably because it's misunderstood by most Christians, among them Weil. I suspect that her main exposure to Christian personalism was in its cruder or more childish forms, and in reaction to them goes too far in the other direction. We see this in an anecdote told about her by Thibon when he saw her for the last time:

As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: “Goodbye until we meet again in this world or the next.” She suddenly became serious and replied, “In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life.  (Gravity and Grace, p. xii)

Of course, this is Thibon’s interpretation of a memory, so who knows how accurate it is, but it's not contradicted by what she writes in "Human Personality". There is something about the thinking of mid-century spiritual intellectuals—we see it in T.S. Eliot, as well—that is more interested in eternity than in temporality, as if we can know something about eternity and that it can be spoken about in some credible way. I resist this fascination with the “eternal” because it opposes my commitment to the idea that what matters most is what happens in time.

And I resist the idea of the “impersonal” because the whole point of Christian spiritual practice is to become more deeply a person, i.e., one's Self, i.e, the Self created in the image and likeness of God, and that this is accomplished when this Self, which starts as a seed, grows to eventually supplant/transform what I call the Darwinian Self, and this "supplanting/transforming" can only happen for us humans on earth over time. The Darwinian Self is the natural human being concerned with biological flourishing--spread your seed, dominate your enemies, seek glory in your achievements. In other words, get your inner Genghis Kahn (or Donald Trump or Tiger Woods or etc.) on if you have the will and wit to do it--or if you don't, bend the knee and draft on those who do. 

And I resist the idea that we shall not meet our deceased loved ones in the future as un-Christian because for Christianity the goal is communion. And communion, as opposed to Buddhistic merging into the pleromatic Unity requires a plurality of persons, that is, of realized Deep Selves. This plurality of Deep Selves is what Christians call the communion of saints. So it seemed to me this comment by Thibon suggested that Weil was more of a Buddhist than a Christian, at least in this respect.

Or at least this was my first impression upon reading this essay. But it became clear that she’s talking about something that resonates deeply with my own understanding of the relationship of transcendence to the temporal.

If I had a conversation with her, I might make the argument that the idea of eternity is a meaningless abstraction invented by philosophers as a placeholder for something they didn't really understand.  "Eternity" pointed to a dimension of reality they knew was important, something radically different and in some ways nobler and more deeply, densely real than what most people take for the real world. If time = change, change = growth/decay, so the opposite of temporal is the opposite of growth/decay, which is eternity. "Eternity" became a  way to name what was incorruptible, and the essence of incorruptibility was God. So I understand that, but I'd still argue that we have no way of knowing for sure whether God is an eternal being or a temporal one, or that he himself is not co-evolving with his creation. 

That being said, it’s certainly possible that there’s a dimension of God that exists beyond Time, but, even so, that is no concern of ours. What makes a theistic conception of God interesting for humans is the fact of his relationship to us in time, and clearly that means he exists in time. All attempts by thinkers to emphasize the eternity, infinity, the power, freedom, and the absolute transcendence of God might in some way be pointing to the truth about him, but it’s not relevant to our experience of him. If you profess to be Christian, the temporal aspect of God is knowable, and we are invited to form a relationship with this God in time through his revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Ideas about his existence beyond time are purely abstract speculation, and, imo, create more problems than they solve. Better not to speak of it. This is the emphasis of the apophatic tradition in Christianity, to recognize that anything we say or think about God is wrong, and so best not say or think it. I think that there is common ground here with Buddhist non-theism, which derives from an honesty that one can only speak about what one knows.

So instead of the word ‘eternity’, I prefer the word ‘transcendence’. Transcendence points to a dimension of being that stands outside of what I think of evolution without grace, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside of time. It just exists in another dimension, a temporal dimension, that interpenetrates with the world we experience on earth. In other words, there's a temporality--and evolution--at a higher level that seeks to become intertwined with and transformative of the lower temporality of biological evolution.

So when Weil talks about there being nothing sacred in the human personality, and that the sacred in the human is only what is impersonal, it sounds at first that she is rejecting the idea of human individuality, and that the goal is to give up our individuality and to merge into a higher unity. Maybe this is what she thought. I’m not sure. But there is common ground here with what I’ve been thinking about regarding the Deep Self and Communion.

I think we want to affirm the same thing. What she calls the impersonal eternal is the same as what I call the Antrhopos archetype, aka, the Christ within about which St. Paul is so articulate. The Christ/Anthropos archetype is universal--it's something potentially cognizable by every human being whether they are Christians or not, and it exists in a transcendent dimension, i.e., a dimension that is nobler and more densely real, as all archetypes do. But Christians like me believe that the possibility of the Christ Self supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self became a possibility for everyone only after the events in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago.

Our theosis, our divinization, becomes a possibility only after the Divine became human. Only after the Divine has lived into human death, did it become possible for the human to die into Divine life. Only after the Old Adam was redemptively transformed in the resurrected New Adam was it possible for the rest of to become who we were created to be. The interior, i.e., inside-out, realization of the New Adam became a possibility for all humans in a way that it was not pre-Pentecost.

So what I'm calling the Christ/Anthropos archetype is what St. Paul points to when he says not I but Christ in me--not the Darwinian Self, the Old Adam, but the Anthropos, the Christ Self, the New Adam. Wouldn’t Weil be receptive to the idea that this "Christ in me" is what she calls the impersonal, but which is in fact a deeper personal, a deeper form of individuality and uniqueness?

The Christ in me is not Christ himself--he has his own embodied individuality--but his image and likeness--the Anthropos archetype--is individualizable in my ‘person’. And the point of Christ's incarnation and resurrection was precisely to restore his shattered image and likeness*, qua the archetypal human in the human being. He did this so that this archetype might in its full development make us individually substantive enough to enter into communion with God face to face. Face to face is emphatically not Weil''s idea of “the empirical self being eradicated in the unity of eternal life”.

That's why Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body--the Anthropos archetype has no body; it must be individualized in bodies. The archetype is like a seed strewn into the souls of all humans but for reasons that are lost to human memory, the human soul-soil in the Old Adam became infertile to its growth. This infertility is what Christians like me point to as original sin. And so Christians like me believe that the possibility for the restoration in the Old Adam of the soul-soil's fertility became possible through the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection, he was the first human being in whom the Anthropos archetype became fully realized in a particular human body and so now its realization becomes a possibility for the rest of us.

So for each of us to realize the Christ archetype does not mean we become Jesus bots, but rather the fully actualized individuals we were created to be who are destined for communion. The banquet parables in the Gospels and the circle dances and wedding parties at the end of Shakespearean comedies are proleptic images for this longed for telos. And while these are simply images about something that is otherwise unimaginable for us, especially given the poverty of our late-modern, buffered imaginations, they give us every reason to hope that we will be in communion with, among others, those whom we came to know and love, and to think this not possible is downright un-Christian. 

Nevertheless, Weil is right to point out that whatever part of us that touches eternity or that is moved by transcendence has little to do with our everyday personality shaped by the anxieties of our day-to-day getting along in the world, which I assume is what she means by the "empirical self". And I agree with her that our preoccupation with the aggrandizement of our personalities, our constant seeking to flourish in terms defined by the Darwinian Self (her empirical self?), is more of an impediment to the part of us that is capable of being moved by transcendence.

I see her as someone obsessed with trying to extirpate her empirical/Darwinian Self as it operated in her. We see something similar in Gandhi's autobiography. The idea is that you have to kill the empirical self (Darwinian Self) to liberate the Deep Self. And it would appear that she does not think of the Deep Self as a truly individuated being but rather as just a part of the soul that seeks to merge with eternity. I suspect we’re talking about the same thing. I just think her impersonalist way of articulating it is deficient from a Christian point of view.

I would agree with Weil that the more focused we are on being affirmed in our Darwinian Selves, the less sensitive we become to hear the music, which is the movement of grace in our lives. For this reason, our lives in the collectivity, especially one so dominated by consumer capitalism, make it more difficult to be touched by transcendence and to hear its music. And I agree that it is in solitude, away from the crowd, that we are more likely to be so touched. But isn’t this need to separate from the collectivity a way of affirming the importance of our individuality? And does it preclude the idea of our having individual Deep Selves brought into fuller realization by a lifetime of openness and response to grace?

So I may or not be right about this, but I think if I were to have a conversation with Weil, I could convince her that what she and I are talking about is pretty much the same thing.

Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be taken seriously at all, for what's best in its traditions if the way most Catholics have acted is the measure. The same can be said of the Calvinists, but as I argued in my previous post, we're all Calvinists now, even Catholics, and we need to understand how Calvinism shapes the way we experience the Real for better and worse.

I have often wondered why the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination didn't lead the Calvinists into a kind of Amish separatism. For the early Calvinists, most people are unregenerate and damned, so why should the elect not just move away and start something new that leaves the damned to the damned. Perhaps the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts came close to this kind of project. But the early Puritans saw themselves not as separatists, but as a vanguard, a light shining on a hill to be emulated by those left behind in England.

This is one of the main questions that Charles Taylor addresses in both A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. He is quite eloquent in describing how ambitious the Calvinists were not just for themselves but for transform all of European society. The English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are hard to understand without acknowledging this as a central Calvinist objective. They wanted to tear down the old thing in its entirety and to build something new. But If they truly believed that most humans were utterly, irredeemably depraved, how could the possibly believe that such a reform project could possibly succeed? 

As Taylor points out, the Calvinist logic is that good people—the regenerate—do good things. Paul says to the regenerate in Corinthians 1: 15.58—"My dear brothers and sisters be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”

Calvinists do good not because it is efficacious for their salvation, but out of an energy that flows from their having been regenerated. There is something genuinely noble about that. There's no quid pro quo, no need to do good to earn points that can buy you a place in paradise; instead, there's just the impulse to do good because that's what's called for, because It's what conscience dictates. But not only must they do good, they must order their lives and the lives of others in such a way as to restore creation from the chaos into which it has degenerated. So, this means that they must restore order in society and in the lives of the unregenerate, even though most living in society are damned.

For the Puritans, the disorder of the world is a stink in God’s nostrils, and so the regenerated have a responsibility to mitigate God’s discomfort and the insult this stinking, disordered, chaotic world presents as an offense to his dignity. Once the “law” awakens in the heart of the regenerate, he is tasked with imposing that law on a lawless world, and by force if necessary. There is an inside-out dynamic at work here. The order is discovered within, and then it is imposed without, both in getting one’s own life in order, but also in imposing order on the world. This is a central insight if one is to understand the the new kind of reform mentality that is born in the modern period. The Thirty Years War, rather than being seen as cruel, destructive holocaust, which it was, is seen rather as a violent cleansing of the old degenerate society to make way for the new regenerated one. We know now how naive such an idea is, but it's understandable that idealists of a certain temperament could believe this. Is it so different from the mentality of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and those who were inspired by them?

The idea of radical, top-down, humanly engineered revolution is something that only becomes possible after Calvin. And so without Geneva in the 1550s, there would be no Paris in the 1790s. Rousseau was a Genevan, but he took the idea of Calvinist human depravity and flipped it on its head. The idea of starting something new, something in defiance of the old, is very much part of the Calvinist imaginary, and plays an important shaping influence on Rousseau's imagination of the possible. Without Rousseau, there is no French Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution are more complex, of course, but it was not possible without this very different, very modern idea of reform that originated in Calvinism. And it lays a foundation for the technocratic state ruled by the best and brightest who know what's best and seek to impose their will from their positions of power.

And at the same time Calvinism lays the foundation for the Baconian revolution in science. Both Puritanism and Baconism set themselves against tradition and see themselves as involved in creating something new, from scratch. Aristotle becomes the foe for each—an authority that stands in the way of seeing things more clearly as they are. So Aristotle and the whole premodern, medieval superstructure is ripped down, and the idea that traditions and customs have any value except to impede the transformation of the world into something pleasing to God for the Calvinists morphs easily into transforming the world into something pleasing for humans by the Baconians.

Modernity is the confluence of both Calvin and Bacon, but in such a way that the first, the idea of pleasing God, becomes gradually supplanted by the latter, which in turn becomes something understood as evolution-without-grace. Hobbesian and Macchiavellian realism emerge at this time. Both accept the world as defined by evolution-without-grace, a world ruled by greed, will to power, and promiscuous sexuality. To be a realist is to understand the world as if grace does not exist. 

If the goal for the Calvinists was to restore God’s order, Baconian science provides a methodology that allows humans to come to a better understanding about what that order is. But there is a different spiritual impulse or energy at work in Baconism. It works hand in hand with Calvinism because it is impelled by a desire to understand the underlying order of God’s creation in order to make it useful and productive. This had  become a key element in the Puritan ethic—to be productive in ways that benefit humans, but it can very easily morph into the Faustian by the less pious. 

So Baconism is the Faustian side of Calvinism. Baconism is a movement driven more by evolution-without-grace than by what was the originary imputse within Calvinism, which was to do what conscience calls for. There is a similarity of motive—to improve the human condition by the establishment of a new order—but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the orders that each seeks to realize. It’s easy for people of good will to be confused by such distinctions, but one leads eventually to a mechanomorphic, technocratic hellscape, and the other to the New Jerusalem. As I argued in my previous post, we're headed for the former if we don't find a way to restore a sense of the latter's possibility, and I see that effected only by something like a transcultural Axial awakening some time in the next century. 

But the idealism of the Puritans goes wrong almost from the start in part because of its image of God that stresses His power and freedom. God is everything all powerful and utterly free and without obligation to anyone or anything beneath him in dignity of Being. So he owes humans nothing. But this is the God of the philosophers, not the God revealed in the Bible. This idea of God as arbitrary despot depicts him as a being closer in nature to Genghis Khan than the one who reveals himself in a still, small voice to Elijah or as the one who seeks to forgive and befriend us in the New Testament.

God might indeed be all powerful, but that aspect of his nature is not how he presents himself in the Gospels. But no matter how pious the original intent--to exalt God and to insist on a radical human humility vis a vis the power of God--the Calvinist idea of God, even if unintentionally, aligns with and supports the technocratic power project of Baconism.

And there is something toxically arrogant about someone who insists that he knows God’s will and insists that you submit to it. This is the flip side of Calvinist humility--an incredible arrogance that the regenerate Calvinist knows better in ways that the unregenerate cannot. And this leads in turn to the remarkable hubris necessary to reorganize a society top-down according to a template that they alone had access to.

This mentality is secularized in modern revolutionary ideologies, which are born of the same kind of we-know-better arrogance. But so is this mentality found in the kind of technocratic mentality that reigns in Silicon Valley. It shares in the arrogance that I call Aspen Institute Liberalism, the mentality of rich elites who think they know better because they are rich and are good at navigating in the world created by consumer capitalism. Trump, Brexit, and the "democratic" embrace of illiberalism everywhere is an understandable, if even more dangerously toxic, response to this liberal, Baconian arrogance. The problem we face at this moment lies in that there are no healthy alternatives to either. 

This kind of technocratic top-downism claims to be progressive, but it's a progressivism that is shaped primarily by evolution-without-grace. It's a "liberal" mentality that seeks to be cutting edge in the development of the new, and as such is consonant with the Baconian project to use science and technology to make life better for human beings. But at a certain point the tail started wagging the dog, and as modern society lost any sense of a vital connection to a sense of a transcendent moral order, there has been no foothold for people to get traction to push back. Technological progress is not human progress unless it can become baptized in some way, which is to say subordinated to the logic of grace. Technological progress without grace, i.e., evolution without grace, is dehumanizing--slowly at first, but ultimately it leads to the complete extermination or enslavement of the human. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, evolution-without-grace is the metaphysics, i.e, the dominant metaphysical imaginary, of the intelligentsia in North Atlantic societies. It is running amok in consumer capitalism and in the developments in machine learning and biotechnology. As I pointed out in my last post, while in the short run evolution-without-grace might need human beings, in the long run it doesn't.  

Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the culmination of the Baconian project, a project that from my pov seems peculiarly impervious to grace. As a Christian, I must live in hope that grace will find a way, but its operation in the world right now is out of sight, and out of most people's minds. 

The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end. 

