| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Voice of Truth" |
| Date: |
14 Oct 2004 05:28:24 PM |
| Object: |
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
PETER KREEFT
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We all know what Christianity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of modernity. In this essay I shall try to turn the truth
tables and see what modernity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of Christianity.
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My point of view is what C. S. Lewis called "mere Christianity." "Mere
Christianity" means not "little Christianity" but "big Christianity":
full, Biblical, apostolic, traditional, orthodox Christianity.
I shall be using many of Lewis' ideas in this essay: some explicitly,
some implicitly. But this is not a scholarly essay about Lewis but an
amateur essay using Lewis (and others) to think about the fate of "the
permanent things" in the modern world. (I'm sure Lewis would much
prefer his readers to think with him rather than about him; to look
along with him rather that at him (to use his own very useful
distinction, from the essay "Meditation in a Toolshed.")
We know what Christianity looks like when viewed from the standpoint
of modernity because we are bombarded with this. The media moguls, the
opinion-molders and real educators of our society, are the most
aggressively anti-Christian propaganda elite since the Nazis. Can you
remember a single movie in the last twenty years in which some or all
of the Christian clergymen were not hypocrites? Talk about a classic
case of projection! (If you think that dig is too dirty, read Paul
Johnson's book Intellectuals. Someone sagely said that the title
should have been Hypocrites.)
But what does modernity look like from the viewpoint of Christianity?
Essentially, a gallows on which "the permanent things" are lynched
without a trial; an altar, or a slaughterhouse in which "the permanent
things" are sacrificed to the dark gods of Baal and Ashtaroth and
Moloch: power and greed and lust.
Our world was aptly described by Arthur Koesteler's paradoxical and
prophetic title, "Darkness at Noon." A similar title by Martin Buber,
"Eclipse of God," makes the same point by a similar astronomical
image: that we are now living in the real Dark Ages, as we approach
the end of that century which a famous religious journal named itself
after, with incredible naiveté and false prophecy: "The Christian
Century!" If there is any title we can be certain the history books of
the future will never use for our century, it is that one. Much more
likely is Franky Schaeffer's suggestion, "The Century of Genocide."
Of all twentieth century inventions, that one is the one that has most
drastically affected the most lives. We have so far witnessed five
major holocausts in this century, and along with every "civilized"
nation in the Western world except Ireland, we are now participating
in the sixth and largest one of all, which is also the only one that
shows no signs of ending, as the other five did. What the Turks did to
the Armenians, Hitler to the Jews, Stalin and Mao to their political
enemies, and Pol Pot to one third of all his nation's people, our
present femininity-haters who are incredibly misnamed "radical
feminists" and their allies are still doing to the most tiny,
innocent, and defenceless of all classes of human beings, unborn
babies.
Mother Teresa said, with the simplicity of a peasant, "When a mother
can kill her own child, what is left of the West to save?"
(Incredibly, Time magazine printed that statement. Perhaps there is
some hope after all.)
God asked a rhetorical question, in scripture: "Can a mother forsake
the fruit of her womb? Even if she could, I could not forsake you,
says the Lord your God." The rhetorical question was meant to put
forth an unthinkable absurdity. Yet millions of mothers today perform
that unthinkable absurdity, and many more millions, mostly men, think
approvingly of that unthinkable work of Moloch.
Doubtless, most of the twenty million mothers who have aborted their
babies since our Supreme Court of justice declared this injustice just
were themselves victims of propaganda pressures and cultural
conditioning, "more sinned against than sinning." That, however, makes
things worse, not better: it implicates the whole culture in the
double deed of destroying undeveloped bodies and undeveloped
consciences.
If the soul is more precious than the body, the latter death is worse
than the former. The soul of Western civilization is dying; that is
the essence of our tragedy. When its body follows, as it must, we will
see the civilizational pus ooze, but that pus is already there,
festering inside. The barbarians are already within the gates, writing
the textbooks, newspapers, TV shows, movies, and music.
Is this going to be another one of those interminable essays on how to
prevent the wreck of Western civilization? No. For as Whittaker
Chambers wrote, "It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of
Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within."
Do I come to you then as a prophet of doom? No. I disavow both
mantles, both prophet and doom. Perhaps there is still time to
intercede for the secular city as Abraham interceded for Sodom. We do
not know how much time we have left. But we do know this: if God
spares New York, He will owe an apology to Sodom.
Avery Dulles has mapped out a useful chart of four possible
contemporary Christian attitudes toward our secular society, in a kind
of logical square of opposition. He calls the four options
Traditionalism, Neo-conservatism, Liberalism, and Radicalism.
Traditionalism believes in the Church but not the State, i.e., not the
present state of society. It is counter-cultural. Neo-conservatism
(e.g., Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak) believes in both the
Church and the American state. Liberalism believes in Americanism but
not in the Church, i.e., not traditional Christianity. And Radicalism
says, "A plague on both your houses."
I am a Traditionalist, as was C. S. Lewis. But I want to interject a
word of caution to my fellow Traditionalists. It is the fear that
Traditionalists run the same kind of risk in idealizing the past as
both Neo-conservatives and Liberals (what strange bedfellows!) run in
looking benignly at the present and the future. Looking back is a
posture that has been known to be very dangerous to one's health,
especially if one is on a salt-free diet: remember Lot's wife.
So let's look to the future. Is it not time to be optimistic now that
the Iron Curtain has fallen with an iron thud? To answer this
question, let us ask two other questions, one about us and one about
"them."
The one about us is: were we more moved by the fear of God or the fear
of Gorbachev? Were we wrestling against principalities and powers in
the Kremlin or in Hell? Do we understand Solzhenitsyn's line about the
border between Good and Evil running not between nations but down the
middle of our own souls?
And the question about "them" is: What kind of freedom was uppermost
in the minds of most of the masses who poured through the newly opened
Berlin Wall? Was it spiritual freedom, or even intellectual freedom?
Did they, like the wise men from the East of old, come West seeking
Christ? Or condoms? Did they pour into churches? Or porno shops? What
excited them about the West? Did they buy Bibles or toilet paper? What
freedom was legislated in Romania as soon as it had killed its
dictator, who was guilty of enormous crimes? It was the freedom to
kill those who are guilty of no crime at all except being in the way
of someone who was bigger and already born.
So let's look to the real battle, not to the fake one. Now that that
silly little temporary distraction called Communism is dead or dying
everywhere from Managua to Moscow — everywhere except Cambridge
and Columbia — we can get back to the battle that should have
been bothering Traditionalists all along much more than the battle
against the Eastern barbarianism without, namely the Western
barbarianism within. The year 1984 has come and gone with few signs of
Orwell's 1984 looming on our horizon, but Huxley's Brave New World
looks like a more accurate prophecy every year. So let us be brave and
look at our new world; at the internal slippery slope we've been
sliding down, now that the external pseudo-threat of Communism has
lost its power to distract our attention.
We're all familiar with the statistics on violent crime, rape, child
abuse, drugs, and similar American leisure activities. We know that
half of all marriages commit suicide, i.e. divorce. We can read
headlines well enough to be totally cynical about businessmen and
politicians. Surveys tell us this is the first generation in American
history whose children are not better educated than their parents, but
worse. They tell us that if teenagers don't have sex, they must be
ugly, isolated or Fundamentalists. Half of all urban teenagers get
pregnant, and half of them have abortions. A brave new world indeed.
I don't think we need to specify any more of the many symptoms of our
decay. They are ubiquitous, obvious and odious. The very word "decay"
is evidence for our decay; for, as Chesterton put it, "Our fathers
said that a nation had sinned and suffered, like a man; we say it has
decayed, like a cheese."
Consider just one more linguistic symptom of our decay. Whenever you
hear a liberal theologian calling for a more "adult" Christianity,
please remember what the word "adult" means in our culture. (What is
an "adult" bookstore, or an "adult" movie?) Ask yourself then what is
the relationship between such a theologian and a certain old
out-of-date teacher who said, "Unless you become as little children,
you can not enter the Kingdom of God."
