The Idol of the Enlightenment

The Case for Christian Schools part 10

Twilight of the Icons

The way we commend ourselves to every human being with a conscience is by stating the truth openly in the sight of God. If our gospel does not penetrate the veil, then the veil is on those who are not on the way to salvation; the unbelievers whose minds the god of this world has blinded, to stop them seeing the light shed by the Good News of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

2 Corinthians 3

How did we arrive after 3000 years of collective tradition, the cathedral-like edifice of the icon of the Cross, with foundations in ancient Middle Eastern and Greek philosophy, to a place where we seem now to be standing in its rubble as isolated individuals, looking forlornly at broken bosses and finials we are no longer equipped to understand? How did the iconic theology fall out of fashion, and what happened next?

We will have to go back to Aquinas to find out. For him, the fullest revelation of divine truth would be found in Christ, incarnate and crucified, yielding himself for the sake of world in self-giving sacrificial love: God revealed as absolute self-gift, life lived entirely for others. So, we could call the Cross the icon par excellence, because it draws the gaze into a divine reality not as some isolated and other “being,” but as fundamentally and essentially consisting in a relationship of self-gift to others.

Ironic, then, that it should be Aquinas who set in motion the decline of this iconic theology which he had inherited. Dionysius had been highly wary of equating God with being. However carefully Aquinas dealt with this caution, by reprioritising God’s highest name as Being over Good, he ended up giving higher prominence than ever before in Christian theology to a philosophical, metaphysical concept. Unfortunately, before long, Being itself would become an idol, a concept used to contain, tame and exclude God, rather than an icon of the participation of creation in the creative Good.

It was Duns Scotus, a Franciscan friar and late contemporary of Aquinas, who made the first step (his name, rather unfairly, lent itself to the conical “dunce” cap of the Victorian classroom imbecile). Aquinas was right to describe God as Being, Scotus thought, but quite wrong to say that created being is only analogous to divine Being. If the word “being” is to have any meaning, then it must mean exactly the same of God as it does of us. In technical terms, Scotus rejected analogy in favour of “univocity.” While Scotus himself earned the title of “Subtle Doctor,” his thought would have less subtle implications in time to come. If “Being” is an overarching category which includes both God and creation, then God is only a being among others: the supreme being, certainly, but still, in the end, a being. “Our God,” as the borderline heretical children’s song has it, “is a great big God.”

With this move, instead of created beings participating iconically in the higher divine Being, we are left instead with one supreme being among a multiplicity of other lesser beings – and thus, other than them, in alterity and opposition to them. The implications of this took centuries to unfold, and they remain with us today.

First, if creation does not participate in the creator, then nothing of the creator can necessarily be perceived through the creation. At best, we might see traces of the creator’s handiwork like an artist’s brushstrokes. That said, the Creator may have decided to make something so utterly inconsistent with his own nature that it says nothing of him at all! Ultimately, this means that we can only know anything at all of the supreme being by that being’s self-revelation.

Second, revelation and indeed the act of creation itself are acts purely of the supreme being’s will. Rather than understanding both creation and revelation as iconic unfoldings of the divine nature, they are arbitrary acts which we cannot hope to understand unless the supreme being wants us to. There is therefore no natural law or natural theology. Creatures are not participants in the creative order of the divine mind, as Platonists like Dionysius supposed. Rather, the creatures’ separation from the creator is absolute, and their sole purpose is to obey his revealed dictats. This teaching became known as “voluntarism,” from the Latin word voluntas, meaning the will.

Already in late mediaeval theology, God as unfathomable ocean of Goodness and Being-beyond-being was starting to be replaced with a “god” idolatrously grasped as a supreme being, defined primarily in terms of absolute alterity and sovereign will — emphases which would unfold and emerge in different intensities over the several centuries leading to modernity. Expanding on the late mediaeval prioritisation of will over reason, the Protestant Reformation fixated on God’s sovereignty and the absolute primacy of his revealed will. Human reason was so utterly corrupted by the Fall that it could in no way participate in the mind of God. The mind of God, anyway, could in no way be discerned. Instead, there could only be submission of the lesser wills to the greatest. The divine will extended to the smashing of images and icons, since it was a gross error to assume that merely created things could in any way mediate the utterly transcendent divine. All theology of participation was eliminated. This had devastating effects on sacramental theology, leading at the most extreme cases to seeing sacraments as nothing more than bare symbols of what they were supposed to represent: a theology of “real absence.” How could, for example, bread and wine participate in the Body and Blood of Christ if we are down here and He, a separate being from us, is somewhere up there?