I'm enough of an Hegelian to see Protestantism and Modernity as the antithesis of Catholicism and pre-modernity, and so it follows quite possibly, if history is dialectical, as I think it is, that the Postmodern era on whose cusp we sit will be a synthesis of the Modern and the Premodern, the Protestant and the Catholic, of the individual conscience and of a renewed sense of sacrament and communion.

So I am a Catholic and a  progressive, but I reject the term ‘Liberal’ as a way of describing my politics because I think that the phrase "liberal Catholic" is an oxymoron, but I do believe that all Catholics are called upon to be progressives if they believe, as they should, that the Spirit is active in history. This seems to be an assertion about Catholicism that goes against every stereotype about it, stereotypes that historically have been well justified. Catholicism, except for a few decades last century in Latin America, has rarely been associated with progressive cultural or political causes in the modern period. That is why I make a distinction between a Catholic intellectual/aesthetic sensibility and the institutional distortions of that sensibility. Those distortions can be traced back to Constantine, or perhaps more interestingly to the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic as Simone Weil argues in her essay "The Romanesque Renaissance".

The point I want to make now is that the modern social imaginary does not give us the resources to push back against problems that derive uniquely from the modern suppression of the premodern, and so it's not unreasonable to assert that a part of the solution lies in retrieving suppressed aspects of the premodern, but in a postmodern key. I don't know if it's dialectically inevitable, but if real spiritual progress is a possibility, I think such a retrieval must play an essential role. And that's why the Catholic and Orthodox traditions are important, not for their institutional moral authority, which is close to nil, but because they have preserved pre-modern forms and practices that need to play a role in a hoped-for cultural renaissance. 

Central to this project is a retrieval of the idea that Christianity is about the redemption of time and space; it is not a religion of escape from either. But what made sense in a premodern cosmic imaginary dominated by the Great Chain of Being no longer makes sense in a cosmic imaginary shaped by Darwin and Bohr. Nevertheless, the Great Chain of Being was a metaphor that pointed to something deeply true about the structure of Being, i.e., its metaphysics embraced an idea of chaos/entropy in tension with the Deep Real as density of actualized form.

It was a spatial metaphor, but it allowed for the movement of lower to higher, from a potentiality in chaos to its actualization in form, which is to say, the Logos or the Mind of God. The history of the world, as I see it from my quasi-Hegelian, evolution-of-consciousness perspective, is the gradual interpenetration of Chaos by the Mind of God effected by humans in whom the Mind of God becomes gradually awakened. Science plays a role in this evolutionary awakening, but the more important evolution is moral, i.e., an evolution in humans from being directed by forces outside to new possibilities for evolution that work from within the human soul. As the human being becomes more him or herself, the world changes. More on this below. 

This tension between Chaos and Logos is still a reality, even if we have no robust way of thinking it within the late modern imaginary. In other words, the Great Chain of Being points to a truth about Being for which we need a new metaphor that is better adapted to our current post-Darwinian/Einsteinian imaginary. I think the post-Einsteinian part of that opens up possibilities for thinking about Being as multi-dimensional, which is a postmodern way of talking about what premoderns and contemporary believers call the supernatural. Supernatural = Other-dimensional.

***

So here's a rough, preliminary attempt to explore mostly the post-Darwinian part of that. I accept Darwin’s description of the chaotic, blind, groping, often cruel, impersonal, random forces that drive natural selection, but I see the randomness of natural selection as that into which fallen humanity has fallen. It was a fall into chaos, and the human mission is to be submerged in that chaos and to find within it a path toward redemption. One way to define 'redemption' is as escape, to get off the planet in a Buddhistic liberation from samsara. Another is to willingly accept one's submergence in the chaos and to gradually transform it--bring order and form to it-- from within. 

This latter, I would argue, is the more deeply Christian idea. It's very similar to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or "world repair", especially as developed by Isaac Luria. Indeed, it's hard to understand the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection without it, even if in practice the Christian idea of salvation has been more Buddhistic. As, for instance, the Salve Regina, a beautiful medieval monastic Marian hymn, depicts humans as the poor, banished children of Eve living in exile longing to return home off-planet in a better world in the beyond. I'm arguing that the human mission is for individual human beings to be infusion points through which the "beyond' incarnates in immanent human practice in the time/space dimension we call our life on earth. The goal is the renewal of the face of the earth, but this will not be accomplished by some external intervention, but rather by human beings inspired by grace working in the world to transform it from inside out. 

So the goal is not to escape earth, but gradually to transform it, to make a garden of the wilderness. And so in a very real sense it's biological evolution as that from which humans need to be redeemed, or more precisely,  it is the human mission to redeem biological evolution by the power of something higher, i.e., something outside our limited time/space dimension. In other words, the human task is to redeem the earth from its subjection to the primitive, random, groping forces that shape biological evolution. Read Romans 8 in the light of that idea. But in order to do this, you need to believe there is something higher, something other-dimensional--which very few educated late moderns believe anymore (yet?)--at least in any robust way that has real stakes for the way they think about how they act in the world. 

So I'm suggesting that a way to think about the logic of natural selection is to see it as the logic of Original Sin, if by Original Sin we mean the condition of Nature that is shaped by concerns dominated by survival and propagation. Original sin is, I want to argue, "evolution-without-grace", i.e., evolution without the influence of forces outside our space/time dimension. In such a condition it's natural for biological species to do whatever it takes to promote their biological flourishing. In humans we see this as the need to dominate and control (will to power), the need to accumulate and hoard material resources (greed), and the need to spread one's genes (promiscuous/predatory sexuality).

Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon, etc., are all prodigies of evolution-without-grace. Their behavior is perfectly "natural", and there is really no coherent understanding of the earth history that can push back against this "natural" behavior unless you allow for the possibility of a counter story Christians call redemption history, which I'm arguing is a story of 'evolution-with-grace'. Liberal ideas about pushing back either draft on Christian ideas or derive from Hobbesian/Lockean contract theory. Both are weak tea that provide no real foundation to deal with the crisis of culture in which we are currently implicated. 

For Christians, redemption history starts with the covenant made with Abraham, culminates with Christ’s incarnation and death, and now continues with us humans post-Pentecost. But it's not only humans, but earth history that must be redeemed--and we humans, inspired by grace--the spiritual energy that inspires us from outside the otherwise closed Darwinian system--have the responsibility to be agents who enact that redemption. Human beings at their best, whether they are aware of it or not, are infusion points of grace. You don't have to be a believer to be such an infusion point--all humans are responding or failing to respond to this energy all the time--but the whole point of a spiritual practice is to increase one's capacity to be an effective infusion point, and in doing so to realize/integrate his or her Deep Self, the part of us that is created in the image and likeness of God. 

For me this provides a compelling answer to the Cur Deus Homo question: Why was the Incarnation necessary in the first place? Christ's incarnation and death effected his submerging himself into the chaos of evolution-without-grace, i.e., the emptying of the unfallen into the fallen, the uncreated into the created, in order to effect a potential fusion of above with below so that after this event human and earth history might be infused with grace in an inside-out process that was not possible before. Before Pentecost, salvation could be imagined in Platonic or Buddhistic terms as an escape from illusion off an evil-dominated planet. After Pentecost, evolution-with-grace on planet became a new possibility, but now as something effected inside out, from within the human being acting in a world otherwise dominated by the logic of evolution-without-grace. 

Before this event the transcendent dimension was open to certain extraordinary individuals, and they were the culture heroes and lawgivers who provided for their societies a code, a way of living that was in close alignment with the Logos or the Tao. These codes could be experienced only as an external command to follow the law. After Pentecost, the law is something that is experienced from within--in the heart, the seat of conscience. The post-Pentecost release of the Holy Spirit into history, I would argue, made what was available to what before was only known/experienced by a spiritual elite, and in doing so made transforming biological evolution from within a new possibility. This transformation is effected to the degree that people--whether they are Christians or not--have supple hearts capable for responding to grace. The redemption of the world is the cumulative effect of a process that happens heart by heart in little and large ways progressively through the arc of history. For this reason MLK was right, the arc of the moral universe is long, and it does bend toward justice. 

***

So how does this impinge on how we should think about the political economy? Is there any purer expression in the political and economic sphere of evolution-without-grace than the market? Is there anything in our contemporary political and economic life in greater need of transformation? 

I would argue, therefore, that if you embrace the market as the main driving force in modern history, you are not a conservative in the traditionalist, principled sense—you are a Liberal. Liberalism was developed as a political-economic ideology in the 18th century to justify the “liberation” of market forces from traditional constraints, constraints that were grounded in Christian, i.e., redemptive concerns, to push back against, avant la lettre,  evolution-without-grace.

Pre-Reformation Christian societies sought to restrain the logic of evolution-without-grace They established the monasteries for those who were more serious about growing in holiness, and the bedrock of monastic life was founded in the evangelical counsels--poverty, chastity, and obedience. These were practices designed to push back against the logic of evolution-without-grace—greed, will to power, and indiscriminate spreading of one’s genes.

Holiness is measured by the degree to which one’s Deep Self, the part of us that was created in the image and likeness of God, has come to gradually displace the Social Darwinian Self, i.e., the Self driven by greed, will to power, and the need to indiscriminately spread one’s genes. The idea that the goal of life was to become good as God is good, i.e., to restore the human as image and likeness of God, and to do so by engaging in a life-long inner transformative process got lost. To be good was simply to follow an extrinsic code, to stoically do one's duty, to follow the rules, as in Kant. 

Post-Reformation societies in northern Europe tore down that redemptive social infrastructure—it got rid of the monasteries and with them the idea that the evangelical counsels provided a path of growth in holiness, i.e., a path for the supplanting of the Darwinian Self with the Deep Self. In doing so they substituted a new idea about morality that was more extrinsically legalistic than inwardly driven and Christian. There was a new, important emphasis on the individual and freedom, but freedom in the service of what? As traditional ideas about growth in holiness were cast aside, what I'm calling here the Social Darwinian Self and its fulfillment emerges as the new "natural" norm. This is the opposite of the idea of Christian freedom as articulated by St. Paul. (See Galations 5 and elsewhere. BTW, Paul's concept of the "flesh" and my use of the term "evolution-without-grace" are roughly synonymous.)

Protestantism at its best (imo embodied most fully by the Quakers) was a celebration of the individual conscience. But morality in Protestant societies in practice became more about doing good according to an extrinsic moralistic code where the code became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. It started, as all genuine spiritual movements do, as an interior impulse to recover a spiritual authenticity, but devolved into a rigid extrinsicism. And in doing so it threw out many of the older religious cultural forms that provided a framework for people to grow in holiness, i.e., into their Deep Selfhood. This framework was preserved to a certain extent in Catholic societies, but it cannot thrive in a world in which the secular imaginary that flowed from Reformation presuppositions is so dominant. 

It became a commonplace, especially for the Calvinists, that wealth was a sign that one was blessed by God, and that he was among the elect predestined for salvation, and poverty was a sign that one was a reprobate predestined for damnation. It’s hard to exaggerate how upside down this idea is from pre-Reformation Christianity and the spirit of the Gospels, which makes it pretty clear that you’re more likely to find holiness among the poor than you are to find it among the rich. And the reason for that is that the rich usually got rich by being evolution-without-grace's winners and as such largely impervious to the counterforces (grace) that seek to transform and eventually displace evolution-without-grace.

Calvinism played a central role in effecting a shift in Western moral imaginary that created the conditions for Enlightenment rationality, Liberalism, and free-market capitalism--both the good and the bad that came with these. America is a profoundly Calvinist society, and all Americans--whether Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists--have to understand how their politics are shaped by Calvinism. On the left, American political imaginary is shaped by Yankee and Black Calvinism that led to the development of the social gospel in the late 19th century. 

And on the right, the American political imaginary is shaped Southern Calvinism, mainly the Baptists and other evangelical sects that were inclined to rigid ideas regarding the inerrancy of Scripture and ok with slavery and later segregation. 

Catholics—on both the left and the right—have to own how their moral imaginaries have been Calvinized. It's not about doctrine; it's about how our moral imaginations are shaped. In that respect most Liberal Catholics have more in common with secular Liberals and most conservative Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than either conservative or liberal Catholics have with one another.

And both liberal and conservative Catholics must accept that they have more in common with secular moderns than either has with their premodern Catholic ancestors, for whom a sense of the sacramental and the distinction between the sacred and the profane was a commonplace. The world is just as disenchanted for contemporary Catholics as it is for their secular contemporaries, and so their attempts to force the sacred into secular spaces fails in almost every instance. The old Catholic sensibility lingers where premodern cultural forms do, as in some Latin American societies. People whose imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism think of those old premodern practices as at best naively quaint, and so they fail to understand how those forms genuinely mediate dimensions of the Real that the modern imaginary filters out. 

Disenchantment is a fact; re-enchantment is a possibility, but if it is to be effected, it will happen gradually from the inside out. That will require, I believe, retrieving much of what has been lost from premodern practice and imagination, but dialectically. Conservatives, particularly those with a Romantic bent, too often want to go native in the past, which never works. The challenge is to live through the modern secular as a kind of wandering in the wilderness with fidelity and by trusting that that such faithfulness will eventually lead to a renewal of the face of the earth. But this is a gradual, evolutionary, i.e,  evolution-with-grace, process. We do what is called for now in the hope that future generations will build on it. Perhaps all we can do now is plant seeds that will germinate in the future. We do that in our actions in all the ways small and large that are a response to the flow of grace in our lives. 

***

Growing in Goodness/Holiness for Catholics is (or should be) central to their practice, and the sacraments and the life of prayer don’t make any sense without it. That’s why the Calvinists essentially got rid of the sacraments. They no longer made sense since mainstream Calvinism didn’t think it was possible to grow in Holiness—either one was saved or he wasn’t. They had a well-founded suspicion of spiritual elites, and so the idea was not to promote individual spiritual prodigies, (aka, saints) but rather to insist that all the regenerated were equals. There are always exceptions, and the exceptions prove the rule, the rule being that one had a conversion experience of some kind, and that was it. One's only moral responsibility after that was to follow the law as revealed in the scriptures, and for most there wasn't much sense of how the New Testament put the revelation of the old law in the Jewish scriptures into a new perspective.

If Calvinists behaved righteously, then they were righteous. In the meantime, the typical not particularly spiritually gifted Calvinists had no compunction about doing their Social Darwinian best to get rich and to increase their power and social status. Indeed their success in these endeavors was the measure and proof of their righteousness. Catholics are surely not immune here--especially American Catholics--but to the degree that they have not been Calvinized, Catholics feel guilty about surrendering to their Social Darwinian selves in ways that traditionalist Calvinists do not, especially with regard to the their attitudes to the poor. "God helps them who help themselves", etc., is their motto. Besides, most of the poor are probably damned. 

So the Reformation unwittingly set the stage for the removal of constraints that kept the Social Darwinian Self in check. That liberation from these constraints released enormous productive capacity and wealth, but it also released forces that in an unprecedented way led to the destruction of traditions, local communities, and customary personal and communal ways of life that most conservatives insist they want to preserve against the intrusive state. But it’s not the state that has destroyed these traditional and customary ways of life, it’s been capitalism and its materialistic presuppositions. Lots of religious people in capitalist societies might believe that there is a spiritual dimension, but they live as if the material was the only thing that really mattered. Their religiosity is a thin patina that covers over their deepest ultimate concern, which is success as measured by materialist capitalist values. Andrew Carnegie thought himself as a good Christian, but we learn more about him by reading his Gospel of Wealth, not to mention the atrocious way he treated his workers.

The American state has been always a tool of capitalism, and both have evolved interdependently. Capitalism is the Sun; the modern state, the Moon. The bigger and more complex the capitalist economy became, the bigger and more complex the state. Without the one, you don’t get the other. The idea of limiting the state in a huge, complex capitalist economy is naively quixotic at best, and downright cynical at worst, insofar as a less intrusive state clears the field for pure Social Darwinians to do as they please with little or no constraints. If we’re to have a large, globalized capitalist economy, you need to have some mechanism for constraining and mitigating its worst excesses, and the only tool adequate for that is a strong state structured by the principle of subsidiarity and held accountable by a vigilant electorate. That's all we've got until there is some kind of new Axial alignment-(explained below)

Liberals—no matter in which party—are people who celebrate what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative/destructive character of capitalism, in other words, the Darwinian impulses as they work in the political economy. You don’t get the creative/productive/innovative without the destructive/disruptive. That’s a truism, but it’s something most conservatives I know don’t appreciate the implications of. One is that in North Atlantic societies it’s mostly educated elites—both Republicans and Democrats—who get the benefits of the creative-productive side of capitalism, and uneducated, rural and rust-belt working stiffs who suffer its destructive/disruptive effects.