What happened? An eclipse. Nietzsche called it "the death of God," but
Buber replied with the alternative image of the "eclipse of God." When
the sun is eclipsed it is still there, but no longer seen. When
someone is dead, he's no longer there. But both death and eclipse
produce a similar effect in our experience: darkness.
It is a "darkness at noon," as Koesteler's title says, because noon is
when eclipses happen. This is true both astronomically and
historically. The noonday devil of pride arranges for the eclipse.
It's the old Greek hybris plot, and it's been repeated many times:
ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, America. Today secularism, subjectivism,
relativism, materialism, and hedonism are the craters on the moon that
has risen up to eclipse the sun of God just at the noon hour of human
pride and cleverness, the triumph of "man's conquest of nature." Just
as Lewis prophetically warned in The Abolition of Man, the culmination
of "man's conquest of nature" has been his conquest of human nature by
"liberating" it from the constraints of the natural moral law, the
"Tao."
The change is not merely that we are behaving like beasts, but that we
are believing like beasts. Man has never obeyed the Tao very well, but
he at least believed in it, and thus felt guilt. The new philosophy
has removed guilt. It has made hypocrisy impossible, for "hypocrisy is
the tribute vice pays to virtue."
Nietzsche's "death of God" is a real event, but wrongly described. It
is not the death of God but of His image in the human soul. It is not
the sun that is in darkness during an eclipse, as it seems, but the
earth. "The death of God" is the pure psychological projection by a
spiritual corpse.
Now when the symptoms of a terminal disease appear, whether in an
individual or in a civilization, what is the reasonable thing to do?
Not despair but treatment. Not keeping our nose to the symptoms,
sniffing at the decay and frothing at the mouth. Rather, we must
approach the problem coldly, calmly and logically, as a doctor would.
We must be both practical and scientific. To be practical is to find
out what to do, and then do it. To be scientific is to ask for a
clear, step-by-step analysis of the problem and its solution.
Such an analysis should use the most practical and pervasive idea in
all scientific thinking, the principle of causality. Every medical
analysis follows the principle of causality by going through four
steps: observation, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; the
observation of the symptoms, the diagnosis of the disease that causes
the symptoms, the prognosis of the cure, and the prescription for the
treatment that causes the cure. The symptoms are the bad effects, the
diagnosis tells the bad cause, the prognosis the good effect, and the
prescription the good cause.
Every practical philosophy answers these four questions, because a
practical philosopher is a doctor for the soul. For instance, Buddha's
"Four Noble Truths" follow exactly these four steps. The "Four Noble
Truths" comprise the whole of Buddhism, according to Buddha himself in
the "Arrow Sermon." First: to live is to suffer; all life is
suffering. Second: the cause of suffering is selfish desire. Third:
there is a way to end suffering and achieve Nirvana: namely, to end
desire. Take away the cause and you take away its effect. Fourth: the
way to end desire is to practice the Noble Eight-fold Path, the
Buddhist yoga of ego-reduction.
Freudianism also contains these four steps. The symptoms are neurosis
and psychosis. The diagnosis says the cause is the conflict between id
and superego, between individual animal desire and social norms. The
prognosis is homeostasis, or adjustment, a compromise of sorts. And
the prescription is psychoanalysis.
Marxism sees the symptoms as class conflict, the diagnosis is
Capitalism, the prognosis is the classless Communist society, and the
prescription is for a worldwide proletarian revolution.
Platonism sees the symptoms as vice; the diagnosis is ignorance; the
prognosis is virtue; and the prescription is philosophical wisdom via
the Socratic method.
Christianity also fits this pattern. The symptom is death, the
diagnosis is sin, the prognosis is salvation, and the prescription is
repentance and faith. "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God
is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rm. 6:23) — that
single sentence sums up all Christian theology.
Let us now apply the generic form of this four step analysis to the
particular content of the deadly disease in contemporary Western
civilization.
The first of the four steps in the analysis is the observation of the
symptoms. I think we all pretty much know both that the patient is
critical and what the symptoms are; so I shall skip step one and spend
most of my time on step two, the diagnosis.
For that is what we mainly go to the doctor for. We go to the doctor
only after we have already observed the symptoms; otherwise we
wouldn't be there. "Those who are sick need a physician, not those who
are well. I come to call not the righteous, but sinners." (Mt 9:12)
And once the doctor performs step two, once he diagnoses the disease,
steps three and four usually follow fairly routinely. Once you know
the disease, you can consult the textbooks to see whether it can be
cured (the prognosis) and if so, how (the prescription).
I am going to diagnose our disease as an eclipse of "the permanent
things." Therefore we need some definitions. I already defined
"eclipse," but not "permanent" or "things." What "things" are
permanent? And in what way are they "permanent?"
We can mean three different things by "permanent" and three different
things by "things." First, "permanent." How can anything be permanent?
Essentially, either subjectively or objectively, or both, or neither.
First, something may be permanent both objectively, in itself, and
also subjectively, in our consciousness. E.g. the law of causality:
nothing ever arises without a cause, and everyone knows that. Both the
fact and the knowledge of it are permanent.
Second, something may be permanent objectively but not subjectively
— for instance, the truth of monotheism. If there is one God, He
is permanent and eternal; but the world's knowledge of Him is not.
Third, something may be permanent subjectively but not objectively: a
permanent illusion, such as the attractiveness of sin, or the
egocentric perspective which we carry around with us all the time, as
if I had first dibs on the name "I AM" rather than God.
Fourth, something may be permanent neither objectively nor
subjectively, such as fads and fashions. These do not concern us here
because they are not in any sense "permanent things." The other three
are.
Take the crucial example of the Tao, moral values, the natural moral
law. There are four possible positions about it: first, that it is
permanent both objectively and subjectively: that there are eternal
moral verities and that our awareness of them can never be eradicated
from the human heart. This is the position of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Second, that the moral law is permanent objectively but not
subjectively; that we can be changed into what Lewis in The Abolition
of Man calls "men without chests," men whose chest, or heart, or
conscience, or organ for apprehending the Tao, has atrophied.
Third, that the moral law is not objectively permanent but that it is
subjectively permanent, a structural illusion of the psyche. This is
Freud's position: the super-ego is the unconscious reflection of
society's constraints on the id's desires.
Fourth, that there is no objectively permanent moral law and no
subjectively permanent moral law; that human nature is malleable and
that conscience can be shaped, reshaped, or eradicated by social
engineering. This is the position of Marx and of Behaviorism.
I make no apologies for calling Freud a fraud or for giving low marks
to Marx, but I feel fear and trembling in arguing against Aquinas. But
my daily experience of ordinary American life and people seems to tell
me that the heart, the moral organ, has indeed atrophied. Perhaps the
blood needed by the heart has migrated south to another, less subtle
organ. There seems to be linguistic evidence for that, for the same
people who confuse "adult" and ''adulterous" also often confuse
"organism" and "orgasm."
Well, I don't want to spend my time arguing whether the moral law is
subjectively permanent or not, but I want to ask instead what things
are objectively permanent. What kinds of "things" are "the permanent
things," anyway? Certainly not concrete things, like concrete. What,
then? Three things, at least.
First, permanent truths. These are not simply ideas in human minds,
because our minds are not permanent. We change our minds faster than
we change our clothes. If these "permanent things" are ideas, they
must be in the divine mind. As Sartre says, "There can be no eternal
truth if there is no eternal and perfect consciousness to think it."
Aquinas says the same thing, in almost exactly the same words.
These permanent truths are not even the so-called "laws of nature," or
laws of science. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, first
clearly realized the double truth that all matter is in motion and
that there are permanent laws or formulas for this motion. He taught
that "everything flows," like a river, but also that there was a
permanent logos or law of change. For him this was the law of the
transformations between fire and water, earth and air; for us it is
such truths as the law of transformation between mass and energy
(E=MC2) or the equality between force and mass times acceleration.
