What Happened?

The great world religions are, as it were, great rivers of sacred tradition which flow down through the ages and through changing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize.

(Christopher Dawson; Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: 12)

            This post is concerned with outlining a process of historical debasement in the thinking of the west, a process mistakenly called Enlightenment.  The origins of historical processes are notoriously hard to identify.  So I will start not historically, but analytically.  This post and the next are an overview of two longer essays to be available soon.

            In Europe, before the advent of the scientific revolution, religious authorities strove to suppress emerging scientific knowledge because it upset their rooted dogmas about the world. They had turned religion from an open highway of holiness into a mechanical treadmill of moral exhortation and abstract law, unfeeling, indifferent, merciless and cruel with no way to evolve. Revolt was the only liberating attitude to take toward this spiritual perversion, and, betrayed into defiance, starting in the sixteenth century with the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, Western thinkers did just that–in the name of a new religion of science built upon reason and secularism. 

            Over time and through the practical success of science, religious conviction, spirituality and faith were replaced by an abiding rationalism, a religious devotion to the factual and a materialistic interpretation of reality that saw only a mechanistic universe ticking away.  But it was based on an impoverishment of thought, not a liberation of it.

            During the Enlightenment, for example, a reversal of traditional logic allowed Enlightenment thinkers to assert atheism as a respectable, in fact the only respectable, way to think and believe for the truly educated.  Carl Becker notes that: “These thinkers did not conclude that nature must be rational because God is eternal reason. They concluded that God must be an engineer because nature is a machine.” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers:56)  But, he goes on, they could not accomplish this logical inversion of cause and effect and thus run God out of their universe: “unless they were prepared to dispense with his revelation to men—the revelation through Holy Writ and Holy Church.  This was the whole point of their high offensive gesture.  Renunciation of the traditional revelation was the very condition of being truly enlightened.” (Heavenly City:50)  Becker sees this movement of thought not as something really new.  Rather he sees such “Enlightenment” thinkers as the secular bearers of traditional religious thought, but in its negative—in the photographic sense--form.  The “Heavenly City thus shifted to earthly foundations, and the business of justification transferred from divine to human hands.” (Heavenly City: 49)

            Later in the Romantic period the process of absorbing a religious body of thought and turning it into a secular one continued.  Professor Meyer Abrams writes in his book Natural Supernaturalism:  “The title Natural Supernaturalism indicates that my recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.” (Natural Supernaturalism:12)  He goes on: “It is a historical commonplace that the course of western thought since the renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place.  Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought.  The process—outside of the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world view founded on secular premises.  Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within a prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.” (Natural Supernaturalism: 13)

            Henry Steele Commager states that the same process of turning spiritual thought into secular ideas occurred in America: “Although the theological implications of Puritanism wore off in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of its moral and political implications persisted.  Two centuries of reaction could not dissolve the Puritan inheritance of respect for the individual and for the dignity of man, of recognition of the ultimate authority of reason, of allegiance to principles rather than to persons, to the doctrine of government by compact and consent, and to spiritual and moral democracy.  These things, along with Puritanism deep-seated moral purpose, its ceaseless search for salvation, its passion for righteousness and for justice, and its subordination of material to spiritual ends, entered into the current of secular thought and retained their vitality long after the theological and metaphysical arguments which sustained them had been forgotten….The church itself confessed to a steady secularization.” (The American Mind: 165, 167)

            Over the course of about eight centuries, a general displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference occurred, translating the traditional hierarchy of the theological system of salvation in a spiritual world, with inner movement “up and down” (Jacob’s ladder) between worlds, into a secular program of linear progress in this one, with outer movement from “left to right”, past to future, in this one.  This was a diminishment of human thinking, for, as professor Abrams notes, it took the three worlds of God, Man and Nature and made it into a two-term one of Humanity and Nature.  God, the sacred and transcendent, dropped from the Supreme Consciousness to became identified, first, with the higher Reason of humanity, then, secondly, with Nature, or natural law, and finally, with the unknown aspects of human nature located, paradoxically, at the deepest within of humanity, the “unconscious”.  This is the slide into fully rationalized materialistic ways of thought.    

            By the early twentieth century, a materialistic interpretation of reality had consolidated itself so completely as to become the dominant world faith insofar as the direction of society was concerned.  It penetrated and captured all significant centers of power and information at the global level, including education.  But a consciousness that is fully rationalized is also fully realized and, therefore, at the end of its development. This itself is a sign of the need for a new encounter with the sacred in order to transcend the whole condition itself.  At this juncture of our cultural evolution, individuals seek such encounters in regions outside the rational in the occult, in mystery of all kinds, seeking answers beyond not just what is comprehendible but also what is conceivable.   

            It was precisely at the moment of its greatest success and spread that the materialistic, secular paradigm was psychologically undermined by the discovery of the unconscious by Freud, and scientifically torpedoed by relativity and quantum mechanics.  As the document, Who is Writing the Future?, puts it: “A new door had suddenly opened into the study of both the minute constituents of the universe and its large cosmological systems, a change whose effects went far beyond physics, shaking the very foundations of a world view that had dominated scientific thinking for centuries. Gone forever were the images of a mechanical universe run like a clock and a presumed separation between observer and observed, between mind and matter. Against the background of the far-reaching studies thus made possible, theoretical science now begins to address the possibility that purpose and intelligence are indeed intrinsic to the nature and operation of the universe.” (Who is Writing the Future:1) 

            Secular knowledge, basically scientific in method and humanistic in belief, still dominates our thinking today, and dominates our education.  In a world whose centers of thought and power remain under the sway of the secular mind and its attitudes toward knowledge, wisdom and reality, spiritual knowledge is considered no knowledge, for real knowledge is concerned with material things and with man’s physical and psychological needs.  In such a world it is hard to believe in and understand spiritual realities. But there is, too, a real hunger for them, a need to again expand the knowledge-base that humans may profitably use.