Both Democrats and Republicans are “Liberals” in the classic sense. The difference between them, from my pov, is that Democrat elites are Liberals who understand that we pay for the creative benefits of capitalism with a destruction and disruption that affects ordinary working people disproportionately, and they care enough (or feel guilty enough) to try to develop programs that mitigate the negative effects on non-elites. 

Republican elites are classical Liberals in the dark Calvinist sense who either don’t understand or don’t care about the destructive effect capitalism has on traditions and local communities and the ordinary people who live in them, and so don’t try to do anything to mitigate it. This mentality is rooted in a vestigial Calvinism that sees the poor as lazy reprobates deserving of their poverty and the rich as blessed by God. Double predestination still lives on in this perverse way.

Whatever. But Republican elites who say they stand for tradition and the integrity of local communities while at the same time embracing the creative destruction of capitalism are either cynical or naively incoherent. Principled conservatives like Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen understand this, and I recommend his book Why Liberalism Failed if you want a very thoughtful, eloquent articulation of a kind of principled conservatism that aligns with what I’m saying. 

My principal reservation about Deneen lies in that he is complaining about the condition of the patient after the cancer has ravaged him. While I agree with his etiology of the disease, it’s already done its worst, and now the question is how to go forward. The authoritarian/corporatist/integralist, Trump/Putin/Erdogan/Xi model represents one very grim possibility that exploits the understandable fears and resentments of non-elites who have felt most the destructive/disruptive forces of market capitalism. 

That’s where we’re headed if some alternative with a robust consensus that, at least until the deeper, long-term restoration I'm calling for here, embraces the better (Whiggish/Transcendentalist) angels of the American Calvinist character reasserts itself. Trump is a bully and con man trading on the fears and resentments that work with everything that is primitive and ugly in the American Calvinist character. 

Christianity from the very beginning has been universalist and anti-tribal, and so Christian tribalism is just as Social Darwinian (and therefore un-Christian) as any other form of tribalism. To defend the faith or the Church by a Social Darwinian logic is a sin against the Holy Spirit and a failure of both faith and hope. My faith leads me to hope against hope that the Holy Spirit will sustain the Church--as sacrament and as the community of the faithful--no matter what. And that no matter how bad things get, no matter how egregious our mistakes, we will never be abandoned so long as repentance is a possibility. And whenever the church has put its institutional survival above its fidelity to the spirit of the gospel, which it has done on countless occasions, it has sinned egregiously and in doing so diminished egregiously its spiritual authority.  

***

But the real threat for the future of humanity doesn't come from Trumpian or right-wing politics, but rather from Silicon Valley, metaphorically speaking. That's where evolution-without-grace is at its cutting edge, and it's becoming clearer with each passing decade that evolution-without-grace doesn't need human beings. Machines serve evolution's purposes quite nicely. And at this historical juncture, what resources do humans have that they can draw upon to constrain what seems at this point the inevitable dominance of the machines? From a purely Darwinian perspective humans are irrelevant, but from the Christian perspective that I'm trying here to articulate, humans are the whole point of evolution.

So what do I mean by a new Axial alignment? The Axial Age, a  term coined by Karl Jaspers, was a remarkable transcultural moment in the history of human spiritual evolution to provide an intervention against evolution-without-grace. It occurred in a huge swath from China to Greece in the mid centuries of the first millennium BCE, from the emergence of Taoism, Buddhism, prophetic monotheism in ancient Israel, and Greek philosophy. Charles Taylor makes the Axial Age and the subsequent "disembedding" of culture that follows from it a central theme in his monumental A Secular Age. Recently its implications are explored in The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. by Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.

The Axial Age introduced into human thinking the idea of a distinction between transcendence and immanence, and that the transcendent world set a standard for behavior in the immanent world. ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.") The idea of the Platonic Good and the Neoplatonic One, the Mosaic law, the Tao were all concepts of the transcendence in relationship with immanence,  and the goal of human aspiration was to become aligned with the transcendent good as opposed to immanent goods, what I described above as goods defined by biological flourishing or evolution-without-grace. From my pov, the Axial Age was an external (other-dimensional) intervention of the higher into the lower through the inspired thinking of prophets and philosophers who advanced their respective civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and the West. Christian civilization integrates the Axial traditions of ancient Greece and Israel. 

So is a New Axial moment a possibility? It seems clear that one way or another there's going to be a radical discontinuity in human history in coming decades. Developments in machine learning, biotechnology, AR and VR virtually guarantee it. The question is whether humans as beings open to and responsive to grace will survive in such a  brave new world. It seems to me that they cannot unless some kind of Axial awakening occurs because the power of evolution-without-grace is too strong to be resisted otherwise.

So is history dialectical? Are we on the cusp of a cultural realignment that integrates the modern with the premodern? We'll see. For those for whom evolution-without-grace is accepted as the only legitimate historical narrative, humans are expendable. Some even argue that the earth would be better off without humans. Or the other possibility as envisaged by transhumanists and poshumanists is a new eschatology as upload. Humans will become immortal machines, which is just another way for evolution-without-grace and the logic of the fall to win.

So what's at stake here? I don't exclude the possibility that developments in technology can be subordinated to the logic of evolution-with-grace, but unless there's some broad cultural awakening and with it the emergence of a new transcultural moment celebrating transcendence and its central influence in human affairs, it's hard to see how that might be possible. The forces of evolution-without-grace right now are too strong to be resisted.

So is such a broad awakening a possibility? Stranger things have happened. And so for those humans who are concerned about being evolutionarily obsoletized, it would seem that Christians and other heirs of the great Axial traditions need to play a role in formulating a counter-narrative that pushes back against the inevitability of the machines. But they can't unless they have a theology of the evolution-with-grace that makes sense and resonates with the broader culture. 

Drift toward Authoritarianism

I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time to return to the historical norm and that means to the strong man. People don't really like to rule themselves; they'd rather be ruled. It's far less trouble. But I still have hope that some how or other we'll get through this without becoming China or Russia, some tawdry banana republic. We're already Berlusconi's Italy. 

Nevertheless, American democracy is just failing because it has become incapable of dealing with real-world problems. All people really get worked up about is red/blue identity politics--whether my team is winning or the other guy's is.

Inaction and gridlock are the preconditions for crises that will create increasing levels of civil unrest and chaos, and civil unrest and chaos are the preconditions for an authoritarian takeover, and once the authoritarians are in place, they have the technology to stay in place for a long, long time. Surveillance technology, as currently implemented (and exported from) in China, is the future and will be increasingly used to suppress any kind of dissent--from the Left or the Right. If you're a betting man, the odds are not that China will not become more like the U.S., but that the U.S will become more like China.

To think that supporting Trump is a way to push back is fanciful at best. This line of thinking assumes that because the Deep State is against Trump, then he must be against the Deep State. He's not against the Deep State in principle, only the Deep State that opposes him. Give him two terms, and he'll find a way of coopting the Deep State to support his interests.

Trump is an authoritarian personality, and it's only his ignorance and incompetence that has prevented him from being more effective--so far. The one thing he's good at is b.s.-ing or bullying his way out of trouble. We'll see if he can keep his grift going, and with a little help from oligarchs--domestic and abroad--who see him as a useful idiot, he just might. His first hires--the Bannons,etc.--were punching way over their weight class. The new hires, smooth operators like Wm. Barr, and others like him for whom Barr is paving the way, could  very well save Trump's ass. We'll see. 

At first I couldn't understand why the Republican establishment was embracing a clown like Trump. I thought they would support some way of easing him out of office and easing a less volatile tool like Pence in. It didn't make sense to me that these wily establishment Republicans would want to tie their collective fate to Turmp.  I understand all about the base and the primary threats it poses, but I assure you, that if the power establishment wanted to get rid of Trump, they would have found a way. They'd find a way to get Fox News aligned with it, and Trump would be gone in a flash.

The only explanation that makes sense to me at this point is that there's a deep split in the conservative establishment. The first are principled conservative never Trumpers who actually care about preserving traditional norms of decency and the rule of law. The second are nihilist right-wing elites who are ruthlessly committed to entrench their oligarchic power. The latter appear to have adopted the Trump-as-useful-idiot strategy. It's not clear to me yet whether they are delusional or whether they understand things the rest of us do not. 

The people in the second group are all about power, and they are fine with authoritarianism as long as their faction holds the power, and I think that's what's at stake for them in keeping Trump propped up. If they can find a way to get him into a second term, they will have all the time they need to consolidate their control. This is a hypothesis I'm just playing with now, but I'm becoming more convinced that more and more establishment types are willing to "ruin" their reputations by associating with Trump because they don't care about the old establishment anymore--they are trying to set up a new one.

They believe, correctly, that the winners write history, and they intend to win. This is their play, and it could succeed, especially if most Democrats continue to think that Trump is an aberration, and things will return to normal when we elect Uncle Joe. Who knows what these right-wing power elites talk about among themselves, and who knows what narrative they are reinforcing to justify this play among themselves. I'm sure there's no limit to their hubris, and with it their ability to justify whatever they do as in the best interests of the country. 

***

And so for this reason, President Chaos is not the harbinger of freedom from liberal technocracy, but the harbinger of a far more repressive right-wing oligarchy. When I discuss Trump with his supporters in my family or with others, I try to understand why they think that he, despite all his admitted flaws, is better than anybody the Democrats will put up. Most Trump supporters don't see him as a wannabe Putin. They would dismiss my hypothesis as unfair and motivated by alarmist sour grapes. They just see him as an anti-establishment renegade who is stirring things up--it's good to stir things up once in a while, right?. 

I understand their discomfort with liberal technocracy and its secular, nothing-is-sacred-or-worthy-of-reverence cultural ethos, but let's face it, the Churches are as instrumental in destroying that ethos as any secular Liberals have been. From Jerry Falwell, Jr. to Bernard Law, they've been exposed for the frauds most of their clerical ilk have always been. They are, as a class, at best mediocre bureaucrats, careerists without a shred of moral or spiritual authority that exceeds that of an earnest middle manager at Wal-Mart.  

That doesn't mean that there is no spiritual vitality in the culture, but only that it's not to be found in its institutions and its managerial class. I'm a practicing Catholic, but Voltaire was right--ecrasez l'Infame. Good riddance to all that ecclesial, faux-medieval claptrap. It's time to grow up. For me as a Catholic, the only thing necessary is that the Mass be continuously celebrated and that the real faithful remain faithful, and that there be a tradition of lively "midrasnhic" reflection on the central historical mystery we celebrate as Christians. That last part is not going to come out of most chanceries and seminaries, at least not for some time to come.

I'm not saying these are bad people--neither were the segregationist Christians in the South. I'm saying they are very ordinary, socially conforming people who have no special wisdom or moral authority. They just reflect conventional wisdom, and they haven't enough deep moral sense to know when the conventional wisdom is morally wrong. That's how most people are regardless of their avowed political or religious commitments. They are just going along to get along.

The people who are the most virulent defenders of conventional morality are not defending the Good; they are defending their particular culture's Oedipus Complex. The Good, as revealed through different cultures' great prophets and philosophers, has obviously played a role in shaping these cultures' norms and taboos. It's a good thing that human sacrifice is no longer culturally acceptable. And so, of course, we measure moral progress in cultures to the degree that they have proscribed the worst forms of savagery.

But the cultures that are most evolved are those in which the cognitive capacity of the heart, i.e., the individual conscience, to know the good as something that transcends one's acculturation. Christian cultures are not the only ones in which this capacity for moral cognition has been valued, but there's a reason why freedom and individuality emerged most precociously in the West. The problem with cultures that celebrate freedom and individuality lies in that they tend to be irreverent, and that's a good thing, when clearly there are sacred cows that deserve no reverence. But conscience bows before that which is worthy of reverence. It just patiently awaits until it appears, and refuses anything and anyone who presents itself as the form without the substance. 

But the more difficult thing for these traditionalists to understand is that the real destroyer of traditional values and a sense of the sacred has been consumer capitalism. Liberalism and Capitalism are interdependent social systems and the only difference between secular Liberals and traditionalist conservatives lies in that the former accept the disruptive changes that capitalism has wrought and have adapted to it and seek to mitigate its most harmful effects, whereas traditionalist conservatives still think capitalism is great without guardrails and have no clue that ubridled capitalism has been the most powerful destroyer of the norms and traditions they cherish.

You can't disapprove of Liberalism without disapproving of Capitalism. While there are some principled conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen who get this, they don't get much air time on Fox News. Fox News propaganda wants its audience to believe that both capitalism and traditional values are compatible, and the only reason conservative traditions and norms have eroded is because there's a Liberal plot to exterminate everything they hold sacred. Read Deneen. He will quickly disabuse you of this mode of deluded thinking. Deneen understands that the market has commodified everything; it has become our fundamental, culture-wide metaphor for assessing value, and without a robust pushback from credible spiritual authorities, it takes the field unopposed. And without a credible spiritual foundation, a culture cannot be anything but secular, regardless of whatever ridiculous shade of lipstick religious conservatives want to gussie this pig up with. 

Trump represents not the contradiction of secular Liberalism in this sense, but its apotheosis. That conservative Christians have embraced him betrays their own confusion, moral bankruptcy, and fundamental misunderstanding of the spirit of the Gospels. These are culture Christians, not genuine Christians. They are as much Christians as those church members In the bad old days who supported slavery and later segregation. The spirit of the gospels is always a challenge to culture and a call to transcend its limitations, especially the various ways it celebrates power and greed, and especially the way it makes enemies of the Other.

Tribal Christianity is an oxymoron. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--tribal about true Christianity--it is radically universalist. It is corrupted as soon as it becomes a justification of us against them, even when the 'them' are non-Christians. Tribal Christianity is a kind of mediocre social conformism that parodies Christianity. So it's not surprising that so-many people who think they're Christians are among Trump's staunchest supporters. And it's not surprising that so much of his support comes from Southerners who--good Christians though they have thought and continue think themselves to be--were ok with slavery and then later with Jim Crow.  And the strongest indicator of the mediocrity of their moral sense is their allowing themselves to be conned by this buffoonish Yankee grifter. 

So a vote for Trump started out a vote against Hillary, and a vote against Hillary was a vote against the hated Liberal establishment. I get it, but then it blossomed for many Christians into this bizarre logic that because we self-identify as God's people, and what makes us God's people is our opposition to secularizing Liberals, and secular Liberals hate Trump, then Trump must be God's instrument. Even if we are laying the foundations for a future autocratic plutocracy, at least it will be a Godly autocracy. It has to be if if it's what God's people have effected. If people really believe this kind of craziness, there's nothing that can be said to them. Reality itself will intervene at some point and give them a slap upside the head. The problem is that their delusional thinking is dragging the rest of them off the cliff with them.

But let's assume there's are still some Trump supporters who haven't gone completely off the deep end. I would ask them, what kind of alternative to liberal democracy would you embrace?  They say they don't like Hillary and patronizing cosmopolitan liberals, but so what? You're going to burn the whole thing down because you haven't been able to adapt to the world that capitalism has created? You really believe that something better will emerge out of the chaos?  You'd really be ok with the kind of Plutarchy that Koch brothers' style radical Libertarianism will bring us--has already brought us? That's what this embrace of conservative values with unbridled capitalism is turning us into. 

***

I think more than anything else it has to do with the broader crisis in meaning that has cast many Americans, particularly traditionalist conservatives, into a state of ontological dizziness. It's particularly important for certain personality types to take their cues from external cultural symbols and norms, and when those norms are fragilized by pluralistic complexity, their sense of meaning and identity are also fragilized. Most people are not independent thinkers; they need to be told what to think, and cultural norms and traditions have been the normal means to effect that through basic acculturation as children. When everything this kind of personality type has been taught as a child  is true and good is brought into question, ontological dizziness sets in. The floor has disappeared beneath them. They are free floating, and will grasp anything that will give them a sense of stability and grounding. This makes such people extremely vulnerable to demagoguery and outlandish conspiracy theories. What makes sense is anything that resonates with their acculturation and explains why their symbolic world has lost its cultural hegemony. 