But these laws of nature are not what I mean by "the permanent
things." For they are only descriptions of how matter does behave, not
laws of how it must behave. Molecules do not bow down before a
pre-existing Ten Commandments of Matter before they set out on their
daily rounds. There is no permanent necessity to the laws of nature.
It is conceivable that they may change billions of years from now if
and when all the matter in the universe gets sucked into Black Holes.
It is generally agreed today that the laws of nature were radically
different than they are now during the first few seconds of the
universe's existence, right after the Big Bang.
No, by permanent truths I mean things like the Law of
Non-contradiction, and the Law of Causality, and the multiplication
table: the objective and unchangeable laws of logic, metaphysics, and
mathematics. Nothing can ever both be and not be in the same way at
the same time. Nothing can ever begin to be without any cause at all
for its beginning to be. Two times three can never begin to equal
seven.
Can anyone deny these "permanent things?" Yes indeed. Even they are
not subjectively permanent. For many of our currently fashionable
philosophies reduce them to symbol systems, useful conventions, mental
biases, cultural copings, projections of our fear of death or chaos,
word games, or even patriarchal plots to oppress women. Permanent
objective truths are not necessarily permanent subjectively. I spent
$18 for a badly written book by Allan Bloom because I got hooked on
its wonderful first sentence: "If there is one thing every college
professor in America can be certain of, or nearly certain of, it is
that all or nearly all of the students who enter his classroom will
believe, or think they believe, that truth is relative."
Why would someone want to deny objective truth? Who's afraid of the of
non-contradiction? What's behind the insane attempt to soften up the
very structures of sanity? I think it is not logical, mathematical, or
metaphysical truths that threaten them, but moral truths. If there
were permanent moral truths, that would mean that morality is no
longer about nice, warm, fuzzy, vague, soft, negotiable things called
"values" but about hard, unyielding, uncompromising, uncomfortable,
non-negotiable things called "laws."
And their fear of permanent, objective moral laws is amazingly
selective. It almost always comes down to just one area: sex.
In my experience, students, like professors, bluff a lot, and do
adroit intellectual dancing. But I'd bet a wad of money that if only
the sixth commandment were made optional, half of all the hatred and
fear of the Church would vanish.
St. Augustine was one of the few honest enough to admit his obsession.
After puffing great philosophical profundities about the intellectual
problems that kept him back from the Church, he finally admits, in the
Confessions, "The plain fact was, I thought I should be impossibly
miserable without the embraces of a mistress." If that profoundly
philosophical motive was what held back one of the most honest,
truth-seeking wisdom-lovers in history, do you really hope that nobler
ideals motivate the spiritual children of Woodstock?
Thus, much more crucial than permanent truths are permanent values, or
rather, permanent moral laws, laws as objective and unchangeable as
the laws of mathematics. Applying these laws may be uncertain and
changeable, but they are not. Applying the laws of mathematics is also
sometimes uncertain and changeable, e.g. when you try to measure the
exact length of a live alligator.
(By the way, I think Lewis made a tactical error in conceding to use
the modern word "values" instead of the ancient word "law" in The
Abolition of Man. For to the mind of the modern reader, the idea of
"objective values" is simply an unintelligible contradiction in terms.
For this modern mind is Cartesian and Kantian; and to the Cartesian
dualist, "objective" means merely "physical," which values are not,
and to the Kantian moralist "values" mean something posited by man's
will, not God's: something subjective, though universal. You see,
there is real confusion here. God did not give Moses "The Ten Values."
And the currently fashionable way of teaching moral relativism in
American high schools is not called "Laws Clarification." There is a
difference.)
A third kind of "permanent things" emphasizes the word "things." Not
only are there permanent truths and permanent moral laws, but also
permanent things. There is a wonderful passage about this in Till We
Have Faces. After Orual's sister Psyche tells Orual that she has seen
the face of the god, her husband, and his palace, his house, Orual
wonders whether it could be true even though she cannot see these
things. She asks her Greek tutor and philosopher, the Fox:
"You don't think — not possibly — not as a mere hundredth
chance — there might be things that are real though we can't see
them?"
"Certainly I do. Such things as Justice, Equality, the Soul, or
musical notes."
"Oh, Grandfather, I don't mean things like that. . . . Are there no
things — I mean things — but what we see?" (1)
The "things" Orual suspects are not physical things, yet they are not
abstract ideas either. They are solid and substantial and real, like
gods, or Platonic Forms. The immense difficulty modern students have
in understanding Plato's famous Theory of Forms as anything other than
abstract class concepts can be seen from their utter incomprehension
(yet fascination) with Charles Williams' novel The Place of the Lion,
in which the very real and active protagonists are Platonic Forms (!);
and in students' equal incomprehension (and fascination) with the
Great Dance at the end of Perelandra, especially this Platonic point
in it:
He could see (but the word "seeing" is now plainly inadequate)
wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute
corpuscles of momentary brightness; and he knew somehow that these
particles were the secular generalities of which history tells —
peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts,
sciences, and the like — ephemeral coruscations that piped their
short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which
millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of a different
kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most
of them were individual entities. . . . Some of the thinner and more
delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and
insects, a fruit or a storm of rain . . . Others were such things as
we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far
above these in girth and luminosity, and flashing with colours from
beyond our spectrum, were the lines of the personal beings. . . . But
not all the cords were individuals; some were universal truths or
universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these
and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the
mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their
streams; but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. (2)
These Platonic universals are not abstractions. They are things. They
are gods, or spirits. In "The Descent of the Gods" chapter of That
Hideous Strength, each of the planetary spirits is both a universal
quality, like joviality, and a particular entity, like Jove. Jove, or
Jupiter, does not merely symbolize joy; he is joy. Joy is not an
abstract property, but a "permanent thing," a reality, a god.
Lewis is so insistent on this point about the concreteness, not
abstractness, of nonphysical realities, that in Miracles he goes so
far as to call God Himself a particular thing. He says:
What we know through laws and general principles is a series of
connections. But in order for there to be a real universe, the
connections must be given something to connect: a torrent of opaque
actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world,
then He is precisely the source of this torrent. . . . But if God is
the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events,
then God Himself must be concrete and individual in the highest
degree. Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and
individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable
means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce
concrete reality. Bookkeeping continued to all eternity could never
produce one farthing. Metre, of itself, could never produce a poem.
.. . . if by using the word "infinite" we encourage ourselves to think
of God as a formless "everything" about whom nothing in particular and
everything in general is true, then it would be better to drop the
word altogether. Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing.
Once, He was the only Thing; but He created, He made other things to
be. He is not those other things. He is not "universal being" . . . He
has a determinate character. Thus He is righteous, not amoral;
creative, not inert. . . . And men are exhorted to "know the Lord," to
discover and experience this particular character. (3)
We have defined three kinds of "permanent things." All three are in
eclipse in our civilization. Now I want to concentrate especially on
the second one, the moral "things," and on the little classic The
Abolition of Man, one of the half dozen books I would like to make
everyone in our culture read, at gunpoint if necessary, for the sake
of sanity and survival.
One of the things this book does for our culture is to show us
ourselves in our radical distinctiveness from all previous cultures.
The most enlightening single sentence I have ever read about our
culture and how radically different it is from all previous cultures
is this one from The Abolition of Man:
There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology]
while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise
men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to
reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and
virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to
subdue reality to the wishes of men, and the solution is a technique.