Having lost its role as custodian of metaphysical truth and spiritual participation, religion found its preserve increasingly limited to the moral sphere. Classic Protestant moralism understood right action as the discernment of and obedience to God’s will, and the Good simply as whatever God wills, regardless of what we might think about it. Likewise, something was considered beautiful not out of participation in divine beauty, but just because God willed that it was beautiful. And truth was not to be discerned in creation, but dictated to it.

In the Enlightenment, when the Scriptures were subjected to the critical scholarship as other historic texts, the basis of discerning this supreme being’s will came into question. From there, it was only a few steps to saying that God’s will cannot be known at all and could be safely ignored. God became, to paraphrase Napoleon, a hypothesis for which we have no further need.

And since the Good was now viewed merely as whatever the supremely powerful being wills, once that supremely powerful being is removed from the picture, that leaves what is good to the will of the next most powerful beings down the chain: us. The concept of what is good in itself starts to yield to the utilitarian concern of what is good for me, or you, or whoever can exercise the greatest dominance of will — and so, the crypto-curriculum, the idol of Western relativism, begins its infiltration.

Freedom Fries

"If there is no truth about man, man also has no freedom. Only the truth makes us free."  —Pope Benedict XVI

A gift from revolutionary France to a new revolutionary power, the Statue of Liberty is perhaps the US’s most iconic symbol. Yet, in 2003, the very word “French” was excised from American speech by government order because France refused to join the war on Iraq.

Emotions were high following the 11 September Al-Qaeda attack on New York in 2001, but in hindsight, many would now agree that France was right. Certainly, life is considerably more difficult for ordinary Iraqis than it was before the war, and especially for religious minorities such as Christians, who have been completely driven out of cities such as Mosul where they had lived for over 14 centuries.

The American dictat to change the name of French fries to “freedom fries” was petty and childish, but more importantly, it has proven to be entirely inaccurate. The western exercise of freedom has, in the long term, proven severely deleterious to the freedom of tens of thousands of Iraqis: for thousands, terminally so.

In western secular modernity, freedom is considered a basic fundamental human right, even at the expense of truth. So where did this shift of emphasis come from?

We have seen its origins in the late mediaeval displacement of the divine mind with the divine will. It escalates at the Reformation, when Luther suddenly breaks with the old Catholic order to seek out the new freedom of a wholly personal faith in Christ, one-to-one, without the need for the community of the Church. But it is in the age of the Enlightenment that the pursuit of freedom finally becomes the West’s overriding obsession.

In an essay called Truth and Freedom, Pope Benedict discerns two different currents of the Enlightenment.

The first he describes as the Anglo-Saxon model, oriented towards human rights and constitutional democracy as the means of providing true freedom. This he sees as a political settlement, opposed to the absolute power of the monarch or the state over individuals, but importantly, it is based on a transcendent reality. The idea of human rights and liberty depends on the truth that there is inherent value to life, and indeed to the world. It thereby assumes a natural, inherent orientation of reality towards goodness. This kind of secularism we might say depends on the iconic vision of reality that I have outlined so far.

The other current is that which Pope Benedict attributes to the Franco-Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). In his strand of Enlightenment thought, the natural human is a pure and free individual, essentially good, who is moulded and corrupted by the impositions of an artificially contrived “society,” which is then perceived as a barrier to be overcome, a restraint on the fundamentally good nature of the solitary individual.