So I don't think most Trump supporters are toxic racists or ignorant brutes. They're dizzy, and they just want to live in an America that feels stable and comfortable for them, and Fox News and right-wing talk radio gives them that, and so does Trump. They restore their sense of what's right because it resonates with what they were taught as children. They have not been able to adapt to a complex world in which people who have been acculturated into very different symbolic meaning systems must live cheek by jowl. They used to be ok with "different" folks so long as their traditional American Christian symbol system was dominant, but they cannot tolerate being only one among many with no cultural primacy. It's in this sense they see themselves as "real Americans" and why they see Trump as their champion. Making America great again means restoring their cultural hegemony. And this "restoration" is more important than any other economic or other mundane political consideration.

But, of course, this is a con. And as with almost every kind of hope these conservative elites cynically dangle in front of this dizzy population, it will disappoint them. Everything in Reality is pushing hard against whatever bubble they are trying to sustain to keep it out, and the only question is whether when this bubble bursts it will be too late not just for them but for the rest of us. 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 3

Part 3: The Impersonal Order

In Part 1, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about a social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but understanding its implications reinforces the idea I have written a lot about on this blog, which is the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is very provisional: humans did not always think/experience the world the way as they do now, and they are not likely to think/imagine it in the same way in the future.

I am persuaded that because we live in a decadent period right now, which means to be in a collective situation of neither here nor there with no collective sense of future possibility, our current imaginary is fragile, unstable, and won't last. Understanding how the premodern imaginary morphed into the modern imaginary is interesting to me because it helps us to think about how our current imaginary might morph into something else in the future--for better or worse.

We assume that we now understand the world more clearly and more accurately than our ancestors did, and we do understand the mechanics of the material world better than they. We also tend to believe if we are the typical secular modern that everything our ancestors believed about the spiritual world is superstition and delusion. Some of it was, but much of it wasn't. Knowing how to discern the difference is a new skill we shall have to learn in the future, but it's not a skill that the "buffered selves" can be much good at. Because their condition as buffered is one that filters out the "data" that must be discerned and evaluated. No data to work with, no possibiliity to develop a skill to evaluate it.

In the meantime, we are in the Age of Whatever, snd sooner or later something new will arise that will give us that sense of a positive future worth working for, a future that currently we cannot imagine. Isn't that the source of our current global, collective free-floating anxiety? The Age of Whatever is the Age of Anxiety. The cause of the anxiety is the ontological groundlessness of social and cosmic imaginaries that shape our existential experience of the world in which we live. 

Our current "postmodern" imaginaries give us no robust sense of future possibiity because there is enframed within them nothing deeply worthy of our aspiration. There are all manner of things to which we san 'No", but nothing to which we can say a deeply felt collective 'Yes'. The postmodern moment is essentially a negating one. The cultural Right says No to everything in the hope that it might preserve what has already been lost. The cultural Left continues to debunk for the sake of debunking. Negation is part of growth, but it is useless if it doesn't open up new possibilities for affirmation. 

I have deep respect for the stance "I don't know", so long as it is a stance of radical openness. And I respect the stance of embracing a refusal of hope when the hope being refused is not hope at all but a kind of bogus optimism that finds the most trivial entertainments and projects "exciting" as seems de rigeur for "unalienated" members of our pop and business cultures. At best this kind of refusal of hope is transitional, but too often I think there's a way that people get stuck in its negating temper. This is especially true when this kind of despair or pure negating oppositionalism becomes fashionable or a tribal shibboleth, because then it is just another form alienation. Seeing through what is bogus is an important step, but it is pointless if it does not open up the possibility to see more clearly what lies hidden behind the bogus.  

At some point, not any time soon, something positive, something worthy of our collective affirmation will emerge, and with it a new grand narrative and a new imaginary. I suspect that while aspects of this imaginary will be completely new in the sense of 'currently not imagined', other aspects of it will involve a retrieval of forgotten things that were once imagined by our ancestors. I suspect that one of the things that will be retrieved is a deep sense of the "personal" nature--the "Thouness"--of the Deep Real. I would at least like to argue for that as a possibility, or at least that if Christians have anything to contribute to a future social cosmic and social imaginary, it's this.

For Taylor our social and cosmic imaginaries are the pre-reflective sense we have of our world, its sense of conventional reality, its myths, norms and practices, in all their taken-for-grantedness. Although in traditional societies these imaginaries tend to be static, in the sense that they don't change significantly over relatively long stretches of time, the imaginary of the societies shaped by Latin Christendom, has undergone very significant transformations starting around the turn of the first millennium C. E. and accelerating over the last five hundred years. Taylor's project in A Secular Age is to trace out this "long march" toward our current secular age over the last millennium and to understand the complex factors that caused it. 

The social imaginary consists of the generally shared background understandings of society, which make it possible for it to function as it does. It is 'social' in two ways: in that it is generally shared, and in that it is about society. But there are also generally shared understandings about other things as well, and these are 'social' only in the first way. Among them is the ensemble of ways we imagine the world we live in. 

And just as the social imaginary consists of the understandings which make sense of our social practices, so the "cosmic imaginary" makes sense of the ways in which the surrounding world figures in our lives: the ways, for instance, that it figures in our relgious images and practices, including explicit cosmological doctrines; in the stories we tell about the other lands and other ages; in our ways of marking the seasons and the passage of time; in the places of "nature' in our moral and/or aesthetic sensibility; and in our attempts to develop a 'scientific' cosmology, if any. (323)

What I’m calling the “long march” is a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the populations;. . .  or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base. . . . Or alternatively, a set of practices in the course of their slow development and ramifications gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary. . . . The result in all these cases was a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies, and thus of the world in which we live. (176)

He wants to distinguish imaginary from theory. Everyone lives with an socially shared imaginary, not everyone lives with a theory. The movement from one imaginary to another, like the one that happened in the West from premodern to modern, and to whatever it is we have now (because it is no longer modern) is a movement that started as theory but then came to permeate social practice. The movement, the “long march”, traced starts from the classical/medieval  imaginaries based on Platonic/Aristotelian ideas of form and teleology and hierarchical complementarity that shaped both social and cosmic imaginaries to our modern order based on instrumental reason and utilitarian mutual benefit.

People tend not to realize how profound the changes are if they are living through them. They tend to focus on the continuities rather than the discontinuities, but when the discontinuities take hold, the imaginary changes. In more intense periods of social change there is often what has been called a generation gap. Some of this is superficial in the sense of changes in fashion that older people may not be attuned to, but some of it is deeper and contributes structurally to changes in the imaginary. The older generation is shaped by older practices and ideas that shaped the imaginary into which they were acculturated as children, and the younger generation, while deeply influenced by the imaginary of the older generations, is also shaped by new practices and ideas that introduce discontinuities that the older generation feels uncomfortable with.

In traditional societies there may be differences of opinion and temperament when it comes to dealing with certain issues, like war or peace. But there is no generation gap in the modern sense. In traditional societies the wisdom of the elders counts for something because their greater experience in a relatively stable world retains its relevance. In a rapidly changing world the experience of the elders counts for little because their knowledge has become largely obsolete and experience irrelevant. Adaptability to the rapidly changing new is prized, and that is a talent exhibited mostly by the young.

So in this post I want to follow some of Taylor's effort to trace the generation-by-generation changes in the social and cosmic imaginaries of Latin Christendom, from the hierarchical, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of classical antiquity to the hierarchical, personal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Latin medieval period to the flattened, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Enlightenment rationalists. 

***

Taylor argues that during the Patristic period, Christian thinkers wanted to use Greek ideas to help them to articulate their understanding of the significance of the Christian revelation. There were elements in Greek thinking, particularly from Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism that were helpful, and there were other elements that were distortive. Much of the arguing during this period focused on how much one gains or gives up in using Greek ideas to establish a Christian ontology and moral order. Taylor argues that the struggle was argued out on six axes of significance where Christian ideas using the Greek philosophical framework made significant alterations that were to have a significant shaping effect on the imaginaries of medieval Christendom:

1. The significance of the body. While Greek spirit/body dualism persisted in some Christian thought, the more significant dualism for Christians was the one articulated by Augustine's "two loves" (love of self vs. love of God), based on the Jewish dualism of the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. It is not the body that presents a problem qua body. The problem rather is what is it that is worthy or our love, or to put it another way, what is so much as our 'ultimate concern' and what obstructs or distracts us from loving that which is worthy of it. That is a function of the predisposition of the heart. The life in the body is validated for Christians by its havng been hallowed by the Incarnation and the resurrection event. The body has been redeemed in a way impossible to embrace within the pure Greek scheme. The goal is not to escape from the body but to transform it. 

2. The significance of history. The Incarnation event gives history and the events that happen in it a significance not found in Greek thought. In addition, the Greek idea of eternity--the beginninglessness and endlessness of time--is replaced by the Jewish/Christian idea of creation and the idea of history's eschatological culmination at the end of time. History has a plot: it is  a story of falling away and return. The turning point in the plot is the Incarnation, and the end point is the eschatological gathering of all time together in the communion of the saints. The lives of the saints are the lives that depict the story of return--of alienation and reconciliation. The Prodigal Son is the archetype.

3. The significance of the individual person. Individuation was not particularly important for Greek thought. But for Christians the significance of history enhances the importance of the individual whose eternal destiny is worked out in time. This sense of the individual is not important in the Plotinian Neoplatonist ontology, for instance, for which the goal is rather Eastern in the sense of the individual overcoming the illusion of individuation and melting back into the cosmic pleroma. And while for Aristotle the physical body was important, the individual had particularity only insofar as it is secured by matter. No body, no individuation. The eternal desinty of the individuated immortal soul is a Christian preoccupation. There's a lot of murkiness about the status of the individual in his post death existence, but the ultimate destiny of the human person is to be bodily transformed as Christ's body was transformed in the resurrection. Individuation and the Body are linked in this very important sense. 

4. The significance of contingency. Stoic fatalism and Plotinian necessity requires that things are exactly as they should be because they could not be any other way because God could not have created any other world. The human task for classical Stoics and Neoplatonists is simply amor fati. The idea of changing anything for the better or that there there could be such a thing as human progress is futile and delusional. This idea is challenged by Christian ideas of freedom and grace--although Plotinian necessity is still echoed in Augustine's and later Calvin's bizarrely un-Christian doctrine of double predestination. The more authentically Christian position is that there is no total plan, God created a more interesting universe than that: 

...the Christian eschaton is made up of paths, of stories. And these are shaped by contingencies. That the sotries end well is sometimes seen as their having been rigorously scripted from the beginning. This is often what people call Providence, following the Stoics. God plans sins, so that he can script in some mercy. 

But a rather different model is suggested by the Bible. God's Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve. We can see this mode, for instance, in the famous phrase of the Preface of [the] Easter Vigil:"O felix culpa" (happy fault), applied to Adam's sin; happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. . . .

[The Good Samaritan story] takes us beyond any established relation into the domain of accident or contingency: my neighbour is someone I come across, bleeding in the road. It was sheer accident that I came along at just that time; but this accident can be the occasion for rebuilding a skein of human relations animated by agape. The Samaritan's action is part of God's response to the skewed serve the robbers have lobbed into history. (275)

5. The significance of the emotions. Life in the body is good, and it is human's eternal destiny to be embodied, so the challenge is not to suppress the emotions, but to transform them. Emotion and desire are affirmed and Stoic apatheia is rejected. The idea of a compassionate, suffering God was an impossible idea for Greek thought, and a stumbling block for anyone whose thought was deeply embedded in the Greek imaginary. And unlike Buddhism, desire qua desire is not the problem so much as on what the human heart focuses its desire and its longing, on what it loves--see number 1 above. 

6. The significance of God as ‘person’ capable of ‘communion’. The Cappadocian formulation of the Trinity is of three persons in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us, through making us partakers of the communion which God already lives. It was meant to effect our “deification” (theiosis). Salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with one another.

This understanding of communion as the telos of history is the central idea, the hermeneutic key, without which it is impossible to understand the animating spirit of the Christian Revelation.  

At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God established the new relationship with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love each other (John 15: God loved us first.) The lifeblood of this new relation is agape, which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessential network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any of the historical forms of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but not into a categorical society based on similarity of members, like citizenship; but rather into a network of ever different relations of agape.

Of course, the church lamentably and spectacularly fails to live up to this model; but it is the kind of society that it is meant to be. (282)

If you want a basic criterion to judge whether someone who claims to be Christian is truly animated by the spirit of the gospels, you can do so by evaluating to what degree he wants to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than shun, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than to judge, to forgive rather than condemn, to converse with the enemy rather than to attack him, to obsess about rules rather than the quality of relationship. Yes, Christians are admonished to be wise as serpents and guileless as doves. This is a warning to be not foolish or naive, but while the dove and the serpent need to be talking to one another, the dove sets the agenda. Too much church history, especially the kind that has been motivated by concerns about institutional preservation, alas, has come from the serpent setting the agenda, and for this reason its spectacular failures. 

Taylor argues that while the Fathers broke from the classical Greek positions on these axes, the Enlightenment rationalists more or less adopted/adapted the Christian positions on the first five but not the sixth. Deism was embraced precisely because of its impersonality and because a deist god does not intervene in history. So there is continuity between the Christian and Enlightenment social and cosmic imaginaries, but this one discontinuity is deeply signifiant, and it creates the space for an exclusive humanism, i.e., one that has no need of transcendence or grace. No interventions, no grace. How can there be in universe in which God has no interest in human affairs. The god of the Deists built the machine, set it in motion, and then bowed out. He gave humans reason to figure out how the machine works, and it's up to them to understand its operations so that they can exploit it for human flourishing. We fulfill God's will insofar as we prosper and help one another to prosper. 

So, how did this play out?  Again, there are many factors that contribute. Taylor lays out these five:

First, the world was already becoming very disenchanted driven by the disembedding, anti-pagan reform impulse that began in the 11^th Century. This was religiously motivated and does not require that God be relegated to impersonal status, but it creates a space for it to happen, especially in the decades subsequent to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The idea of a God who cares to intervene in human affairs has way too many problems: For instance, why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn't God intervene to prevent this disaster or that massacre? And then there was the absurd way that Christian factions in the religious wars of the preceding period insisted that God was on their side and prayed for his intervention to ensure their victory. Clearly the stalemate that ensued undermined any such beliefs in any such interventions. (The answer, btw, to these questions of theodicy lies in distinguishing the purposes of the post-Axial, transcendent God of faith with the immanent pre-Axial gods concerned with ordinary human flourishing. The transcendent Good and the immanent good are not necessarily opposed, but they are not to be conflated.)

Second, the loss of face-to-face, personal relationships in the social hierarchy that characterized premodern societies (I talk about how this played out in American society here after the revolution). This tends to create a society where atomized equals become more the norm especially as society urbanizes and industrializes. As our experience of the social world becomes gradually more impersonal and atomized, so does the way we imagine the cosmos. The two mutually reinforce one another. 

Third, in a more complex and impersonal social world, it is no longer possible to conduct business trusting people with whom we have long acquaintance. We need rules, laws, contracts, and courts. We have a society best understood by codes and rules rather than relationships. This allows for the emergence of a free individual unconstrained by authority, in the sense of deference to one's "betters". This is attractive because the new atomized man freed from his niche in the social hierarchy has ‘adult’ dignity and latitude for a more autonomous way to live in the world.  

Fourth, a process of objectification/disengagement derived from the methods of natural sciences gains huge prestige. It has created a world that has no meaning in the way the world defined by the Platonic/Aristotelian chain of being did. Gone are the days when reading nature was reading God's script. In the classical model we experienced and perceived the world through its meanings. The objectification of scientific method brackets these meanings, and they no longer animate enquiry. Descartes pushes this even further by having us not only withdraw from the old field of meanings but also from the body, i.e., into disembodied consciousness. And then because of the prestige of the scientific method, there is a spillover effect--so that what is appropriate for enquiry regarding the mechanics of the material world extends into domains that are neither mechanical nor material. And so what is not mechanical or material ceases to be interesting because it cannot be worked with and eventually ceases to have any real legitimacy. 