(4)
We usually misunderstand the spiritual significance of technology, for
we associate it with science more than with magic. Of the four
enterprises — magic, religion, science, and technology —
most moderns would classify science and technology together and magic
and religion together. Not so Lewis. He sees deeper. The deepest
unity, the unity of ultimate aim and purpose, unites magic and
technology: the aim of both is the satisfaction of our desires by
power and control. The opposite aim unites science and religion:
conformity to objective truth. Just as the aim of the magician and the
aim of the saint are opposites, so the aim of the pure scientist and
the aim of the engineer are opposites. It is not the spirit of pure
science, the spirit of pure curiosity and wonder, that our culture
values, but the spirit of practical success and power. It was
classical Greek and medieval civilization that valued the spirit of
pure science, though they did not have the efficient method to do it
very well. If there is one thing that is abundantly clear from a study
of the lives as well as the writings of modern intellectuals, it is
that only a small and uninfluential minority of them believe in and
practice the pure love of objective truth, especially moral truth.
Toynbee distinguished 21 great civilizations in human history, of
which ours is the latest. Every one of them admitted the Tao,
objective moral truths. Ours is the first civilization to deny the
Tao. The most radically new feature of our civilization is not
technology, its newly powerful means, but the lack of an end, a summum
bonum. We are the first civilization that does not know why we exist.
Every past civilization has had some religious answer to that
question. The essence of modernity is the abandoning of that religious
foundation, and thus eventually also abandoning the moral first story
of the same civilizational building. Morality has always rested on
religion in practice, even if a few philosophers like Plato and
Aristotle could defend it without religion in theory. Dostoevsky
wrote, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." History
shows far more people, both atheists and theists, on Dostoevsky's side
than on Plato's here. For Sartre, "there can be no eternal Good since
there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it." For
Nietzsche, the consequence of the good news that "God is dead" is a
"transvaluation of all values." Like Milton's Satan, he says, in
effect, "Evil, be thou my good." He declares love, compassion, mercy,
justice, impartiality, and democracy to be weak and therefore evil;
cruelty, ruthlessness, war, competition, and selfishness are good. For
from the natural struggle of selfishness emerges the strongest, the
Superman.
Please do not be horrified, but I am often tempted to thank God for
Hitler. For if one big Hitler and one big Holocaust had not scared the
Hell out of us, we might be living in a worldwide
Hitler-Holocaust-Hell right now. God rubbed our face in it — we
have seen the pure logical consequences of "the death of God" in the
fires of Auschwitz. Yet most of us in the West still have not learned
the old and simple lesson (scandalous to modern intellectuals simply
because it is simple and old) that "unless the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain who build it." No one in our time has ever faced
and answered the question: If there is no God, why shouldn't I do as I
please if I can get away with it? Because it's not ''acceptable,"
nice, humane, human, democratic, fair, just, community-building,
helpful, survival-enhancing, practical, and approved? But suppose I
don't want to be acceptable, nice, humane, human, democratic, fair,
just, community-building, helpful, survival-enhancing, practical, or
approved? I have never heard any reply to that from any humanist. No
one has ever answered Dostoevsky's "Underground Man." The
existentialists refute humanism. You don't need an Augustine or an
Aquinas to refute humanism, only a Nietzsche or a Sartre.
If Dostoevsky is right, morality without religion is impossible. For
there is no morality without real moral laws, binding duties,
objective obligations. A morality of mere convention, man-made and
thus man-revisable rules of the social game, is not morality at all,
only mores. Life under such pseudo-morality is not real moral warfare,
only war games, and we are never on the hot seat, but in a hot tub.
So there is no morality without moral absolutes. But there can be no
moral absolutes without God. That's the second step. An absolute law
can come from and be enforced by only an absolute will. Finally, no
civilization can stand without morality. That should be exceedingly
obvious, both from common sense and from history. Thus: without
religion, no moral absolutes, without moral absolutes, no real
morality, and without real morality, no survival of civilization. Thus
without religion, civilization cannot survive. And
has not survived. This is not just a law of logic but also of history.
Every civilization in history has had a religious base. Ours is
experimenting with a deviation from history's most obvious and
universal law. The prognosis thus does not look very hopeful. If you
can't even fool Mother Nature, you certainly can't fool Father God.
This fact comes as a surprise only to this generation, the first to be
Biblically illiterate. All I have done is to translate into abstract,
logical language the simple, punchy point of Old Testament history
that a nation's fate rests on its faith.
There is one thing even stupider than modernism abandoning religion in
society: theological modernism abandoning religion even in religion.
The essence of theological modernism is the denial of the supernatural
(miracles, Christ's divinity and resurrection, Heaven and Hell, the
Second Coming, and the divine inspiration of scripture). These
fundamentals of the faith are labeled "fundamentalistic" —
modernity's other F-word. Modernism reduces religion to morality,
morality to social morality, and social morality to socialism.
In fact, its instinctive gravitation to socialism is natural. For
socialism and religion are the only two answers to a problem Lewis
poses in The Abolition of Man: the problem of the Controllers versus
the controlled, the Conditioners versus the conditioned. To see this,
we must first review his argument in that book.
Lewis' argument in chapter 3 is absolutely stunning, both in the sense
of intellectually brilliant and in the sense of emotionally
terrifying. It is that "man's conquest of nature" without the Tao must
necessarily become nature's conquest of man. For "man's conquest of
nature" must always mean, in the concrete, some men's power over other
men, using nature as the instrument. Lewis' examples of the wireless,
the airplane, and the contraceptive show this: some men wield the
newly-won power over others as its patients. Perhaps they are its
willing patients, but they are its patients. Now as long as both the
agents and the patients of these powers over nature admit and work
within a common Tao, or moral law, they have the same interests,
rights, and values. Monarchy is not oppressive if the king and the
people are working for a common goal under a common law and share a
common dignity. But if the power elite, whether king, voting majority,
or media elite, cease to believe in an objective Tao, as is clearly
the case in our society, then they become Controllers, Conditioners,
Social Engineers, and the patients become the controlled. Propaganda
replaces propagation. Propagation is "old birds teaching young birds
to fly." Propaganda is programming parrots. Propagation is the
transmission of tradition. Propaganda is the invention of innovation.
Which of the two is piped into our brains daily by our media?
This new class of Innovators, the Tao-less Conditioners, will
themselves be motivated in their social engineering, but not by the
Tao, which is supernatural and eternal, a "permanent thing." Instead,
they will be motivated by their natural impulses, which are
non-permanent things: their heredity and environment, especially their
environment, especially the fashionable opinions. This means they will
be motivated by Nature, not by "the permanent things," which are
supernatural.
Thus "man's conquest of nature" must be expanded at both ends: the
conquerors are themselves conquered by nature (Tao-less environment),
and they in turn only use nature to conquer other men. Thus "man's
conquest of nature" turns out to be nature's conquest of man. Man's
triumph is thus man's abolition, for the new man is an artifact. Those
who have been conditioned out of the belief in free will, lose their
free will. Those who believe they are only clever apes, become only
clever apes. "Made in U.S.A." comes to mean "made in the image of King
Kong," not King Christ. Where is Christ? In a jar of Andres Serrano's
urine. Artists are prophets, antennae.
Now there are only two ways out of this "abolition of man" by social
engineering. One is, of course, the return to the Tao. This is
unlikely because the one thing modernity resists the most is return.
It believes in progress, not repentance. But this would be a solution
to the alienation between the Conditioners and the conditioned because
both would then be under the same moral law. That spiritual equality
would overshadow the physical and social inequality. The authorities
would then wield power only in the name of the common objective Tao.
The other way to unity is socialism: not spiritual unity of a Tao but
mere physical unity, i.e. social unity, i.e. economic unity. A
"classless society" will supposedly make it impossible for one class
to conquer or condition others. From the history of secular socialist
and communist experiments that we have seen so far, I think we must
not only call all the experiments failures but also call most of the
experimenters liars and hypocrites. The most systematic oppression and
mass murders in history have been carried out in the name of social
equality, and blessed by the intellectuals, both of the Left and the
Right. Statistical studies have revealed that in Hitler's
concentration camps, the cruelest torturers were the most educated.