Rousseau speculated that children were born as pure “blank slates,” which would only later be corrupted by social influences. Left to be free to their nature, humans would be gentle and innocent, could not help but love one another, would need no money, would have no rulers, would be in harmony with the rest of nature, would enjoy perfect health and would live naked, completely sexually unrestrained. It is only culture, and especially Christian culture, that has imposed the constraints on an otherwise good human nature and so leads to evil, suffering, inequality and injustice. Somewhere out in the wilds untouched by western civilisation, he thought, there must be a tribe of ‘noble savages’ who lived just like this.

Not only does Rousseau’s ideal of the naturally good human society not exist, anywhere, but he was utterly incapable of living it himself. He had five children and sent them all to orphanages. They were just another obstacle to his freedom, and why should he listen to “culture” dictating that he had any responsibility for their upbringing?

In one stroke, Rousseau invents “nature” as a category separate from “culture.” To be truly natural is to be spontaneous and utterly unfettered, in absolute freedom. Reason and all its contracts, including all morality, gender, sexuality, social expectation, are merely “cultural” and so can and should be cast off.

Rousseau’s thought led directly to the atrocities of the French Revolution. In its early days, the Revolution was closer to the “Anglo-Saxon” model, in its determination to establish liberty, equality and freedom through the overthrowing of a tyrannical and oppressive regime. The Rights of Man were declared in 1789, and the old order definitively thrown out.

But tellingly, a new secular calendar was instituted, dismissing the birth of Christ as an irrelevance and starting again at year 1. All Christian festivals were erased. Three years later, thousands of Christians were being slaughtered. When the Jacobins took control in 1793, they determined to eliminate the faith by violence, believing that science must replace religion. They instigated the Reign of Terror by the end of which 250,000 people were executed, including children. Extermination camps were set up in La Vendée, where people tried to cling to the faith. In a hideous foreshadowing of Rousseau’s later heirs, ovens were used, along with poison, mass shootings and drownings. John Marsh’s The Liberal Delusion gives greater detail, more sickening than I wish to recount here. Suffice it to cite some words from General Westermann, who was responsible for the atrocities in the Vendée, in his report back to his masters in Paris:

“There is no more Vendée. It died with its wives and its children by our free sabres… I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women… I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all… Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment.”

Later, in the 1870s, there was a new Jacobin-inspired uprising. Seventy clergy were slaughtered. Following the events from Russia, Dostoyevsky wrote, “It’s the same old Rousseau and the dream of recreating the world anew through reason and knowledge.” He could not know then that his own country would be party to worse atrocities still, and under the same philosophical inspiration. Marxism, too, claimed that it would usher in a new order of undreamt-of freedom for all.

The Jacobins devised their own catechism which maintained that “a child is like soft wax capable of receiving any imprint one wishes.” Chairman Mao justified brainwashing his people with the bon mot, “it is on a blank sheet of paper that the most beautiful poems are written.” Behind the French Revolution, Marxism and Nazism lies a common pedagogical methodology inherited directly from Rousseau. It is the idea of the child’s mind as a blank slate or empty vessel waiting to be filled with whatever adults want to fill it with.

The influence of Rousseau’s “blank slate” persists in the presuppositions of western secular modernity. It rests on his assertion that culture is distinct from nature, and that even this nature has no metaphysical grounding in any transcendent order. Goodness, truth and beauty are “just” cultural constructs defined at will, with no reality in nature.

Yet the separation of nature from culture is alien to any known society on earth. We know now that not only humans but animals have societies, through observing the behaviour of species ranging from monkeys to elephants and dolphins, or even ants. We would never dream of saying that animal cultures are somehow distinct from their nature. Animals are cultural by nature: even social by nature. Only humans, insist the heirs of Rousseau, are different. And so, society becomes just an imposition, a bind on my freedom. We write things off as being ‘only’ social constructs: gender, marriage and social hierarchy among them. They are not part of our nature, which in the end is subject to determination only by the gloriously emancipated, unfettered, isolated individual will.