Fifth, a stadial consciousness develops, i.e., a new framework of thinking that sees something new developing all around, that real progress is being made, that the only thing impeding further progress is the irrational baggage of tradition and custom, and that all we need is to be reasonable so that a better world can be achieved. If we are to have a new commercial elite, a new politics, why should we not have a new religion--or no religion? This stadial consciousness is, so to speak, the ratchet at the end of this shift, which makes it (near) impossible to go back on it.

The signifcance of the shift is profound. It creates the conditions that make possible what Taylior calls the 'anthropocentric turn', and I will address that in Part 4.

Related:

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

 

 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 2

Part 2. Reform: The Rage for Order

Many societies have moments of 'reform', but Taylor wants to make the case that the rage for Reform in the Latin West was unique and was central to the emergence there of the secular society Westerners introduced to the world. As described in Part I, before the reform bug bit elites in the West, a system of spiritual hierarchical complementarity developed in Christian societies in which almost everyone was nominally Christian, but some Christians, a minority, felt compelled to leave the world to go into monasteries, while ordinary householders, tradesmen, magistrates, soldiers, etc., lived with varying degrees of religious commitment in the secular world.

There was in that ancient Catholic arrangement a sense of higher and lower vocations--or vocations at different speeds--that correlated with spiritual/secular. There was always a tension between the two because of the disembedding challenge that the spiritual posed to the secular, but the arrangement remained fairly stable until a shift began around the turn of the first millennium, and a desire arose among educated elites to raise the standards of Christian practice in the secular world.

The secular majority, like humans everywhere, was concerned primarily with ordinary human flourishing, and its spiritual practice was for the most part subordinated to those ends. Everyone, secular and spiritual alike, lived in an enchanted world, but the religious practice for those who lived in the secular world focused mainly on the need to contend with malign spirits and to propitiate benign ones in order to obtain the good health, long life, prosperity, and other forms of success that are important for humans everywhere.

For the majority of European Christians, Germanic or Celtic pagan practices and beliefs were merged syncretically with Christian practices and beliefs, but in a way that tipped more toward pre-Axial concerns than toward the post-Axial challenge posed by the gospels. These practices were more about ordinary human flourishing than about spiritual transformation. And so the religious practice for most Christians was mostly concerned with managing their lives in an enchanted economy in which you engaged in ritual practices--beating the bounds, Ember Days, the veneration of relics, and the propitiation of spiritual beings--the Virgin, the saints, etc., and all of these practices came to be seen by the Reformers as a 'white magic'. 

The monastic minority also lived in an enchanted world, but the religious task for those in it was to transcend secular concerns with ordinary human flourishing by aligning their lives with a higher "Good", and that required living according to different norms defined by values that were outside the secular worldly system, so to say. As early as the 3rd century, this minority faction left the "world" to live as hermits in the Egyptian desert, and then later, as the Roman Empire in the West collapsed, they went into the monasteries founded on the Benedictine Rule.

These spiritual 'virtuosi', to use Weber's term, were a sign to everyone living in the secular world that there was a higher possibility, that there was something more to which one could aspire that lay outside secular preoccupations. But since that life in pursuit of the higher had stricter moral norms and required renunciatory practices and disciplines, it was a life chosen only by a minority. (It's the same in Buddhist societies.) As with all things human, some who rose to this post-Axial, soul-transformative challenge were more successful than others. But that some were successful cannot be denied: great saints, mystics, and philosophers were nurtured in that old system, from Hildegard of Bingen and Hugh of St. Victor, to Francis, Bonaventure, Catherine of Sienna, and Aquinas, through Eckhart--and later John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.These are all people who climbed to the mountain top, breathed in its cold, thin air, and returned to tell the rest of us what they experienced about the transcendent Real there.  

There was an assumption among elites, carried to an extreme later with Calvinist ideas of predestination, that most people were damned, and the proof of it was the dissolute, quasi-pagan lives most ordinary people lived in the secular world. As suggested in Part I, the impulse for top-down reform to raise the standards of practice for secular Christians began in the 11th Century as Europe emerged from the "Dark Ages". (There were also popular spiritual movements that arose from below, but we'll talk about those in Part 4, "The Anthropocentric Turn".)

And so a well-intended desire on the part of elites began to take hold, which was to close the gap between the "higher" spiritual life lived by those in the monasteries and the spiritually lax lives of ordinary people in the secular world. The emergence of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the 13th Century was largely impelled by this desire to take the spirituality out of the monasteries and into the world, out of the spiritual sphere and into the secular. Instead of demanding that everyone go to the mountain top, they sought to find ways to bring the mountain top to those living in the lowlands. 

Calvinist elites continued the reform traditions of the late Middle Ages in societies where they had control, but on a much more ambitious level. The first task was to completely eliminate whatever remained of the enchanted world in Christian practices. The second task was to eliminate the two-tiered vocational system; and a third challenge lay in maintaining an attitude of humility as this new kind of 'saint' took on this ambitious task of radical reform. The best among the reformers, whether Catholic or Protestant, knew how difficult it was to zealously take on ambitious projects, which though consciously justified as for the greater glory of God, in reality very often were unconsciously ego-driven causa sui projects that were motivated for the greater glory of one's self. 

So the first step is to complete the disenchantment project:

. . . we reject the sacramentals; all the elments of "magic" in the old religion. They are not only useless, but blasphemous, because they are arrogating power to us, and "plucking" it away "from the glory of God's righteousness". This also means that intercession by saints is of no effect. In face of the world of spirits and powers, this gives us great freedom. Christian liberty for Calvin consists in this: that one see salvation in faith; that one serve God with one’s whole heart; and that one no longer be scrupled by indifferent things. We can cast aside all the myriad rituals and acts of propitiation of the old religion. Serving God now in our ordinary life, guided by the spirit, we can re-order things freely. We don’t need to be too impressed by custom; this can lead us terribly astray.

The energy of disenchantment is double. First, negative, we must reject everything which smacks of idolatry. We combat the enchanted world, without quarter. At first, this fight is not carried on because enchantment is totally untrue, but rather because it is necessarily ungodly. If we are not allowed to look for help to the sacred, to a “white” magic of the church, then all magic must be black. All spirits now are ranged under the devil, the one great enemy. Even supposedly good magic must really be serving him. . . .

The more so, in that the second energy was positive. We feel a new freedom in a world shorn of the sacred and the limits it set for us, to re-order things as seems best. We take the crucial stance for faith and glory of God. Acting out of this, we order things for the best. We are not deterred by the older tabus, or supposedly sacred orderings. So we can rationalize the world, expel the mystery from it (because it is all now concentrated in the will of God). A great energy is released to re-order affairs in secular time. (79-80)

That sense of freedom derived from opposition to these forces of enchantment, now all of which are by definition malign, is a key element in understanding the attractiveness of becoming a buffered self, the kind of self that filters the supernatural out. The buffered self lives in a mystery-free zone, except for the occasional frisson he experiences when passing by a graveyard, so to say, or more recently when he watches a supernatural horror film. When he leaves the theater, he leaves the imaginative re-creation of that eerie, enchanted world. People living in an enchanted imaginary cannot leave it because their whole world is their 'theater'.

Becoming a buffered self gradually becomes an attractive option in early modernity, first for elites, then for everyone else, because it becomes a way of leaving the enchanted theater, which brings with it, understandably, great relief and a sense of control. But with that control also comes a flatness and deadness of soul, because it's not only the eerieness of the spiritual world that is filtered out. It also filters out a vital sense of connection to the life world. Humans begin to "forget Being". The world becomes Hamlet's 'sterile promontory', and a sense of felt meaning becomes rarer the more buffered one becomes. Another kind of free-floating anxiety becomes common. Existential dread becomes common. And neurosis, a breakdown in the filtering system, becomes a possibillity for moderns in a way that was not possible for premoderns. The psychotherapist replaces the priest, and his job is to help the patient patch up the filtering system and get him back into buffered control, i.e., back into alignment with the disenchanted social and cosmic imaginary. 

The second task for the Calvinist Reformer is to eliminate the two-tiered system--the radical Calvinist Reformers utterly rejected the idea of Christianity being lived at different levels (or speeds) because they were committed to the idea of equality of all before God--how can there be first- and second-class Christians? But that meant that they had to pick one level and expect everybody to live at it. So where do you set the level? Clearly not everyone, even in the Age of Faith, is equally pious or serious in his spiritual commitments. And even for the pious householder who wants to live a righteous life, there seems to be a bedeviling paradox: On the one hand, he is told that God wants him to flourish and be happy, and on the other that he must distinguish himself from the quasi-pagan, drunken, fornicating, relic worshipping, saint-propitiating nominal Christians who were more or less the norm in medieval Christendom. Be happy, but not too happy. But where do you draw the line? And how--

. . . do you hold the two together? The dilemma was faced first by the late medieval Catholic reformers who wanted to raise standards of practice:

Any attempt to tie it down faces two opposite dangers. One is to set the element of renunciation so high as to make the life of flourishing a travesty of itself [e.g., no festivals, dancing, no pleasure or joy from sex]. The other is, to set a bare minimum. Think of the minimum necessary for salvation: keeping certain important commandments. But then we know even these will often be broken; so in the end the minimum demands simply that you repent in time. 

The end result here is that an inherent danger built into this tension itself now befalls us. We clearly set the renunciative vocations above the ordinary lay ones. There are first- and second-class Christians; the second being in a sense carried by the first. We fall back into hierarchical complementarity.

Whereas the crucial truth that we wanted to hold on to was the complementarity of all lives and vocations, where we all serve under God, and can't put some above others. 

So there seems to be a dilemma here, between demanding too much renunciation from the ordinary person on one hand, and relaxing these demands, but at the cost of the multi-speed system, on the other. (81)

So the late-medieval Catholics tinkered with reforms here and there, but pretty much stayed with the multi-level system of hierarchical complementarity, and do so to this day. They compromised by trying to bend some pagan practices to more Christian ends, endorsed relics and other sacramentals as a substitute for pagan talismans, maintained and further developed propitiatory practices to the saints and the Virgin, whose merit the people could call upon for their own benefit--and we all know how this kind of thinking went off the rails with the indulgences controversy. But--

Radical Protestantism utterly rejects the multi-speed system, and in the name of this abolishes the supposedly higher, renunciative vocations; but also builds renunciation into ordinary life. It avoids the second horn but comes close to the first danger above: loading ordinary flourishing with a burden of renunciation it cannot carry. It in fact fills out the picture of what the properly sanctified life would be with a severe set of moral demands. This seems to be unavoidable in the logic of rejecting [hierarchical] complementarity, because if we really must hold that all vocations are equally demanding, and don't want this to be a leveling down, then all must be at the most exigent pitch. 

Here is where it becomes significant that Protestantism is in the line of continuity with medieval reform, attempting to raise general standards, not satisfied with a world in which only a few integrally fulfill the gospel, but trying to make certain pious practices absolutely general.

But in view of the importance now given to social order, the generalization of moral demands involved not only placing high moral demands on one's own life, but also putting order into society. This was not seen as involving a watering down of the standards of personal morality, but as completing them. Calvin held that we have to control the vices of the whole society, lest the vicious infect the others. We are all responsible for each other, and for society as a whole. (81-82)

In other words, for the Calvinists, the high standards of conduct the best of them followed would become the same standard for the worst of them. They demanded that everyone live in the thin mountain air, even if most had no real experience of transcendence in living there. And the ideal exemplar for holiness changed from the extraordinary holiness of the saint to the very ordinary moralistic righteousness of the good burgher. Theosis as a possibility is no longer on the table. 

The Puritan notion of the good life . . . saw the "saints" as a pillar of a new social order. As against the indolence and disorder of monks, beggars, vagabonds, and idle gentlemen, he "betakes himself to some honest and seemly trade and [does] not suffer his senses to be mortified with idleness" (106)

The goal was to avoid leveling, but leveling was exactly what happened. The model Christian in Calvinist societies became the model bourgeois. The Calvinists rejected the Catholic two-tiered model, and they rejected sectarian or separatist models, as well--e.g., those developed by Anabaptists like the Amish and Hutterites. The Calvinists were bent on reconstructing the whole system so that it would align with their idea of a righteous society. Reformers looked to the theocracy of ancient Israel as a model, and from this followed the radical experiments in Geneva in the 1550s, Boston in the 1630s, and London in the 1650s.

So the Calvinist reform project has, first, to eliminate completely enchantment in Christian practice; second, to get rid of the two-level Catholic system of hierarchical complementarity. The Calvinist impulse was not just to tinker with this or that problem or adapt to local customs, but to wipe the slate clean and start anew. The goal was to destroy the whole magical, superstitious, enchanted superstructure root and branch. But to do this effectively, one had to re-order the entire society.This impulse to reform the whole of society is a significant turning point, and one has to ask what motivated it. Taylor suggests these reasons:

First, there was a sense that God judged the whole community, and that the eternal fate of the best was linked to the eternal fate of the worst, so it was incumbent on the best to discipline the worst. (How this jibes with predestination, I'm not sure.)

Secondly, Puritans feared the unruly and irreligious and saw them as a threat to civil order, peace, and prosperity. The Puritan desire for reform jibed with a broader civil interest to reduce crime, brigandage, social violence for reasons that have little to do with religious reforms, but the civil reforms that were increasingly common throughout Europe in the early modern period were almost always framed in religious terms. 

Third, it's very difficult for someone who lives a life of renunciation to live cheek by jowl with those who don't. If you're not going to leave secular society, as monks or sectarians do, to live in an environment where the temptations will be fewer, then you have to demand that the society live according to your high standards, assuming you have the power to do it.

So much of what constrained the earlier Catholic reformers was simply jettisoned by the radical Reformers. We are left with a much starker world, one in which there is God alone in his heaven who must be obeyed, and on whom we must rely, but the world is otherwise evacuated of mystery, of spiritual beings and spiritual forces, except as they are evil forces. The ambition, if not hubris, of this broad social reform project is really astonishing. Just to believe that it would be possible to succeed with the intractable, depraved material that these Puritan "saints" believed they had to work with in the broader population alone would discourage lesser men. And for a while, in New England and Geneva, they succeeded. 

But in the long run this project was doomed to fail on religious grounds and to morph into something unintended. For such a society to persist in maintaining a lively sense of its ideals, the motivation had to be maintained from generation to generation, and that proved impossible. 

First, the one-level solution proved impossible to sustain. The tension between renunciation and flourishing was challenging for the most gifted, but impossible to maintain in the long term by ordinary people. The challenge of holding the two together was bound to break down, and it's not hard to understand why the flourishing side of the tension won, and it's not hard to understand why, except for a gifted spiritual minority, the spiritual component became an empty form, a repressive code that later generations threw off.

In the end, most people can't live in the thin mountain air, and a levelling takes place; lowland pursuits take precedence without much thought of there being mountains to ascend. Puritan societies morphed into good capitalist societies where success in business for individuals was proof of God's favor and of their being among the elect--so long as they kept up pious appearances. Whited-sepulcher syndrome becomes common if not the norm. It is a fact of human nature, but perhaps more so in matters of religion and politics, that those who are most aggressively and confidently wrong rise to positions of power and shape the narrative the rest of us must live by. This is as true in Catholic societies as in Protestant ones. 

Then there was another dilemma posed by the tension between ambition and humility that eventually proved too difficult to hold in balance. 

Puritan spiritual life moved between a Scylla and a Charybdis. On one hand one had to have a confidence in one's salvation. Too much anxious doubt amounted to a turning away of God's gift, and could even be a sign that one was not saved after all. But at the same time, an utterly unruffled confidence showed that you were altogether forgetting the theological stakes involved, forgetting that one was a sinner who richly deserved eternal damnation, and was only saved from this by God's gratuitous grace; that one was in fact hanging over a cliff, and was only held back by God's outstretched hand. . . .

Consequently, a third level of order-building arises in Protestant (and also some Catholic) spirituality: building the right inner attitude. Being able to avoid despair or paralyzing melancholy, on one side, and a facile, unthinking confidence on the other. (83) . . .