Socialism's dream is naive because mere equality does not
automatically destroy oppression. Egalitarianism can be as oppressive
as any tyranny. De Tocqueville pointed out long ago that democratic
totalitarianism is not a contradiction in terms, and that Americans
are naive if they think that the sheer political structure of
democracy will protect them against totalitarianism. For democracy and
totalitarianism are not opposite answers to the same question, but
answers to two different questions, and thus can be compatible.
Democracy is an answer to the question: In whom is the
social-political power located? The answer is: in the people at large.
Totalitarianism is an answer to the question: How much power are the
social-political authorities to have? The answer is: total power,
power to reshape human life, human thought, human nature itself.
Here are three examples of democratic totalitarianism: in theory,
Rousseau's "General Will" (vox populi, vox dei); in fiction, Huxley's
Brave New World; and in fact, the American media establishment.
Only the Tao can ensure freedom. Only when we are bound to a higher
law of permanent, unchangeable, objective moral absolutes, are we free
from being determined by the lower laws of animal instincts,
selfishness, sin, and propaganda. Only conformity to the trans-social
Tao can make nonconformity to a decadent society just, or even
possible. For we do, and must, conform to something, or else we are
formless. The only question is: To what? There are only two possible
answers: to what is higher than ourselves or to what is lower,
supernature or nature, the Bible or MTV, Jesus Christ or Norman Lear,
the Crucified or the crucifiers.
Let's take a time-out and take stock for a moment. How far down the
slide have we slid? How much of the Tao is already lost? How many of
the objectively permanent things have become subjectively impermanent?
I count at least 33: silence, solitude, detachment, self-control,
contemplation, awe, humility, hierarchy, modesty, chastity, reverence,
authority, obedience, tradition, honor, simplicity, holiness, loyalty,
gentlemanliness, manliness, womanliness, propriety, ceremony, cosmic
justice, pure passion, holy poverty, respect for old age, the positive
spiritual use of suffering, gratitude, fidelity, real individuality,
real community, courage, and absolute honesty (the passionate, or
fanatical love of truth for its own sake). That's one lost value for
each of the years in Christ's life.
We could, of course, profitably spend hours, days, perhaps lifetimes
exploring each one of these 33 lost values; and we could probably add
33 more. But in this age of progress and time-saving devices we have
no time for such important things any more — things like
conversation, debate, meditation, prayer, deep friendship,
imagination, even family. (If the sexual revolution doesn't do the
family in, it will die for lack of time.)
But, you may think, this gloomy picture I have painted of a spiritual
Dark Ages is only half the picture. What of all the progress we've
made?
Well, let's look at the progress we've made. It can be divided into
two kinds: spiritual and material. Let's take spiritual progress
first. I think there has been some significant spiritual progress in
modernity in at least one area: kindness vs. cruelty. I think we are
much kinder than our ancestors were, especially to those we used to be
cruel to: criminals, heretics, foreigners, other races, and especially
the handicapped. I think this is very real progress indeed. I wonder,
though, whether one big step forward offsets 33 steps back, some of
them also big, some medium sized, but none small.
In any case, the case for progress and modernity usually rests either
on one of two grounds: either supposed spiritual progress that is not
progress at all (e.g. freedom from superstition, authority, absolutist
morality, Biblical literalism, Church dogma, and the like), or
explicitly material progress, scientific and technological progress.
It is this last area which is spectacular and indisputable, and thus
the strongest case for Progressivism.
Our civilization certainly has produced astounding, magnificent,
utterly undreamed-of successes in understanding and mastering the
forces of nature. I think every intelligent human being born before
the Renaissance, if transported by a time machine to today, would be
stupefied with wonder, marvel and admiration at the awesome progress
in science and technology, i.e. material progress, in our world.
But now I ask a strange and unusual and very upsetting question: is
there such a thing as material progress at all? Or is this a confusion
of categories, like a blue number, or a rectangular value? I am not
sure of this, but I want to suggest, for your consideration, the
possibility that there is not and can not be any such thing as purely
material progress; that only spirit can progress.
The reason I think this surprising and unpopular conclusion is true
has something to do with the nature of time. To see this, we must
speak Greek for a minute. The Greek language is much richer and
subtler than English when it comes to philosophical distinctions, and
Greek has two words for time, not just one. Kronos means the time
measured objectively, impersonally, and mathematically by the motion
of unconscious matter through space. For instance, one day of kronos
is always exactly 24 hours long, the time it takes for the earth to
rotate. Kairos, on the other hand, is human time, lived time,
experienced time, the time measured by human consciousness and
purposive reaching out into a future that is not yet but is planned
for. Only kairos knows anything of goals and values.
For instance, when St. Paul writes, "It is now time to rise from
sleep, because your salvation is nearer than when you first believed,"
he does not mean by "time" something like "June 30 of the year 50
A.D." "It is now time to die" does not mean "it is 3:20 P.M." Ends,
goals, and purposes measure kairos, and these things exist only in
consciousness, in spirit, not in mere matter.
The reason why I think only spirit can progress is because only spirit
lives in kairos. For only kairos touches eternity, knows eternity,
aims at eternity. Progress means not merely change, but change toward
a goal. The change is relative and shifting, but the goal is absolute
and permanent. If not, if the goal changed along with the movement
toward it, we could not speak any more of progress, only change. There
is no progress if the goal line recedes in front of the runner as fast
as the runner runs. You can't steal second base if the second baseman
has already stolen it and is running to third.
Think of a circle, like a pie, with a segment, like a piece of pie, in
it. The segment is kairos, lived time, lifetime. The circumference is
kronos. Kronos limits how much kairos there is (e.g. 80 years), but it
does not determine the other dimension of kairos, the dimension of
progress. Progress means getting closer to the goal, which in my
geometrical image is symbolized by the center of the circle. That
would be eternity, permanence. Only in the kairos dimension, i.e. the
spiritual dimension, can we speak meaningfully of progress at all. The
only thing kronos can do is endlessly circle around the center and
limit the quantity of any segment of kairos, but the circumference is
equidistant from the center. This symbolizes the fact that our lived
time, our lifetime, can move toward eternity, but purely material time
cannot. You get closer to God by sanctity, not be aging. The world
gets closer to God by improving spiritually, not by improving
materially. And God is the goal, the measure of progress.
The essence of modernity is the death of the spiritual. A modernist is
someone who is more concerned about air pollution than soul pollution.
A modernist is someone who wants clean air so he can breathe dirty
words.
A modernist cares about big things, like whales, more than little
things, like fetuses; big things like governments, more than little
things like families and neighborhoods; big things like states, which
last hundreds of years, more than little things like souls, which last
forever.
A modernist, thus, is one who puts his faith and hope for progress in
precisely the one thing that cannot progress: matter. A
traditionalist, on the other hand, is one who ''looks not to the
things that are seen but to the things that are unseen, for the things
that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are
eternal." (II Cor 4:18) A traditionalist believes in "the permanent
things," and the permanent things cannot progress because they are the
things to which all real progress progresses.
Perhaps I should modify my stark statement that matter cannot progress
at all. Perhaps matter can progress, but only with and in and for
spirit. If your body and your tools and your possessions serve your
spirit, make you truly happy and good and wise, they contribute to
progress too.
But this modification does not help the progressive at all, since it
is pretty obvious that modernity's technological know-how and power
has not made us happier, wiser, better, or more saintly than our
ancestors. When we speak of modern progress, we do not mean progress
in happiness, in contentment, in peace of mind. Nor do we mean
progress in holiness and moral perfection or wisdom. We speak readily
of "modern knowledge" but never of "modern wisdom." Rather, we speak
of "ancient wisdom." For wisdom is to knowledge what kairos is to
kronos: the spiritual and purposive and teleological and moral
dimension.
Incidentally, this point about kairos and kronos liberates us not only
from the ignorant worship of the nonexistent god "Progress" but also
from the ignorant lust to be "up to date." A date, being mere kronos,
has no character. It is almost nothing. It is a one-dimensional line,
the circumference. A line can have no color. Only kairos, only a
two-dimensional segment of the circle, can have character, and color.