The deficiency of Rousseau’s thought, and so ultimately of ours, is born of a deficient understanding of God. Heir to the voluntarist assumptions that began with Duns Scotus, Rousseau understood God primarily in terms of the exercise of power by his own free will. Hence, to be godlike for Rousseau meant to exercise untrammelled will oneself. What Rousseau wanted, as moderns want, was to be a god himself. As Pope Benedict puts it in Truth and Freedom, the aim “of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, whose freedom is not restricted by that of another.”

As we saw in our discussion of Duns Scotus, to understand God primarily in terms of will and power is to make God just one agent among many: in other words, to make God merely a god. This effectively makes “God” just a superior and more powerful version of ourselves, making us humans a pagan polytheistic pantheon of gods in our own right. Eliminate the “great big God” of the popular heretical children’s hymn, and we are free to pursue our own individual agendas.

But this notion of God is nothing like the God revealed in earlier Christian tradition. Fundamentally, that God is trinitarian. The divinity in which we participate as iconic image-bearers is not some utterly alien autarch in the sky, but is by nature three persons in union: God is at heart communal, and in sharing his image, we are fundamentally and naturally social, communally-oriented creatures. Christ in his Incarnation and Crucifixion reveals the image of a God who is instrinsically oriented towards the Other, not imprisoned in an isolated selfhood.

Human freedom rests not in our abilities to conquer and destroy one another, but to love another. This is demonstrably true, in that our very existence depends on other people. Firstly, on our mothers and fathers, without whom we would not exist at all. But then, for our food, shelter, sustenance, security, even our language and ability to think, we rely on others as they rely on us. Biologically and socially, we are interdependent beings naturally ordered towards social harmony.

Only this truth makes us free. History shows that every time we deny that there is a real and lasting goodness to which humans are naturally oriented, every time we attempt to reset all social norms to zero, every time we try to establish our own utopia, freedom truly fries.

The Idol’s Janus Faces

How often does our teaching imply that the people of the past were less advanced and clever than we are? After all, we now have electric lighting and televisions. Never mind that most of us have no idea how these things work, and that even a monkey could be taught to press the buttons to turn them on.

Progress is perhaps the most enduring myth propagated in western schools today: namely, the notion that we can simply take it as read that the past was inferior, and we are moving inexorably towards a better future.

An important component of this myth is the notion that because religious observance is declining in the more technologically advanced countries of western Europe and America, this must be a sign of the inferiority of religious belief. Implicit in this belief is the assumption that religious decline has happened naturally, as an inevitable matter of course, rather than being engineered socially. It plays into Rousseau’s narrative of autonomy and individuation, and the deeper myth that materialism (by which I mean the philosophical rejection of any nonmaterial reality) is a strictly neutral viewpoint from which all others can be objectively judged.

I have already sketched out the internal contradiction of this problematic belief, namely making relativism itself an absolute and arbitrary truth-claim. I have also traced a brief trajectory of western thought towards this point, and sketched out the development of relativism, showing that far from being inevitable or neutral, stems from particular problems in the very specific tradition of western medieval Christian theology.

The myth of progress suffers from similar problems. Like the myth of relativistic neutrality, the myth of progress also stems from a particular western European tradition, and in particular from the thought of Hegel. He insisted that human development follows a trajectory from primitive Eastern thought  towards the giddy heights of modern western superiority. Even now, the very western liberal commentators who berate traditional world views for their intolerance tend also to maintain that they are the true defenders of diversity and respect for minority positions.

The reality is that just as western Christians imposed a worldview on foreign nations, so western liberals to seek to do the same. Attitudes towards Christian Africa are instructive. Once upon a time the European berated the African for engaging in homosexual practices: nowadays, the European berates the African for condemning homosexuality, and is affronted that the African no longer obeys. Regardless of one’s position on the issue itself, the hubristic assumption of inherent western superiority is highly problematic. Belittling those whom one wishes to persuade and writing them off as primitive bigots is unlikely to win hearts and minds, as the bellicose attitude of the West towards Islamic countries also amply testifies.

Apart from a barely concealed racism, the myth of progress also depends on a false narrative about the relationship between science and religion. Plenty has been written about this, and in particular the two supposedly seismic discoveries of Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang.