So as long as the ambition that motivates the social reform is balanced by the humility of one's awareness of himself as a sinner, a genuine spiritual idealism can be at work here, but that is an inner attitude that is difficult enough for extraordinary individuals to maintain in balance--and surely some individuals maintained it--but it is much more difficult for an entire society to maintain it, and so a facile, unthinking confidence won out in the end:

. . . the reversal is prepared in the fact that as an order is built in conduct, and at least seen as within our power to encompass in society, and more crucially, as people learn the secret of a kind of motivational equilibrium whereby they can keep themselves on the track to both of these external orders  [personal moral conduct and moral social order], the possibility is opened to slide de facto, without even feeling it, into the Scylla mentioned above, that is, into a confidence that we have this under control, we can pull it off. (84)

In other words, the good burghers know what's best because they believe that they have God and his grace because they are the pillars of their community--the flourishing, well-heeled elect. But it becomes a bubble reality, and bubbles by definition are extraordinarily resistant to influences outside of it, including grace. And so from this lived reality, since grace is no longer really a primary factor, conformity to external moralistic codes is all that matters, and spiritual authority in the community correlates with behaving according to a strict moral code and being rich and successful. 

Of course, we go on holding to the express belief that only God's power makes this possible; but in fact the confidence has grown that we, people like us, successful, well-behaved people, in our well-ordered society/stratum are beneficiaries of God's grace--as against those depraved, disordered classes, marginal groups, Papists, or whatever. It is hard to dent this confidence as long as we can keep the triple-level order in being. As a general proposition, of course, it remains true that the majority of humankind is destined for damnation, and that the minority of the saved are very lucky; but in practice, we are confident that we belong in this minority; and that the universe is unfolding as it should. The declarations that we are helpless sinners become more and more pro forma. (84)

And an us-against-the-world attitude develops: We are the holy society, a light shining unto the nations, and bright island in a sea of darkness and depravity. But with such a sense of oneself, one loses perspective and humility, and forgetfulness of grace, and what's left is the smug, priggish moralism that we have come to associate with Puritanism. Instead of creating a space for a genuine, lighthearted Christian freedom by clearing away all the medieval clutter, the Puritans simply replace it with another kind of bric a brac, and a kind that is dehumanizing compared to pre-reformation enchanted-world tolerance.

A humorless determination to castigate sin and disorder takes over, a denial of ambiguity and complexity in an unmixed condemnation, which reflects the attempts by controlling elites to abolish carnivalesque and ludic practices, on the grounds that they see disorder, mix pagan and Christian elements, and are a breeding ground of vice. (We are witnessing the birth of what will become in our day p.c.) Delumeau relates this to a parallel shift in the attitude to madness, where previously this could be seen as the site of vision, even holiness, it now comes more and more to be judged unambiguously as the fruit of sin. (87)

There was more tolerance for diversity, for the poor, and  the 'cunning' women in an enchanted world, but not for them in one that was so radically disenchanted.

So in the short run this could lead to an intensification of certain of the old beliefs, particularly in witches, who were now redefined in a much more sinister role as helpmeets of the devil. Salem becomes possible. But in the longer run this attack could not but undermine the whole outlook within which these persecutions made sense. (80)

As Puritan societies became more repressive, their projection of what they repressed demonized the Other. Anybody with any common sense or common decency--even at the time--was repelled by the inhumanity of it.  And in the second half of the 17th century, in the wake of the religious wars on the continent and England, parallel to developments in natural philosophy and alternative religious ideas emerged that rejected both Catholic enchanted medievalism and austere Protestant moralism.

Providential Deism embraced an even simpler understanding of God and his purposes than the revisions proposed by Calvin--the Deists' God was so much more reasonable; he didn't interfere in human affairs, and a belief in such a reasonable god avoided all the ridiculous confessional strife. For the Enlightenment rationalists, a pox on both houses--Catholic and Protestant--wan an attitude that we looking back should find quite understandable. And the de-legitimization of ecclesial authority from then on progresses to a point now where only right-wing fanatics take it seriously. The churches have nobody to blame but themselves because in their delusional sense of their institutional prerogatives, they allowed those who were most aggressively wrong to take control.

But a certain rage for order had been unleashed on the world, and its influence is something that we feel to this day. If its religious motivations have faded, its need-for-control motivations have not, and in many ways what was begun then was the harbinger of the police, technocratic, and surveillance states. Taylor talks about how this impulse to reform from its earliest manifestations was characterized by four basic traits:

There are certain common features running through all these attempts at reform and organization: (1) they are activist; they seek effective measures to re-order society; they are highly interventionist; (2) they are uniformizing; they aim to apply a single model or schema to everything and everybody; they attempt to eliminate anomalies, exceptions, marginal populations, and all kinds of non-conformists; (3) they are homogenizing: although they still operate in societies based on differences of rank, their general tendency is to reduce differences, to educate the masses, and to make them conform more and more to the standards governing their betters. . . . (4) they are “rationalizing” in Weber’s double sense: that is, they not only involve an increased use of instrumental reason, in the very process of activist reform, as well as in designing some of the ends of reform (e.g., in the economic sphere); but they also try to order society by a coherent set of rules.  (86)

But the takeaway for now is that the disembedding process that began in the Axial Age comes to a kind of culmination in the Calvinist reforms, and disembedding is the essential condition that makes secularism possible. For secularism is the social condition in which enchantment is quite thoroughly abolished from the social imaginary. The impulse that drove this for both the late-medieval and post-Renaissance Reformers was to clear the ground for a purer kind of faith in the One God. That the purity of this kind of faith is authentically achieved at an altitude where the oxygen is rather thin I do not question. But if most people cannot live at that altitude, that doesn't mean that many of these remarkable men and women in the 16th and 17th century did not truly live there.

The mistake they made was not in their misinterpeting the profundity of their experience, but in expecting to shape a whole society based upon it. People need to run at different speeds and to live at different altitudes. And while there are different qualities of depth and intensity with which people experience the transcendent Real, grace is nevertheless to be found everywhere, high and low. The gospels couldn't be clearer about that. Because pagan practices interweaved with Christian ones in the old enchanted order does not mean that grace wasn't also interwoven with them as well. 

Although their reforms, like many human projects, were at first impelled by genuine idealistic motivations, they sour into something relentlessly repressive, and the idealistic rationale becomes an ex post facto justification for other less idealistic motivations. For what we are seeing emerge here is the fundamental top-down reform dynamic that, while it was motivated in its earliest manifestations by a sincere desire for spiritual reform, ironically becomes later the dynamic that manifests in the secular, anti-Christian revolutions that start erupting in the late 18th century and into the 20th century.

While these revolutions are secular, immanentizing, social-engineering projects through and through, they would not have been possible if the Calvinists had not cleared away all the medieval clutter that otherwise stood in the way, at least for the elites who wanted to effect the reforms. Paris of the 1790s would not have been possible without similar projects already undertaken in the Geneva of the 1540s, Boston of the 1630s, and London of the 1650s. (But also Charles Borromeo's Catholic Milan in the 1560s.) I think Taylor makes the case powerfully that this is why Latin Christendom was uniquely suited to usher in secular modernity for the rest of the world. There is something in its application of the Axial Hellenic/Judaeo cultural code that impelled this remarkably ambitious disembedding "rage for reform" in ways that would be unimaginable if not repellant to other societies. 

And while I think there are good arguments made mostly by Catholics and conservatives of a Burkean stripe that the Reformers were fundamentally mistaken in attempting to do it the way they did, it's really rather a moot point at this juncture. We are where we are, and we have to work within the historical reality in which we find ourselves. And I am inclined to think that the reform impulse, even its secular revolutionary manifestations, no matter how flawed in their execution, is consistent with post-Axial ideals, insofar as it is an impulse to disembed us from the constraints of the old, enchanted, customary social imaginary to clear the way for the emergence of something transcendently new. This historical challenge is to hold the reform impulse in a kind of tension with existing practice understanding that the influence of the first on the second over time has a transforming effect. Problems arise when existing practice rigidifies or when the reform impulse becomes a radical, top-down social engineering project. 

So one final thought along these lines to be developed in a future post. I have for a long time thought of secularism as not an attack on Christianity, but as a chapter in its development. I think of it as a collective, culture-wide Dark Night of the Spirit. It's a time when everything is stripped away except what is essential, and it's up to us to grope around in the darkness until we find the one thing needful. But dark it is, and grope we must. But because what we grope for is not easily found does not mean it isn't there. It's just that we haven't learned where to look, and Taylor in his treatment of what he calls the 'anthropocentric turn' points us, I think, in the right direction. But that's for another post. 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part III

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

On Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 1

Part 1:  Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the impious or people for whom religion meant little, but before the modern age, they were marginal. During modernity meant that impious ideas have become not only acceptable, but in some precincts--inhabited these days by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and their fellow travelers--the new orthodoxy. 

Taylor is at pains to reject classical secularization theory as a subtraction story that is too simplistic, and wants to tell instead a story about secularization that is much more complex and interesting. By subtraction he means that as the powers and characteristics ascribed to God fell away--were subtracted--when science developed alternative explanations, very little was left that one could say about God, especially the biblical God, that anyone could take seriously. Taylor grants that rendering irrelevant of God is true insofar as religion is conflated with the practices and beliefs--the social imaginary--of an 'enchanted' society, but 'disenchantment' has been the project of the post-Axial 'higher religions' for at least the last 2500 years. Disenchantment is not a bug of the post-Axial religions, but a feature.

A basic premise of this blog is that we are on the cusp of another shift in our imaginaries. As we shifted from premodern to modern, we are now in the process of shifting from modern to whatever comes next. Our current condition described as 'postmodern' is the last gasp of modernity in its reductio ad absurdum of individualism and freedom understood in an unbalanced way. It's an age in which debunking for the sake of debunking is the rule, and we have nothing positive--except a kind of groundless freedom--that can be affirmed. It is The Age of Whatever, a period of ontological vertigo in which any belief or practice is defensible. This can't last; nobody, even intellectuals, wants to live in a world like that, and it's not the only intellectually legitimate option, even if many intellectuals haven't been persuaded of that yet. Taylor's book I think will be seen as important for laying a foundation for what comes next. It sifts what is essential from the Western religious heritage, and discards what is not. 

If modernity mainly identified itself over against pre-modernity, we are moving into a new phase. If all goes more or less well, I believe that we will find a way to synthesize what is essential from modern developments--science, critical consciousness, equality ideals, the importance of the free individual--with much of what modernity rejected as irrational and delusional--a sense of the sacred, the sacrament, the movement of grace, a renewed sense of the Deep Real as personal, perhaps even a retrieval of lost knowledge/wisdom that persists in the not-quite-extinguished "enchanted" shamanic and totemic cultures that persist mostly in the global south. There is no going backwards, but the way forward involves retrieval and reintegration of much of what has been lost or forgotten. 

Taylor isn't concerned to talk about what comes next so much as he is to explain how we got here, and also to create an intellectual space for legitimate belief, and I believe, a space for the development of a positive ontology in a post-Axial key that can be broadly accepted, even by philosophers. I see his work as foundational, something that must be understood and assimilated before moving forward. In what follows in this post and in three posts that follow, I want to provide a summary with my own glosses of his analysis of the factors that so profoundly shifted the social imaginary of Latin Christendom. 

But before talking about the dramatic shift in the social imaginary that occurred during the modern era, I want to provide a broader historical context, which for Taylor begins with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. This was the extaordinary time around 500 BCE when various higher forms of religion emerge seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such founding figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.

The 'axial' impulse  begins a process of disembedding. In "embedded" societies human beings are enmeshed in their surroundings to such a degree that their identity and sense of personal agency are severely limited by "outside" factors that surround them. The embedded human being has what Taylor calls the 'porous self', one where the boundaries of his individuality are very permeable to outside social and spiritual influences. His personal identity is deeply merged with that of his tribe, clan, polis, and he is broadly vulnerable to the influence of spirits and spiritual forces, both malign and benign that, though invisible, are all around him and with which he must contend. 

For the porous self, the cosmos is enchanted not as a matter of belief or theory, but as a matter of experience. Think of the way the gods influence the fates of the Greek heroes in Homer's enchanted world. The hero's personal prestige is linked to how he performs in battle, but that performance is determined by whether he is favored by the gods or not. Paris let's loose his arrow, and Apollo guides it to its mark in Achilles' heel. It's Apollo's achievement, not Paris's skill that effects Achilles' demise.

Moderns call it luck; premodern called it good or bad fortune. But good or bad fortune is not random; it is personally intended by the gods. Humans act, but they are mostly reacting to outside spiritual influences that have the larger role in determining the outcomes. Julian Jaynes talks about this way of experiencing the world in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The point here is not whose interpretation what was going on then is correct, but simply to establish that the premodern experience of porous selves was very different from the experience of the world that we buffered moderns accept (naively?) as real. 

So religion in its pre-Axial modality is about trying to navigate in such an enchanted environment, appeasing or propitiating the malign spirits and enlisting the support of those who are benign. The goal of pre-Axial religion is to develop rituals and practices in an enchanted world that are designed to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, prosperity, success in all one's worldly projects.  

Societies that live in an enchanted social imaginary are embedded societies, but a shift toward disembedding begins in the Axial period. Taylor explains:

Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine. What I've been describing as the Axial transformation breaks this chain at least at one point, if not more. Oakley argues that the break point which was particularly fateful for our development in the West was the rupture, as it were at the top, the Jewish idea of (what we now call) the creation ex nihilo, which took God quite out of the cosmos, and placed him above it. This meant that potentially God can become the source of demands that we break with "the way of the world"; that what Brague refers to as "the wisdom of the world" no longer constrains us. 

But perhaps the most fundamental novelty of all is the revisionary stance towards the human good in Axial religions. More or less radically, they all call into question the received, seemingly unquestionable understandings of human flourishing, and hence inevitably also the structures of society and the features of the cosmos through which this flourishing was supposedly achieved. The change was double. . . . On the one hand, the “transcendent” realm, the world of God, or gods, spirits, or Heaven, however defined, which previously contained elements which were both favorable and unfavorable to the human good, becomes unambiguously affirmative of this good. But on the other hand, both the crucial terms here, both the transcendent and the human good are reconceived in the process.

We have already noted the changes in the first term. The transcendent may now be quite beyond or outside of the cosmos, as with the creator God of Genesis, or the Nirvana of Buddhism. Or if it remains cosmic, it loses its original ambivalent character, and exhibits an order of unalloyed goodness, as with the “heaven” guarantor of just rule in Chinese thought, or the order of Ideas of Plato, whose key is the Good.

But the second term must perforce also change. The highest human good can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before. Either a new goal is posited, or a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing. Or else Heaven, or the Good, lays the demand on us to imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mundane order of things down here. This may, indeed usually does, involve flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family, clan, or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal. And of course, this may be expressed by a redefinition of what “flourishing” consists in.

Seen from another angle, this means a change in our attitude to evil, as the destructive, harm-inflicting side of things. This is no longer just part of the order of things, to be accepted as such. Something has to be done about it. This may be conceived as an escape through self-transformation, or it may be seen as a struggle to contain or eliminate the bad, but in either case evil is not something just to be lived with as part of the inevitable balance of things.  (152-53)

The Axial Age introduces a new idea that things are not what they seem; that what people have always accepted as normal reality, enchanted as it might be, is not necessarily the best reality, and that 'normal reality' is something from which we need to be liberated. Something more and better--higher--is possible. A tension is created between this idea of a transcendent Good and the life most people live in pursuit of ordinary human flourishing. And this tension is destabilzing. But the "higher" life is not for everybody because leaving normal reality, like Abraham leaving Ur, is not easy. (Ask Lot's wife.)

But for the ancient Israelites, to live according to a higher law required disembedding from the enchantment-saturated fertility cults that shaped the societies around them. That this was extraordinarily difficult, even unnatural, is repeatedly attested to in the Hebrew scriptures. To 'disembed' is to 'disenchant'; the austerity that comes with disenchantment isn't and end in itself; it's a means to an end, which is to live something at a higher, freer level of human possibility. Socrates' project in Athens had a similar purpose, to disembed the youth of Athens from their naive acceptance of their enchanted cultural download.