Since a date is only a point on the circumference, it has no
character. Nothing can ever be really "up to date." What a wild goose
chase is our lust to be "with it" or "contemporary"! What a waste of
passion and love and energy!
It's all in the Bible, of course. All this stuff about "love not the
world" and how hard it is for the rich to be saved — it's very
practical. St. Teresa of Avila wrote, "Anyone who wishes to enter the
second Mansion will be well advised, as far as his state of life
permits, to try to put aside all unnecessary affairs and business."
One thing painfully obvious about modern "progress" is that we all are
much busier now than we ever used to be. All these time-saving devices
have done exactly the opposite of saving time: they've killed time, or
enslaved us to time, to kronos, to the clock. Jesus is a very good
psychologist when he says, in the parable of the sower, that we are
choked and suffocated by the brambles of the cares and riches and
pleasures of life, so the seed of life cannot grow, cannot progress.
Progress retards progress! Progress is the enemy of progress! Business
chokes our real business here. Riches make real riches extremely
difficult. Remember Mother Teresa's simple, Christ-like words at
Harvard: "You did not invite me here from a poor country to speak to a
rich country. America is not a rich country. America is a desperately
spiritually poor country." America is a poor country. This only seems
paradoxical to us. In fact, it is simplicity itself. It is we who are
standing on our head; that's why Christ's simplicities appear to us as
upside down paradoxes. Once we get right side up again, we will see
how simple it is. And the world will see us as upside down and
strange, and "out of it." How wonderful to be "out of it" when "it" is
the maelstrom.
You may doubt the paradoxical point that progress retards progress.
You may think it too pessimistic, world-denying, anti-progressive,
irrelevant — "out of it," in a word. Well, here is one more
argument for my outrageous paradox against progress. Let's take
modernity's supposed progress to its limit, its end, its success. I
think its failure will be most clearly and spectacularly evident if we
look at its supreme success, by its own standards — like a
prosecuting attorney who simply lets the accused criminal talk on and
on and hang himself.
Modernity's progress in conquering nature is incomplete because nature
still holds one trump card over all her conquerors: death. Nature
always has the last word. Suppose genetic engineering conquered death.
That would be the supreme triumph. Or would it?
Let's backtrack to Eden. You remember the story, of course. It began
with the invention of advertising. Satan invented the first
advertisement: "Eat this; it will make you like God." It was a lie, of
course, like most of the industry. Modern technology is Satan's new
advertisement. It tempts us, as it tempted Eve, to become like God in
power (but not in virtue). Artificial immortality would be the supreme
sell job. We would mortgage our soul for that, the conquest of the
very power of life. That would conquer even the highest of the angels,
the seraphim, whom God stationed at the gate of Eden with a flaming
sword to prevent us from eating the fruit of the tree of eternal life.
Death was God's severe mercy, the tourniquet around the wound of sin,
to limit sin to 80 years or so. Remove the tourniquet, and history
would bleed to death. Imagine the Roman Empire forever. Imagine the
Third Reich forever. Imagine America forever. Lewis speaks of our
"nightmare civilizations" whirling around themselves in never-ending
gyrations of selfishness and despair (in Miracles), and (elsewhere, in
Mere Christianity) of eggs that never hatched (by death) and so went
rotten. "You can't just be a good egg forever; you must hatch or go
bad." Death lets us hatch; artificial immortality would make us go bad
forever. Hell incarnate would reign on earth. That would have to be
the end of the world. And most geneticists estimate we will have it in
2-300 years (according to Osborn Seagerberg in The Immortality
Factor).
How wonderful Progress is!
Let's now back up and ask the psychological question about motivation:
why did our civilization suddenly develop this lust for power? What
caused the great sea-change that The Abolition of Man defines? Why did
we get a new summum bonum, "man's conquest of nature," or power?
I think Nietzsche, of all people, provides us with the answer. The
children of this world are wiser in their own generation than the
children of light. Nietzsche, the prophet of nihilism, understands
modern nihilism better than its critics sometimes. Here is the
sentence in Nietzsche that answers our question. Viktor Frankl quotes
it in Man's Search for Meaning as the key to why some survived the
Nazi death camps and others, often the strongest, did not: "A man can
endure almost any how if only he has a why." In other words, you can
endure bad circumstances, powerlessness, poverty, even a concentration
camp, if and only if you have a meaning and purpose to your whole
life, and therefore also to suffering which is part of life. The
corollary is that if you do not have a "why," you will not be able to
endure any "how" that is a little upsetting.
This explains the origin of modern technology. It did not drop out of
the sky. Nor did mankind suddenly get smart, by some genetic mutation.
Rather, the old "why," or meaning and purpose to life, the old summum
bonum, began to weaken and decay. Once the sense of life's
significance was lost, we could not endure its sufferings, so we had
to invent ways of conquering nature to radically reduce those
sufferings. A man with no "why" must conquer his "how."
St. Thomas says, "Man cannot live without joy. That is why one
deprived of spiritual joy necessarily turns to carnal pleasures." The
same is true of societies as of individuals. When "God is dead," idols
must be worshipped, for man is innately a worshipper. When true joy
dies, false joys must be believed in. We are addicts. That's the only
explanation for the amazing fact that the whole human race idiotically
tries the same experiment over and over again, with endless little
variations, even though it has failed every single time, billions and
billions of times: the experiment of idolatry, of hoping to find
happiness and joy and fulfillment and adequate and final meaning in
this world, trying to find the summum bonum in the creature rather
than the Creator. In light of the dismal track record of this vehicle,
it is amazing that we keep gassing it up and putting it on the road
again. It is more than amazing, it is insanity. The human race is
spiritually insane. That is what the shocking doctrine of Original Sin
means. It is shocking to us only because we are standing on our heads
again, just as with the paradox about progress.
True joy is significance, false joy is power. True joy is finding
truth and choosing goodness. False joy is fabricating ideologies and
"creating your own values," and buying beauty. True joy is smelling
the rose, false joy is plucking and possessing it.
Western civilization began to worship power when it began to doubt
significance. The reason Lewis and Chesterton and Williams and Tolkien
fascinate us so much is fundamentally that they still live in the
medieval world, a world chock full of built-in, God-designed
significance. That's why they all think analogically, sacramentally,
imagistically. For them, everything means something beyond itself.
Everything is not only a thing, but a sign, full of significance.
Modernity, confining itself to the scientific method as the model for
knowing reality, deliberately induces in itself what Lewis calls a
dog-like state of mind, full of facts and empty of significance.
Point to your dog's food and he will sniff your finger. Show a baby a
book and he will try to eat it rather than read it. Show a modern a
lion and he will try to tame it and make money out of it in a circus,
and smile superiorly at the quaint old medievals who saw it as the
King of Beasts and the natural symbol in the animal kingdom of the
great King of Kings.
That's also why Tom Howard is so fascinating, especially in Chance or
the Dance?
That's also why modern scripture scholars tend to be either
fundamentalist literalists or modernist demythologizers: neither side
sees that an event like the resurrection can be both a literal
historical fact and a sign or symbol. The words man makes are signs
that point to things beyond themselves; but the things God makes are
also signs. The whole world points beyond itself. But the whole modern
mind has lost this sign-reading dimension of consciousness. Even
Christians have to strain to see it. We have lost the very powerful
and all-pervasive sense of significance; therefore we must replace it
with science (i.e. factual knowledge) and technology (i.e. power).
At the far end of this loss of significance lies Deconstructionism,
which denies that even words have significance, intentionality, a
meaning that points beyond themselves. Archibald MacLeish says, "A
poem must be palpable and mute, like globed fruit . . . a poem must
not mean, but be." If this means what it seems to mean, it is
proto-deconstructionism, linguistic nihilism, and the beginning of the
end — the end of a human history and consciousness that begins
with "In the beginning was the Word." Nietzsche wrote, sagely, "We
(i.e. we atheists) are not done with God until we are done with
grammar." It looks like we are now beginning to be done with grammar.