The theory of the Big Bang was formulated first by a Jesuit priest and astronomer, Fr George Lemaître. It was not Christian theologians but scientists who were sceptical. Contrary to the revelations of all three Abrahamic religions, scientific consensus maintained that the universe had always existed; that it had no beginning and would have no end. Lemaître’s peers thought that his idea of the cosmos exploding from a singularity sounded too much like the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing. They accused him of mixing theology into his science. “Big Bang” was the derogative phrase sceptical scientists coined to dismiss Lemaître’s theory. Yet, within years, Hubble’s telescope provided overwhelming evidence that the Big Bang was theory was right.

As for Darwin’s evolutionary theory, suffice it to say here that the majority of scientists who accepted Darwin’s findings were themselves practising and devout Christians.  If you want to look into the details, you could try the eminently readable John Haught’s  Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life. Here, I want to expose the misleading narrative that religion until Darwinism was “fundamentalist,” and that his science has in some way liberated humanity from superstitious error. In reality, fundamentalism and relativism are really two sides of one equally devalued coin.

If fundamentalism is taken to mean a literal reading of the Bible as inerrant history, then this was certainly not the position which most Christians held in the time of Darwin, nor is it is the position they hold today. It originated in early twentieth century America, and for better reasons than today’s cultured despisers of religion might think: as a reaction to the bad science of social Darwinism.

Despite the efforts of some of his later disciples, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne among them, Darwin himself had not intended his evolutionary theory to become the sole hermeneutic lens for understanding reality. He certainly had not expected it to offer an ideal model for human society. “Survival of the fittest” was not intended as a programme for social engineering.

Yet it did not take long for scientists to establish, through techniques respected in their day but now debunked, the evolutionary superiority of some people over others. Notably, in the United States, the scientific orthodoxy of the day led to the stratification of different races. Measurements of the cranium and, later, highly culturally specific IQ tests were applied to show the evolutionary superiority of the “white” over the darker skinned peoples. So scientific reason was applied to promote slavery and empire.

Although these scientific theories have now been superseded by later evidence, at the time, they were highly influential. Christian fundamentalism was a horrified response to a scientific assault on human dignity completely at odds with the notion of all people being made equally in the image of God. Presented with the apparently incontestable weight of scientific “proof,” these Christians decided that all they could do was discard it. Taking to its extreme the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, the idea that Scripture alone is necessary for salvation, they declared that the Bible was verbally inerrant and that any knowledge which did not conform to it was simply false. They fought one absolute with another. Christianity was reduced to biblicism, science to scientism: the ideas that the Bible or science provide the sole means to truth. 

But it didn’t work. The fundamentalist defence did not stand up to the rationalist onslaught. Well into the middle of the twentieth century, evolutionary theory was still being used to justify the elimination of genetic deficiencies from the human race. The Nazis are the obvious example, but moderate left wing intellectual organisations such as the Fabians firmly supported the practice of eugenics to abort children with disabilities and sterilise their parents. Marie Stopes, who founded the UK’s leading provider of abortions which bears her name, was an anti-Semite and admirer of Hitler who wished to create a super-race and disowned her son for marrying a short-sighted woman. In the UK, foetuses with Down’s Syndrome are routinely terminated. In poorer parts of the world, it is girls. Both are deemed too much of a burden to their families and to society.

Both scientism and biblical fundamentalism rely on the idea of an absolute and unchallengeable authority behind them. On this shallow foundation, each builds its own huge, casuistical edifice through the exercise of reason divorced from any connection to transcendent goodness or truth. Each forges its own truth by sheer strength of will. In this, both scientism and fundamentalism are heirs to the philosophical heritage of Scotus, the Reformers and the Enlightenment.

As an aside, we might note that Quranic fundamentalism is just as much a late-nineteenth century phenomenon as Protestant biblical fundamentalism and scientism. The western pursuit of empire which had once been waged under the banner of Christianity was now flying the flag of scientific and genetic superiority instead. Western generals and diplomats began dividing up tribal Arab lands and imposing the obviously “superior” western model of the nation state, literally drawing the lines on the map. This set up the conflict between secularist and theocratic movements which still devastates the region to this day, and has made religious freedoms far more fragile than they were a hundred years ago. So much for progress there.