The goal for both Socrates in Athens and the prophetic tradition in Israel was not just to debunk worldview seeped in enchantment, but to point to something that was higher and better. Both Plato and the religious traditions of the book--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--get a bad rap in post-Freudian/Darwinian societies that have largely reverted to materialism and celebration of the sensual. These traditions are perceived as unnaturally, repressively anti-body and anti-life.

But disembedding is misunderstood if it's thought to be only about repression because some vindictive father god in the sky demands it for whatever capricious reasons he may have. It makes no sense to repress what is lower if you don't believe there's anything that higher. The problem in a secular society lies in that the higher is something hardly anyone, especially among its educated elites,  believes is a possibility. Now whether an ascetic path is the only path to realize the higher is a legitimate question, and I am inclined to think not--the choice is not binary. The more important concern is to retrieve the Axial understanding of the "higher", but now in a postmodern key.

But back to our story: In some post-Axial societies, those shaped by Buddhism and Christianity for instance, a stabilizing compromise was developed in which some people left the world of ordinary human flourishing to live in the wilderness or in monasteries. It's a compromise because these individuals who responded to the Axial challenge and who left the ordinary world of flourishing behind to live austerely in pursuit of this higher good, still remained in relationship with the old world. And the people left behind looked to those who went into the monasteries as having a special role to play as 'holy' men and women who could provide spiritual benefit to those who remained in the 'world'. A spiritual/secular dyad develops, and with it a sense of complementarity:

So that those who are fully dedicated to the "higher" forms, while on one hand they can be seen as a standing reproach to those who remain in the earlier forms, supplicating the Powers of human flourishing, nevertheless can also be seen as in a relationship of mutual help with them. The laity feed the monks, and by this they earn "merit", which can be understood as taking them a little farther along the "higher " road, but also serves to protect them against the dangers of life, and increases their health, properity, fertility. (154)

There were those who pursued the spiritual life in a purer, more demanding form in the wilderness or monasteries, and there were those who lived in the secular world, but who drew strength and inspiration from those who lived outside of it. This compromise as it worked in Latin Christendom was rejected by the Reformers in the 16th Century. The Reformers insisted that a Christian society is one in which everyone is equal before God, and so there should not be 'special' vocations: such vocations only lead to spiritual pride. Their model was more that of ancient Israel, in which the whole society was expected to live a rigorous spiritual life, and this led to experiments like those in Geneva or Boston. 

These experiments failed for a complex of reasons that we'll explore in more detail later. But it's interesting to note that an unintended consequence ensued: in a world where the spiritual and secular were collapsed into one another, a new social construct was created in which a sense of higher, spiritually transformative possibilities were de-emphasized and replaced by a rigorist, if not suffocating, moralism, i.e., a focus on codes of behavior more than on spiritual transformation. This causes a significant flattening of human possibiliites, especially in Protestant societies.

Not all, or even most, monks achieved significant (or any) levels of spiritual transformation, but some did, so the possibility of a monastic vocation always held out the possibility of that kind of transformation. That disappears in Protestant societies. And in the long run the moralistic rigor of the Puritan societies breaks down, because most people, unless particularly spiritually gifted,  have little reason to remain religious once the spell of primitive enchantment has been broken.

That's why the early Puritans insisted on a conversion experience to be a church member. If you were not so gifted, you were only going through the motions. But the problem for subsequent generations of Puritans was that fewer experienced such authentic conversion, and so maintaining such a theocratic society became extraordinarily difficult in a burgeoning, modern, commercial society. Too many other options were becoming available to those who were not particularly pious or gifted and who didn't feel particularly at home in these strait-laced New Jerusalems. In such a pluralizing social context, if there is no spiritual/secular dyad, then everything tends to collapse into the 'secular' by default. It's not hard to see how a loss of a sense of the "higher" as a human possibility follows for the the broader, un-gifted population. 

And it's not hard to see how a reversion to older, pre-Axial understandings of human flourishing develop as the norm for Christian societies who gradually lose any sense of the post-Axial challenge to aspire to a higher, transcendent Good, especially in Calvinist societies. For the Calvinist, God who is Good wants our good; he wants us to flourish, and we will flourish if we follow his commandments. We must live ordinary lives in the ordinary, daily, disenchanted world; we must be good householders, i.e., we must work hard, take care of our families, be responsible and productive.

If there is no "higher" to be achieved in this life except to live righteously in this sense, then human purposes become focused on flourishing in the ordinary sense--long life, prosperity, victory over one's enemies (mostly papists and other infidels). Taylor says that Weber, if not in every detail, was fundamentally right about his connecting the rise of capitalism with the Protestant work ethic. 

The Protestant model was still post-Axial, but more in the mode of ancient Israel, where the whole society had to live righteously in conformity with the Law. We can see how this attitude persists among the "theocrats" on the religious right in the U.S. today. They want to transform Washington into Jerusalem, or an updated Geneva. But we can see how the murky boundary between the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of the gospels leads to a kind of assimilation to, rather than contradiction of, the mores of a society whose idea of flourishing is 'consumption'. After a while the consumer capitalist impulse crowds out the Christian impulse, which is what we see today in much of what we call the evangelical Right.

The Catholic model, insofar as it maintains the tension in the spiritual/secular dyad, also maintains a tension between pre-Axial and post-Axial, between concerns about everyday flourishing in the world and the aspiration to be spiritually transformed. But while most Catholics, now as always, are more assimilated to pre-Axial concerns with flourishing than with spiritual transformation (growth in holiness), at least it's one place in a secular society where it is broadly revered as a possibility. (But less so with each generation.)

But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. The point for now is to understand that for the first thousand years of Christianity, if one was serious about pursuing a higher Christian spiritual life in the Latin West, one had to leave society--the secular world. Even if that society was nominally Christian, it was still largely enchanted and "superstitious" in its popular piety--more Celt or German pagan than Christian. And such nominal Christians concerned themselves primarily with how spiritual beings and forces--saints, relics, sacramentals, rituals like beating the bounds, etc., could be used to promote human flourishing in the pre-Axial sense.

A shift in which spiritual elites move toward reforming the 'secular' realm begins in the 11th Century--the Hildebrandine reforms, the Lateran Councils, the evangelical mission of the Dominican preachers, Franciscan mendicants, and the Waldensians, Wycliffe & the Lollards, Hus, etc., and all of that culminates in the Reformation in the 16th. The nature of this reform dynamic is arguably unique in the Latin West, and while it has led to the secularized society in which we now live, it's important to undestand how it was in its roots religiously motivated. But more about that in future posts. 

[This completes Part 1. Parts Two, Three, Four, etc., will follow in posts written over the next weeks discussing Reform and the Disciplinary Society, more on the Buffered and Porous Self, the Enlightenment and the Anthropocentric Turn, Deism and the Impersonal Order, more on the modern social imaginary and modern moral order, and other topics I have yet to consider.]

[Part 1 was revised to reduce wordiness and improve clarity 5/23/20]

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

Francis and the Conservatives

Conservative culture warriors are concerned that the church is selling out to secular culture and should more forcefully be a sign of contradiction to it, and I agree that the Church must always be such a sign of contradiction; it must always play a subversive role in its relationship to the world of princes and powers. But conservative Catholic culture warriors are disappointed in Francis because they want from him more confrontation with the secular culture, and for them that means confrontation on sexual issues. For them one's position on abortion, gay marriage, and divorce are litmus tests of orthodoxy--either think or behave correctly on these issues, or you're not really a Catholic.

I have a hard time understanding the obsession conservatives have with sex and why it has always been a marker for them about what is orthodox or not. It doesn't get that much treatment in the New Testament, and it could not be by any stretch of the imagination be seen as one of Jesus' primary concerns. Human sexuality along with a whole range of things in our experience of being fallen human beings needs to be transformed by grace, but it is not clear to me why sex is more important to conservatives than the way they use their money, or eat, or behave toward the poor and the prisoner. Why this obsession with sex? I suspect it has less to do with the spirit of the gospels and more to do with threats they feel to their tribal sense of identity. It's akin to the genital controversy in the early church concerning whether gentiles needed to be circumcised when they entered the church. The hard-line conservatives lost that one, and the Church didn't lose its identity--it expanded it. The same kind of challenge faces the church now.

The Church's essential role in the world right now is to be prophetic voice against very powerful forces in the world that seek to dehumanize us. There are lots of ways that sexual behavior is dehumanizing, and we see it all over. I've argued here that the Church's position on abortion only makes sense to non-Catholics if is presented as part of a larger spectrum of issues in a consumer society that dehumanizes us. There's a very powerful argument that can be made here that all but the most hardened secularists would be receptive to, but the public face of the pro-life movement is not broadly perceived as a defender of the deeply human; it is perceive, for good reason, as dominated by outraged Puritans on the warpath against heresy. This approach persuades no one, and it isn't very Christian, if by Christian we mean the spirit of mercy and understanding the suffuses the gospels. 

But that's why many conservatives tend not to "get" Francis. He's not an outraged puritan; his first priority is the first priority presented in the gospels, which is that the kingdom Jesus brought into a fallen world be born within the hearts of as many human beings as possible. When the rule of that kingdom takes root, it transforms the human soul and  makes the need for external rules secondary. The Church is not first and foremost a club you belong to and that you get kicked out of if you don't follow the rules.That is such a small, soul-shrivelled vision of what it is or could be. It is a place that points to the existence of this alternative regime and invites and encourages us to allow its rule to govern us.

Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and what that means for us is that insofar as we can say truly 'not me but Christ in me' that law is being fulfilled in us. It's not our adherence to the rules that matters so much as the degree that our hearts have been changed, and the sign of that is in our becoming more deeply human, more compassionate, more spirited, gentler, more vulnerable, and more fearless as truth tellers. But that truth telling, while it must be clear and firm, need not be strident and judgmental. 

In my experience, people who rely too much on the rules do so because they are fearful and lack practical wisdom. They have little common sense and a very weak instinct for what the decent thing to do is in a particular circumstance. They don't trust themselves, so they need to consult the rule book or authorities that they think are rules experts. They will often do or say terrible things because they think the rules permit it or even require it or some demagogue demands it. But the rules or the law have value in the sense of pointing to best practices, and the best practices have value only insofar as they provide a path for our becoming more deeply human. Our learning the rules benefits us like learning scales and chords benefits the aspiring musician, and it's useful to be taught them rather than to have to figure them out for yourself by trial and error. But they are not an end in themselves. They are tools to empower us to work more effectively and creatively in the world. 

That's the value of a living tradition: it passes on to us the value of what our ancestors have learned about what works and what doesn't so that we don't have to start from scratch. But the rules of the ancestors are historically and culturally circumscribed, and what's important is not the letter but the spirit or the wisdom that lies behind the rule, and as long as we work with that spirit, the rules can be changed and adapted to different circumstances. This might in certain circumstances look like caving in to secular society without it being that at all. But people who only focus on the rules and not the spirit that lies behind them find it very difficult to understand that. For them rules are rules. But that attitude toward rules makes idols of them.

So they are not an end in themselves. They have value only insofar as they point beyond themselves and increase our capacity for higher levels of human performance in the world, and for the Christian that means building bridges not walls, of trusting that grace is everywhere if only people would open their hearts to see it. Once rules become an impediment to that kind of work, they are not only useless, they are dangerous and lead to a dehumanizing spiritual emptiness, foremost among them the sanctimony of the religious zealot and the Pharisee. Zealotry is a parody of religious sincerity. It compensates by drawing from the lower instincts what it lacks from a higher inspiration by grace and love. A Pharisee is a technocrat of the spirit, and his condition is much worse. His is a cold, dead-soul state in which the he arrogantly believes himself superior by virtue of his expertise, his prodigious knowledge of the rules and of his perfect adherence to them. He is a spiritual Robespierre. 

Francis is a mensch. He's deeply human, and as such a model of the transformed heart about which I wrote above. That anybody could resent him or think that he is damaging the church says far more about such a person's hardness of heart than it says about his being faithful to the truths of the faith. Conservatives worry too much about the forms and not enough about the life that gave them their shape in the first place. They are more concerned about good order, than they are with the life of the spirit. We need the forms, but they are not the important thing; the shaping creative power that lies behind them is. Align yourself with that which lies behind the forms, and the forms will take care of themselves. 

More on the Pope's Visit

This is a reflection on the pope's address to Congress and his address at St. Patrick's Cathedral mainly directed to nuns and priests.

In the life of faith, as in any realm of human endeavor, there are prodigies, journeymen, and hacks. A hack is somebody who lives his life imitatively or derivatively, someone who adapts uncritically to ethos around him and tries to make his way as best he or she can by doing what seems acceptable or unacceptable by others. Hacks never speak from what they know themselves; they only quote authorities or the law or use some other source extrinsic source of validation.

It's not that the authorities are wrong, but they only understand the letter not the spirit of the laws or rules. And they are therefore more likely to game them for their own advantage, rather that submit to the deeper truth that is often expressed in them. The Pharisees as depicted in the New Testament were hacks in this sense. They are  the symbolic representatives of a spiritually empty judgmentalism I call whited-sepulcher syndrome and which is found always and everywhere among people who think of themselves as religiously superior in some way.

A journeyman in faith is most of us who struggle to live lives of genuine faith. We have experienced moments of transformative grace; we try to live as best we can oriented by what we have come to understand in the light of grace. We are the ordinary people you meet everyday who have a sense of common decency and common sense. We're the people who are often right but often wrong, but when we're wrong admit it and learn from it, and move on. We're the sinners who, like the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, when they met Jesus were capable of recognizing in him something the hacks were not. The difference between a hack and a journeyman is that the hack goes through the motions coldly without the fire kindled in the heart of each man or woman who has encountered, in any of a million ways, the deep suffusing presence left in the world by the risen Christ, aka, the Holy Spirit.

For every encounter, whether it is while alone in prayer, while taking a walk on 4th and Walnut, whether in reading a book, the bible or some other,  or being thrown in jail, participates archetypally in the encounter with the risen Christ the  disciples, those two nameless journeymen, had on the road to Emmaus. Like their encounter, our encounter with the risen Christ in not obvious. But if you're a journeyman sinner, as most of us are, you recognize in the encounter a giving of a great gift. "How our hearts burned within us", they said after the encounter. Only later does it occur to you what in fact you encountered.  I'm sure that was the experience of the woman at the well, and of so many sinners who encountered Jesus when he walked on the earth,  in one way or another, experienced that burning in the heart without understanding what it meant, and whether it wasjust a flicker, or whether a raging fire, that fire in the heart is the core experience of the life of faith. 

Prodigies may or may not be aware that they are prodigies. More often than not, they aren't aware. They are prodigies because the intensity of that fire is greater in them than it is in the rest of us, and it would be hard not to be aware of that, but at the same time we are told time and again by the saints that they see themselves as poor sinners, and I don't think that's false humility. The more you see yourself in the light cast by the fire of grace, the more aware you become of how much you lack, how far the distance between what you are now and that which you were created to be. The prodigies are prodigies by virtue of their awareness that they have more in common with  poor sinners and all the wretched of the earth, than they do with the residents of Olympus.  

So the prodigy knows something the rest of us don't, and because they radiate this fire, we recognize in them an authority that perhaps they don't feel themselves, and yet they speak because they must, and when they speak, there is a tone that draws you in, even if what's being said is an idea you've thought wrong or resisted. You hear even ideas you were familiar with in a way you never heard them before. There is fire in them. They take hold of you, and burn in you, and transform you. In his speech before congress he  pointed to prodigies of the faith whom we should learn from, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. (Lincoln, I think, is more for obstreperous politicians to learn from than for the rest of us.) Each of them were kindled by the fire of heaven, and each of them were prodigies because of the way so many people who encountered them were transformed by them. 

Unfortunately prodigies are rare, especially among the professional clergy. Most are journeymen, and alas too many are hacks, and too often the hacks rise to positions of authority and power in the Church. One of the signs of a hack is that he or she is stridently judgmental. Hacks think they have the truth in ways that others don't, but they don't know The Truth, none of us does. The best we can do is speak the truth as best we know it, and if there is grace in it, then it will be heard and will take hold in the heart of him or her who hears it. That's what is so wonderful about the way this pope speaks. He speaks the truth, very often an uncomfortable truth, in such a way that and in such a tone that it will take hold of more hearts than from listening to a thousand sanctimonious rants of clerical hacks. 