The next step can be clearly seen by reading the apotheosis of That
Hideous Strength, the Babel scene, or its original in Genesis 11 and
Revelation 18. The ancient Tower of Babel story in Genesis and the
apocalyptic Fall of Babylon prophecy in Revelation are the spiritual
meaning of modernity. These two chapters are mirrors, reflecting each
other and ourselves.
We're almost finished. We've spent nearly all our time on the
diagnosis, and now we have to make a very quick prognosis and
prescription, the last two of our four steps in our spiritual medical
analysis of Western civilization.
The diagnosis was very bad news indeed. I wish it was not. Honestly, I
do not enjoy playing the part of the prophet of doom. Like most
Americans, I like to be liked, and the messenger of bad news is seldom
liked. Do you like your dentist when he tells you your roots are
decayed? I fear many of you will remember only one thing from this
essay years hence: Kreeft is a Puddleglum. Doom and gloom loom on his
horizon.
Actually, I am a Puddleglum. The Boston Red Sox have taught me that
Calvinistic, New England wisdom. Yet my prognosis is surprisingly
optimistic. For seven reasons, I will not pronounce the patient dead
yet, or even terminal.
First, ignorance. No one knows the future but God.
Second, free will. Repentance, turning back, has happened in history
and can happen again. If the liberal claims to have a bright crystal
ball, the conservative shouldn't claim to have a dark one, but none at
all. The liberal believes in maximal external freedom because he does
not really believe in the primary internal freedom, free will, and the
moral responsibility that goes with it, a responsibility that extends
even to our eternal destiny. We who believe in free will must never
despair of the salvation of any soul (remember the thief on the cross)
or any society (remember ancient Israel). As my favorite saint, Thomas
More, put it, "The times are never so bad but that a good man can live
in them."
Third, there is the "skin of our teeth" principle. Humanity always
seems to survive by the skin of its teeth (to use the point and title
of an old Thornton Wilder play). If any one of a thousand chances had
gone just slightly the other way, none of us would be here now. If the
temperature of the primeval fireball had been a trillionth of a degree
hotter or colder three seconds after the Big Bang, no life could ever
have evolved anywhere in the universe. If the cosmic rays had not
bombarded the primeval slime at just the right angle, protein
molecules could never have come out of the stew. If Europe had not
discovered ale before the Black Death polluted the water supply, most
of our ancestors would have died. If Hitler had gotten the atom bomb,
he would have destroyed the world. If your grandfather hadn't turned
his head right instead of left one day and noticed your grandmother on
the trolley, he would never have dated her, married her, and begat
you. If one Egyptian tailor hadn't cheated on the threads of Joseph's
mantle, Potiphar's wife would never have been able to tear it, present
it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown
into prison, and let him be in a position to interpret Pharoah's
dream, win his confidence, advise him to store seven years of grain,
and save his family, the 70 original Jews, from whom Jesus came. We
owe our salvation to a cheap Egyptian tailor.
Fourth, there is the rebound principle. After each night, a day. After
each trough, a wave. Eclipses end. Communism is dying. Bad things die.
American decadence will die. If necessary, America will die too.
Diseases run their course. If our civilization is doomed, mankind is
not — not till the end of the world, and that's the happiest
event of all, the coming of our Bridegroom. Maranatha!
Fifth, the Church is now the counter culture, not the culture, not the
fat cat establishment; North Vietnam, not South Vietnam; a catacomb
church, not a Constantinian church. The Church is thriving in every
place she is persecuted — Poland, Lithuania, East Germany,
China. She is sick only where she is established: England, West
Germany, Holland, Scandinavia. What an exciting change of battle plans
our General is now overseeing: from defense to offence! We are now
spies, guerrillas. We are the barbarians at the gates.
Sixth, the Church will win. Christ will win. That is guaranteed, by
the only absolutely trustworthy guaranteer there is. If we only
remember where our true country lies, and our true citizenship, we are
absolutely certain of victory. All who seek Christ find Him. If that
is not so, then He is a liar and you don't want to find Him then.
Seventh, the strongest force in history is not man's sin but God's
grace. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." (Rm. 5:20)
God can't lose. Othello can lose to Iago but Shakespeare can't lose.
God is our Shakespeare. History is His story. Identify with our Author
and you can't lose either, in the end.
But that's only "in the end." That's the long range prognosis. What of
the short range prognosis for that little local pocket of stuff called
modern Western civilization? That may be another kettle of fish
entirely. The fish may be so rotten that the only thing for God to do
is to throw it out. And would that be so terrible, really? Compared
with what we've just looked at, compared with the Church and compared
with the grace of God, the survival of Western civilization is a
triviality. Our civilization is a carbuncle on the cosmos, a
hemorrhoid on history.
Finally, the prescription: what shall we do? How shall we fight the
good fight? What are our marching orders as we prepare for Armageddon,
or Marathon, or Waterloo?
Four answers come to mind, four practical principles, four
prescriptions.
First, be counter cultural. Like the Bible. Like the early Church.
Like Augustine's City of God. Like Jesus. "Be not conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds." Be a nut, a
fanatic, a weirdo. Was it ever said of the early Christians that they
were "cool," or "with it"? Or, to use exact adult equivalents, that
they were "appropriate" or "acceptable"? No, here's what the world
said: "These that have turned the world upside down have come here."
(Acts 17:6) Let's turn the world upside down, for it's standing on its
head, with its eyes in the mud and its feet kicking up in rebellion at
the heavens. (Sorry, Chesterton, that's about the twentieth image I
stole from you. Perhaps this confession will work the good penance of
making more good thieves of your goods.)
Second, be ready. Be ready for battle, for we are at war. Edie
Galbraith writes, in a letter to the National Catholic Register:
I'm getting tired of constantly praying for peace. What's wrong with
praying for victory once in awhile? We belong to the Church Militant;
we're engaged in a battle. The battle is with the powers of darkness.
Since there is never any shortage of darkness, I think we should be
allowed to pray for the grace to be victorious.
What difference does it make when you think you're at war? You get a
sense of perspective. A matter of life and death appears as it is: as
a matter of life and death. Trivia appears as it is: trivia. No one
complains that the beds are lumpy on a battlefield. No one even bleats
about "sexual needs" when live bullets are whistling past the ears.
Third, be ready for the end. For we may well be very near the end.
Passionate, anxious, expectant longing for the end, for the return of
the Lord, was the high octane fuel of the early Church. We have
watered down the fuel today.
I do not think we need to make arrogant and foolish predictions in
order to say "Maranatha" with an exclamation point. A good third
baseman need not predict that the next pitch will be hit to him as a
screaming line drive in order to be prepared for one. Let us be alert.
Alertness is not worry. Worry drains your energy; alertness conserves
it, because it is calm, not agitated: deadly calm, in the face of a
matter of life or death, especially spiritual life or death. For the
war we are all in, like it or not, is the war between Heaven and Hell,
and at stake is human souls.
Finally, for this greatest of all wars we must use the greatest of all
weapons, the strongest power that is.
Our enemies are supernatural, of course, but we also have natural,
concrete, human enemies, those who are doing Satan's work, consciously
or unconsciously, as we try to do Christ's, those who passionately
hate us and want to kill us, i.e. to destroy the Church and make our
souls like theirs. They are in the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and the
Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and media boardrooms. But they are also in
the legislatures and the corporations, and sometimes even in the
seminaries. What is our strongest weapon against them?
There is one that is guaranteed to defeat them, and we alone have it.
Their weapon is hate, ours is love. God's love. Agape. We can defeat
our enemies by making them our friends, by loving them to death. It
may take forever. But love never ends, never gives up. Not even when
it sees Calvary. And once it has seen that, everything else is
trivial, including the decadence of Western civilization.
ENDNOTES
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (St. James Place, London: Collins, Son
& Co., Ltd., 1979), 150
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.),
218-219.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.), 86,
88.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (St. James Place, London: Collins,
Son & Co., Ltd.), 46.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Peter Kreeft "Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things."