It is not belief in God, but belief in the power of science and the exercise of the human will which has led to the devastating ideologies of fascism and Communism, which has reduced people to mere accessories of technological and economic advancement, which has pushed religion towards extremism, and which has caused the greatest wars of human history. It comes down to a displacement of transcendent reality in favour of the absolute dominion of the human will.

This displacement is also a contributing cause to the environmental catastrophe that we are facing today. For if humans are in sole charge of the world, as the most highly evolved species, then it stands to reason that the world is here purely for our use and our taking.

Some have argued that the biblical account of reality is to blame here. In Genesis, the creation narrative, God gives humankind “dominion” over the creatures of the world and commands them to “subdue” it (Genesis 1:26-28). Environmentalist James Lovelock considers the idea “that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the earth … the most hubristic ever.” And certainly, in the Enlightenment period, Christian thinkers such as the jurist Matthew Hale understood Genesis as saying that the world “needs” human intervention to tame and order it.

A closer and more contextual reading of the Genesis passage gives a different picture. Cambridge biblical scholar Richard Bauckham’s book, Bible and Ecology, shows that within the wider context of the Old Testament, “dominion” does not mean superiority: rather, humans are formed from the earth and share the same “life breath” as all other creatures. The divine purpose for us is expressed in Genesis 2:15 as to preserve or maintain the world, not to exploit it; and the Hebrew word translated as “subdue” elsewhere in the Bible means to till the land. Nor, when the world is referred to in Genesis, does this even mean the entire world: a concept quite alien to its 5th-century BC authors!

Bauckham also points out that at this stage in the Genesis story, there is to be no killing of animals even for meat. That only happens after the Fall, where humanity takes the “apple” of divine freedom into its own hands and starts using it for our own ends. The point of the Genesis narrative is that humanity may enhance creation, but we are incapable of improving it. We are meant to rule on God’s behalf, not in God’s place. 

There is a key word missing in our analysis so far. We have taken the words “dominion” and “subdue” from Genesis 1:26-28 without looking at the vital words which proceed them. God begins by saying, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”

I hope that by now, the words “image” and “likeness” are starting to ring a bell. First of all, in the Greek version of Genesis which would have been familiar to Jesus and his followers, the word “image” is eikon, or “icon.” Humanity is made to bear the image of God, to mediate God into the created order.

And note, secondly, the interesting pronoun. God does not say, “let me” make humankind, but “let us” make humankind after our own image. God speaks in the plural. Christian theologians have traditionally understood this as representative of God’s Trinitarian nature. An authentic Christian understanding of human nature is that it is, like, God’s own nature, fundamentally communal. We exist not in the pure, unadulterated autonomy of Descartes or Rousseau, but in relationship to one another and to the rest of the world. The ecological and social implications of this traditional Christian understanding of reality are vast, but they have been obscured by the individualism of post-mediaeval western thought. The implications, as I have already illustrated, are profound: not just for westerners, but for all of humanity, and even for the plants and animals of the world.

We have a duty in Christian schools to lead the people in our care back to a properly iconic view of reality, including the reality of the human person. To do this, we will need to prune our curriculum from the errors and stop perpetuating the damaging myth that in overthrowing God, western society is leading the world in a constant march of progress towards emancipation from primitive world views. The catastrophe of the twentieth century tells a different story. That of the twenty-first is still unfolding.

In an age where inclusivity is valued and promoted, we need to show that the iconic view of reality is, in fact, far more inclusive than its secular rival. Secularism sets itself up as the sole arbiter of truth and seeks to impose the image of the modern western mind upon the entire globe, and in doing so is ultimately exclusive and divisive.

For centuries before modernity, Platonic thought provided a shared basis on which pagans, Christians, Jews, Muslims and others besides could engage seriously with one another’s ideas and, of course, with scientific knowledge. Christian schools can offer people of other faiths or none a kind of intellectual hospitality far more communal and inviting than the mere secular privatisation of belief can afford.