He'd be the last to admit it, but the pope is for these reasons a prodigy of faith. He asks for our prayers because he understands the importance of his task and the obstacles that lie before him. He knows that he can accomplish nothing by himself, that it is not he, but Christ in him who accomplishes anything that is good. While we are all of us vicars of Christ insofar as our actions are inspired by grace, the pope is the Vicar of Christ in a uniquely symbolic way as the the representative of all us in whose hearts Christ has taken up residence, no matter how cramped the accommodations he finds there. He is the Vicar of Christ in all of us.

So Pope Francis asks for our prayers so that he might represent that which is best in us as he confronts the enormity of those forces that seek to dehumanize us. He knows that he cannot do it by himself, but only with the support and the good will of a quorum of earth's humans, we journeymen in the world who in their encounter with this good man encounter not just him but the confluence of the world's good will. We empower him by our prayers to be in a special way someone who when people encounter him can say in truth, "Oh, how our hearts burned within us."

A Word on the Pope's Address to Congress

Maybe the sentiments of the woman who wanted to throw a shoe at him represent a larger proportion of those listening to his speech than you would otherwise be aware of,  but I for one was deeply moved by this speech. In part it was the incongruity of this man in Renaissance garb talking to a body that not too long ago would have had a quorum who thought of him as either the anti-Christ or some Machiavellian schemer promoting superstition to disguise his own dark power agenda. And he's a Jesuit, to boot. The Jesuits were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another for their sly, scheming ways. So if nothing else, I hope for many his speech broke the stereotypes associated with popes and Jesuits, but I'm sure there are many in a cynical place like D.C. who were left implacably entrenched in their prejudices. 

I've been reading around the web on liberal sites, and it's interesting how people seem to think that the pope can just say whatever his personal opinion is: How can a guy be so right about this and so wrong about that? When you're the pope you don't get to just say what you might personally think. There are 2000 years of thinking by people who thought culturally and historically circumscribed, were mostly thoughtful, decent people, if not prodigies of the spirit and mind. And so anything any pope says, even things that seem 'new', must have some continuity and consistency with the teaching and thinking that preceded it.

For him it's mostly a question of emphasis, of drawing from this 2000 year tradition of thinking and reflection and applying it to what the world--or what this particular audience--needs to hear now. In that respect this address to congress was close to flawless. 

Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis

Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says:

Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to church teaching around marriage right now are not at all like a springtime for Arianism, that they are in fact in essential continuity with past teaching, with the New Testament, etc. But this is my point: You have to make that case, which I would submit that Father O’Malley does not exactly do, and if you just invoke authority and docility without actually making it, you’re implicitly indicating that the Protestants were right about the nature of the Catholic position all along.

There’s a special irony to that possibility, because as I suggested in my last post, the question of divorce and remarriage is among the issues where the Catholic claim to a special authority, both contra Protestantism and in its own right, has historically been strongest, because it’s place where the binding force of tradition and ecclesiastical stewardship of the same have helped Catholicism hold a line that’s very clearly rooted in scriptural, indeed gospel authority … while in many Protestant communities, notwithstanding their official commitment to scripture’s primacy, that line has either been blurred more often or erased. Ross Douthat

I have thought for a long time that Catholic identity--and Christian identity in general--cannot be primarily located in its codes. Codes are for children, for people who haven't yet developed an awakened conscience. The grasping at Catholic identity as being rooted, for instance, in its proscription of divorce and remarriage is a form of idolatry and devolves quickly into a form of whited-sepulcher syndrome, a kind of legalistic extrinsicism that is tone deaf to the way human beings really live. 

I do in fact believe that what God has joined together that no man should put asunder, but I also believe that most twenty-somethings who are infatuated with one another do not qualify for making such a commitment, and for the church or any Christian to insist on it just because it was consecrated in a church ceremony is humanly stupid.

The Church would be wiser if it looked at marriage as simlar to the way that men in women in orders take their vows, in stages, with making a final commitment that has sacramental authority until after, say, ten years. In other words Catholics should be allowed to be legally married and divorced like everyone else, there should be a church ceremony in which (aspirational) promises are exchanged, but it should not be considered a "sacrament". There should be a second and perhaps even a third level of commitment after the passage of some time before any  marriage should not be sacramentally validated. We already acknowledge the need for something like this in renewal of vows ceremonies. 

Rigorists like Douthat would argue that that has not been the practice of the Church for centuries. But there's a lot that has been the practice of the church for centuries that has been shaped more by the role it plays in shaping social order than by the spirit of the gospels. Is there really anthing more spiritual in the proscription of divorce in the church's practice than the proscription against it ordered by the Roman emperor Augustus? 

I think the argument that I have with Douthat is that you have to find ways to affirm the deepest truths of Christian faith, which have level after level of depth without, but to do it in a way without making them into rigorously enforced rules. The faith, if it is lived at any depth, leads one to a deeper levels of rigor, but it's a rigor that has to be freely chosen; it can't be something that is demanded of people who have no idea what they are doing. And the vast majority of young people who get married could not possibly have any idea about what they are being asked to do. It's just not something that can be learned by reading a book or taking a class. It's something that only life can teach, and only life can present as an existential choice after some experience of it. 

The Hypertrophied Eye (encore)

Protestantism is the expression of faith that resulted from changes in consciousness effected by the spread of literacy after Gutenberg. Catholicism is the expression of a faith shaped by a consciousness formed in traditions and customs that have its roots in oral culture. A literate consciousness is one that hears the Word while reading alone. An oral culture hears the Word when it is read aloud and heard in the assembly in the context of a sacramental ritual--the mass--which became meaningless hocus pocus for the modern Protestant sensibility. I'm not talking here about the difference in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants, but about a very fundamental difference in the way each experiences and encounters the Word.

A spoken-word culture shapes minds that easily swim in the world of symbol and mythopoesis. The premodern ear-centered imagination is a far richer than the literal literate mind of moderns. Things change very dramatically when a culture tips toward literacy from orality. It's the difference between whether the ear or the eye is the main organ for processing information that comes to us from the world outside our minds. And this shift from orality to literate consciousness is central in understanding what caused the shift from medieval to modern consciousness. This is Marshall McLuhan's basic thesis, and it's an important one to understand if we're to grasp the significance of what is happening to us at this moment as once again consciousness is being changed by our continuous exposure to electronic media.

There are so many things that can be said about this, but the most important for my purposes here is the way these processes require the hypertrophied eye. Did you ever think that what we mean by doing science is essentially thinking only about what we can see and that the scientific revolution was founded on the development of instruments like the telescope and later the microscope that helped us to see more, and that knowing eventually became equated with seeing. In contrast, knowing in a textless world came from what people heard, from the poets and storytellers, which meant that human 'knowing' by people not less intelligent than us was more metaphorical and analogical. The experience of knowing was different because it was done in very different mode of consciousness than the one we now take for granted as universal.

In the scientific age, the age of seeing, everything that was invisible was thought to be unreal—or merely a matter of subjective opinion. But the effect of this new habit of thought was to render a whole dimension of reality as unreal subjective fantasy even though for preliterates this dimension of reality was as objective as the chair upon which I’m sitting. In other words the invisible dimension of reality was pushed into unconsciousness, and as the mind individuated during the modern era, we came to understand the “unconscious” as a personal, subjective realm rather than as a transpersonal collective one. The "unconscious" means for almost everyone today our individualized personal reservoir from which arise personal thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, and we project back our own experience into the minds of the primitive preliterates as having thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the way we have them. Therefore, moderns think, the mythologies they created are the same thing as moderns writing science fiction--a species of imaginative speculation.

But what has become unconscious for us was conscious, or semi-conscious, for them. They lived in a world that was permeated by the gods. The gods were not in here locked in our individual unconscious minds, but out there animating a world shimmering with their presence. We have just come to think that the poor benighted fools were projecting intrapsychic unconscious content onto the blank screen that was the world around them. They weren't. This is simply the prejudice of a shriveled kind of mind that knows only with its eyes and brain.

Nature, for moderns, became the realm of "common sense,” but it has never been other than a cognitive consensus based on sharing in the heritage of alphabetic literacy. The world became “Newtonized” as mystics like William Blake lamented. The scientific process cast aside traditional lore and authority as steeped in superstition and the irrational, and substituted a new understanding of objectivity which required the freezing of reality by making most of it irrational, i.e., opaque to reason, except its physical husk. The world literate moderns came to live in is more like one of those awkward looking exhibits at local Natural History Museum than the living, buzzing, spiritually animated and soulful world of preliterates. And it is this experience of the world that is at the heart of our allienation and of our longing for something more.

Our cognitive capacities to understand more deeply come from listening and speaking. “Out of the depths I cry out unto you, O Lord.” What depths is the Psalmist speaking of? Music and the spoken word correctly heard engender feeling states that are the precondition for deeper modes of cognition. Music is very important here, and the trivialization of music is linked to our loss of a sense of the sacred and of the "moods" or "modes" of consciousness needed for extraordinary cognitive states. And so insofar as our acoustic sense has atrophied, so has our capacity for cognitive depth. What passes for deep thinking is just complex thinking, which comes from complex seeing, analytical seeing, decontextualized seeing, abstract seeing.

So I would argue, then, that Marshall McLuhan was one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century. For him understanding the shift from orality to literacy was central to his understanding about how the modern mind is programmed, and his ideas about how the mind is being even now reprogrammed by electronic media is a major driver that is bringing us into a post-modern, post-literate world.

This is really the meaning behind McLuhan's idea of how society is becoming tribal. He didn't mean by this Balkanized or fragmented; 'tribal' was a positive word for him, and he didn't mean it as a regressive movement. He meant it as a way of describing a social connectedness that was lost during the modern era. The point bears repeating: post-literate doesn't mean a regression to preliterate, as it is commonly supposed. But reading and the eye will no longer remain virtually the exclusive means through which we obtain and process information. The goal is to return to a broader, more balanced cognitive capacity that will allow for a more ready acceptance of objective realities that are “unseen.”

McLuhan's point is that the human being in becoming literate paid a price by throwing off what had been a more balanced ratio among the senses. The hypertrophied visual man lives in a kind of estrangement from the world around him in a way that was not the experience of the preliterate, acoustic man. Modernity and its eye centeredness created the conditions for the possibility of individualism and critical reflection, but it also led to the gradual disenchantment of the world which became reified, Hamlet's sterile promontory, a thing over against which we become aware of our own subjectivity, but which in itself lost its numinous character. Yes, we developed a capacity to see with our physical eyes more accurately—but we see only the surfaces of things, and as a result our ability to cognize a richer kind of multidimensional reality has severely atrophied.

Electronic media is changing us profoundly, but these changes are gradual just as the shift from oral to literate did not change humans very quickly. Literates until recently lived in a world in which most people were still illiterate, and the oral world still flourished in the rural areas, and the oral culture preserved there was an endless source of material and inspiration for the literate artists of the last two or three centuries. But as literacy has become almost universal and along with that the rural world withers as it technologizes, another way has to be found to break out of the literate straitjacket so many have come to assume is the sole basis for our civilized life.

I feel very ambivalently about technolgoical civilization, because it's not at all clear that the changes that come are an unambiguous good. So the question here, as elsewhere, is who's in the driver's seat--the serpent or the dove? (Matt 10.16) If it's the serpent, we're likely to evolve into a race of cyborgs. But if the dove is driving or at least influences the direction evolution will be taking in the future, something else is possible.

And so if there is one point I hope I’ve made so far it's that being literate is not the goal of the evolution of consciousness; it’s just a stage. And whatever anxiety we may understandably feel about the unknown terrain to be navigated ahead, we need to trust that we will have the resources to find our way. These technologies cannot be feared, they must be mastered and used for transformative purposes. And the one rudimentary resource we have to achieve that now at this point is conscience--Protestantism's bequeathal to the future, which is the way the serpent part of us searches out and listens for the prompting of the dove part.

 

Francis as the Vatican's Gorbachev? (Updated)

Oh, I forgot. John 23rd was. The Vatican since then has been trying futilely to get back to the status quo ante, but the "Vatican Security System" has been in a slo-mo implosion mode since then. Things move a little more slowly in such ancient institutions. Anyway, this paragraph struck me in an article in today's NYT about Pope Francis's new appointments:

Vatican experts also noted that Francis favored men who had worked long years as priests before becoming bishops, and who had shown the sort of merciful pastoral style he advocates. And the Vatican also highlighted the selection of Archbishop Loris Francesco Capovilla as an emeritus cardinal. He is 98, and served as the secretary for Pope John XXIII, who will be canonized by Francis in April during the continuing commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

I don't want to oversell what Francis is doing, but he does seem to be doing some structurally substantive things as well as some stylistic things. He does seem to "get it", if by getting it we mean that the real church is on the local level, and the people who play management roles are there to serve the work that goes on at the local level. In order to do that you need to appoint bishops and cardinals who have had long careers working in parishes on the front lines. And you need to get people who are not going to be Yes men, empty cassocks, who will simply do as they are told.

For someone who is old enough to have lived through the Vatican II reforms and then to witness the retrenchment that followed it, I have been pessimistic that anything could be done by a single personality to take down the Vatican Security System. For the last several hundred years it has operated as a corrupt little city state, and there are too many vested interests that like it that way for some interloper to come in and change things. But I think there come moments in the history of all institutions when they are no longer viable and must either collapse from their own dead weight (as the Soviet Union did) or grow something new from within, which like the new chick bursts the shell of the brittle old thing when the time is ripe. John XXIII started the process, and maybe Francis is going to finish it.

Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea whether we are entering such a time for the Roman Church, and I'm sure many readers here could care less one way or the other.  But let me explain why it matters to me. I have often enough explained my reasons for remaining a practicing Catholic despite how difficult it has been to take the institution seriously. In the last ten years I've been holding on by my fingernails. But I have this belief, which might be naive, but it's that the pre-Reformation Churches provide a part of the essential infrastructure for a cultural rebirth.

They have played, often rather clumsily, an essential role as a sign of contradiction to the materialist/rationalistic frame that has shaped optimistic modernity, and pessimistic postmodernity (so far). The core element in this being a sign of contradiction is their  insistence on the fundamentally sacramental and multidimensional nature of reality. The post-Reformation churches, particularly those in the Calvinist wing, tip their hat to that reality insofar as the scriptures point to it continuously, but their worldview is otherwise thoroughly modern and rationalistic. Faith is not a head trip.

And while these churches have been in a defensive mode and in such a posture have not introduced anything new of any broad cultural import in over 500 years, I think of them as like fallow fields, rich in nutrients from having been rested, and as such providing fertile ground for the emergence of something new, something that can have broad cultural import.

It will bear some resemblance to the old, but will be  different, the way Aquinas is like Aristotle or Bonaventure like Plato. But I don't mean this as something new in purely the intellectual sense, but more in an experiential sense. New thinking has to come out of new experience broadly shared. This will be something that comes not top down, but from the bottom up, and with the right people in place in the hierarchy, people who 'get it', people who are themselves looking for it and doing what they can to nourish and cultivate it, it might have a chance of taking root, flowering, and fruiting.

UPDATE: Pope Removes Cardinals in Shakeup of Vatican Bank. Cleansing the temple? It looks like it. I hope this guy doesn't get himself killed. There is a very interesting story unfolding here. It's time to start paying attention. This from the National Catholic Reporter:

Most recently, we have from Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, a detailed account of the pope's conversation in November with leaders of men's religious orders gathered in Rome. This appears to be another important segment of a corner of the puzzle that, while perhaps not as apparent as other elements, is fundamental to the rest. From the start, the pope has been slowly dismantling that portion of the clerical culture that has led to destructive secrecy, corruption and lack of accountability. . . .

The headlines his comments generated were not inappropriate. After all, this was the pope warning that "formation is a work of art, not a police action" and that the result should not be the creation of "little monsters." How many of us sitting in the pews recognize those "little monsters" or have had our parishes disrupted by priests "who have hearts that are as sour as vinegar"?

That would be tough talk for any group to hear, but Francis also went on at length talking about the need for tenderness, for forgiveness. He made the distinction between sin and corruption. "Sinners are accepted [into religious life], but not people who are corrupt."

He's a mensch who has entered a den dominated for so long by moral midgets, but don't underestimate the resentment of the midgets and their power to push back.