Faith and Reason (Spring, 1991).
Reprinted with permission of Faith and Reason. Subscriptions available
from Christendom Press, 703-636-2900, Fax 703-636-1655. Published
quarterly at $35.00 per year.
THE AUTHOR
Peter Kreeft has written extensively (over 25 books) in the areas of
Christian apologetics. Link to all of Peter Kreeft's books here.
Peter Kreeft teaches at Boston College in Boston Massachusetts. He is
on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center.
Copyright © 1991 Faith and Reason
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0100.html
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| User: "Witziges Rätsel" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 05:46:44 PM |
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You should keep your posting brief if you want to get a point
across. Nobody wants to read a droning diatribe.
.
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 01:32:20 AM |
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In article <ckn0b6$fot$1@news.chatlink.com>,
"Witziges Rätsel" <zer@roer.com> wrote:
You should keep your posting brief if you want to get a point
across. Nobody wants to read a droning diatribe.
He's one of those trolls who think that cutting and pasting is a viable
substitute for intelligent and logical argument.
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
-The ability to change one's mind, ideas, and opinions when confronted with
new facts is the sign of the rational and intelligent. The inability to do
so is the hallmark of the dimwitted and the fanatic. This applies not only
to science and philosophy, but also to politics.-
.
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| User: "John Baker" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 09:12:35 PM |
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"Voice of Truth" <voiceoftruth227@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com...
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
PETER KREEFT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all know what Christianity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of modernity.
Yep. It looks like a load of superstitious *****. Which it is.
In this essay I shall try to turn the truth
tables and see what modernity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of Christianity.
Here's a quarter, fuckface. Go call somebody who gives a *****.
.
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| User: "Phÿltêr" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 09:47:45 AM |
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(Voice of Truth) astounded us with:
news:816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com:
No one in alt.atheism gives a *****, *****, stop wasting news server space
and bandwidth with your shite
--
Phÿltêr
AA#1938
Denizen of Darkness #44 & AFJC Antipodean Attaché
http://forums.clickhalah.com/index.php
Remove "s" to respond
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| User: "Psycho Dave" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 01:47:58 PM |
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(Voice of Truth) wrote in message news:<816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com>...
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
PETER KREEFT
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I met Peter Kreeft as part of "Campus Crusade For Christ" lecture at
MIT back in the late 80's. Back then, his message was not quite as...
shall we say, INSANE. He's trully gone off the deep end with the
paranoia. The second i saw "like nazis", I knew what to expect from
the rest of the article.
Kreeft once tried to push the nonsense that belief in God is a
pre-requisite to having any philosophical foundation for any beliefs,
because allegedly, all logic flows from God, and if you don't believe
in God, then you can't use logic.
This sort of flew in the face of 3,000 years of philosophy starting
with the Greeks -- with Hereclitus, Thales, and others. Kreeft makes
all sorts of assumptions about reality and truth which are not as
clean-cut as he thinks. I find it amazing that this guy teaches
college-level courses.
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| User: "Philippic" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 02:07:59 PM |
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"Psycho Dave" <Irish@fmedr.com> wrote in message
news:ea202634.0410151047.4946729b@posting.
Kreeft makes
all sorts of assumptions about reality and truth which are not as
clean-cut as he thinks. I find it amazing that this guy teaches
college-level courses.
I wouldn't find it so 'amazing' to hear that he's teaching these 'college
level courses' *in the US* - which, as pretty well the only remaining 'faith
society' in the industrialised West, represents *the largest outdoor lunatic
asylum in the developed world*.
A 'faith society'? Yes, indeedy! Did not the Deserter-in-Chief
soporifically, hypnotisingly and, above all, faith-fully state, the other
day: "We are ... being tested in Iraq"...?*
*(As opposed to a *factual* statement which would have proceeded along the
lines of: "We are ... a bunch of dishonest and deluded incompetents who are
getting our asses whipped in Iraq and doing a shedload of senseless and
brutal killing while we're about it"...)
Philippic
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| User: "Dan Clore" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 04:13:06 PM |
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Philippic wrote:
"Psycho Dave" <Irish@fmedr.com> wrote in message
news:ea202634.0410151047.4946729b@posting.
Kreeft makes
all sorts of assumptions about reality and truth which are not as
clean-cut as he thinks. I find it amazing that this guy teaches
college-level courses.
I wouldn't find it so 'amazing' to hear that he's teaching these 'college
level courses' *in the US* - which, as pretty well the only remaining 'faith
society' in the industrialised West, represents *the largest outdoor lunatic
asylum in the developed world*.
We not only treat the insane humanely, we put them in charge
of the asylum.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608
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| User: "John Norris" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 10:02:29 AM |
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(Voice of Truth) wrote in message news:<816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com>...
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
The full lunar eclipes will begin at 9:14 pm EDT on Wednesday, October
27. Voice, if you see the moon disappear, then God hates you and will
curse you and your family unto the sons of your sons sons. Hide in
the basement.
JohnN
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| User: "*nemo*" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 07:58:07 PM |
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In article <816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com>,
(Voice of Truth) wrote:
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
Yes, it's a shame that modern civilization -- an enlightened
civilization -- will be still-born because a bunch of superstitious
mother-fuckers who think too much of one particular ancient book are too
afraid to face the endless possibilities that science has put in our
grasp.
Makes me sick, it does.
--
Nemo - EAC Commissioner for Bible Belt Underwater Operations.
Atheist #1331 (the Palindrome of doom!)
BAAWA Knight! - One of those warm Southern Knights, y'all!
Charter member, SMASH!!
http://home.earthlink.net/~jehdjh/Relpg.html
Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus
Quotemeister since March 2002
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
15 Oct 2004 01:34:26 AM |
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In article <816e1d8c.0410141428.410ed5@posting.google.com>,
(Voice of Truth) wrote:
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
The darkness will be lifted when the human race outgrows superstition.
You're a waste of bandwidth.
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
-The ability to change one's mind, ideas, and opinions when confronted with
new facts is the sign of the rational and intelligent. The inability to do
so is the hallmark of the dimwitted and the fanatic. This applies not only
to science and philosophy, but also to politics.-
.
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| User: "raven1" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 08:10:52 PM |
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On 14 Oct 2004 15:28:24 -0700, (Voice of
Truth) wrote:
We all know what Christianity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of modernity.
Then buzz off, already; you've nothing further to add to the
conversation.
In this essay I shall try to turn the truth
tables and see what modernity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of Christianity.
DILLIGAFF?
Seriously, why you might possibly think I or anyone else who doesn't
already share your "Belief System" ("BS", for short) would care what
anything looks like from the perspective of Christianity, Hinduism,
Islam, or any other system of superstitious nonsense, is one of the
great mysteries of the modern world.
.
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| User: "Paul Hovnanian P.E." |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 07:07:59 PM |
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Please stop the mad, rambling theological spam.
--
Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, "Let there be Light."
And there was still nothing, but you could see it.
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| User: "wbarwell" |
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| Title: Re: Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of Modern Civilization |
14 Oct 2004 09:30:40 PM |
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Voice of Truth wrote:
Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things
PETER KREEFT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all know what Christianity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of modernity. In this essay I shall try to turn the truth
tables and see what modernity looks like when viewed from the
standpoint of Christianity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ignorance, stupid tall tales, contradictions, lies,
false promises of great miracle working ability, false
prophecies the world would end and judgment day would be
upon us 1930 years ago.
180 years of pogroms, heresy hunts, religous wars, forced
conversions, oppression, racism, inquisitions, crusades,
and savagery in the name of Christ.
To hell with this nasty superstition.
--
Kerry - two medals a silver and bronze star.
Bush? Well they don't give medals
for going AWOL, missing your medical and
getting grounded or falling off of a bar stool.
Kerry - a hero, Bush - a zero
Cheerful Charlie
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