In contraindication of the pantheistic tendencies of continental rationalism and the scepticism of the British thought there arose a certain intellectual lure to delete all things past as childish and antiquated fribble, and begin upon a foundation new yet ancient, upon something authentic to humanity, upon “reason” freshly comprehended as common sense. Once again we hear the well-worn anthem that reason must be purified of all prejudices of the past, the detrital attitudes and values of an effete cult and culture, that reason must look to man, must embrace man, celebrate his fundamental nature, his nature as at-one with Nature. Once again, we are confronted with something that is not new, merely the newest generation of an attitudinal shift toward an anthropocentric cosmos begun in the Renaissance and continued on in the introspections of Descartes and the self-analytic approach of Locke. Yet here, reason is not confined to cold logic; it is freed to passion, it is impassioned reason, the mind that conjures martyrs and revolutions, that spins out new vistas, ideas, ideologies. It is l’âge des lumières, The Enlightenment, an age of celebrating light, be it the Sun King, the Hall of Mirrors, or the Encyclopaedia’s illumination of every subject in the realm of man. It is not a power so much concerned with stating facts as with opening eyes, with the vision to rightly see man and his rights, and thus, it is about society and justice, brotherhood and liberty. Inherent within this is a power to startle and move, but the rich aesthetic of that genetic fibre will be another day’s child—the unabashed enthusiasm of the Romantic movement.
The proponents of this Enlightenment embrace “Nature” and “common sense” as their field and methodology. They seek to elucidate man’s natural rights, man’s natural society, man’s natural religion. For some the causality, the functionality, of Nature is blind, chaos. For others it is structured, ordered. For some it is ordered to a final cause. For some God can be deciphered in Nature by natural means. For some the God revealed by the mind is the maker of a machine that functions without divine interference or involvement (Deism). For some, natural moral laws may also be found in Nature, and ideas of sentiment, feeling, empathy often play a significant role in their analyses. “Common sense” occasionally refutes Hume regarding god, man and world, and claims these are not logical fictions but primitive, primary judgements. Purified and impassioned reason feels sharply the disparities among men, and finds much to criticize concerning the artificiality of social structures and class distinctions.
This movement is encapsulated intellectually in the compilation of the Encyclopaedia, a compendium of knowledge regarding the panoply of Nature, an endeavour the most devoted light of which was the even-keeled, well-informed, and reasonable Jean D’Alembert. D’Alembert had that taste for right and proper that constitutes wisdom. He could ascertain the valid and true points in systems past, discern the limitations of investigations, and remain modest and open to the unfolding of the new. He could appreciate the nature of man would always rest in mystery, and that religion based on revelation could offer vistas beyond natural religion, but be aware of the danger inherent in organized religion’s affinity to bond with political power and create a force more for social suppression than stability. He was patently aware of the fact knowledge is certain only for the simplest objects—mathematics in its varied forms. The farther from this science of equivalences investigations and analyses move, the less certain they become, the deeper they move into the layers of darkness and mystery that encompass the cosmos. Here is reason enlightened by the fact of its own limitations. Here is reason aware passion and feelings have a logic of their own. Here is reason acknowledging that for every object it can bring to light, somewhere it thereby throws a shadow. The Enlightenment begins in the humble confession and ominous insight that light not only dispels darkness, it creates it.
One can hardly write about the Enlightenment without noting its greatest publicist, François-Marie Voltaire. The ideals of freedom and happiness flow from his every work as they shimmer in the paintings of Watteau. No unprovable proposition, no dogma, be it of church or state, can stand in the way of reason. Yet, man, ever prone to being foolish and wrong, ought not to be rash, but strive to be open-minded and tolerant. A religion that contributes to a safe and sane society is not to be discounted. As there is more to us than we can fathom, the idea of a God as prime and final cause of the cosmos, as the ultimate scale on which to weigh all that transpires is profitable for society. Voltaire, equal parts glee and bite, is not about to toss away the world as he knows it. A social order may be critiqued and challenged, but in that it functions, it is not to be despised.
In the work of Giambattista Vico the new science of man and his society continue to evolve, building a bridge between the spirit of scholasticism and that of the new age. He dismisses the quest for certainty that so preoccupied the rationalists and empiricists. Truth is not some Thing to be discovered externally or internally; it is something we make. Foreshadowing the pragmatic epistemologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he claims it is man who makes things come true. The ultimate reliability of this our making rests in our having been made by God, maker of all things. On a theological level, we cannot, therefore, know God, know the truth of God, for that would be to make him—an insight Feuerbach will develop in the opposite direction. Man here must rely upon revelation and feeling—an insight Schleiermacher, hailed the father of modern theology, will bring to maturity. On the practical level, mathematical precision belongs to mathematics alone, and this coupled with our limited nature means probability is the common-most concern of pragmatic, making-useful and purposeful human knowledge. Our common sense, our practical reason, therefore, does not disclose to man eternal and unbending truth, rather it arouses wisdom, a feeling for prudence and eloquence—the classical ideals of human action. Epistemologically, contrary to notions of rationalists and empiricists alike, reason and volition cannot be understood as separate and distinct functions; they are a singular activity. A focus on reason cannot, therefore, be isolated and permitted to peculate humanity, its artfulness, its playfulness, its capacities for insight and delight.
The divine act of creation within itself generates structures, natural laws which govern the cosmos and moral laws which govern men. Man is from the beginning a social being, predisposed to living together, and having the compos mentis that this entails the utilitarian principle of doing so justly. There is no social contract of free and happy individuals, no coming together out of endless strife and enmity. Civilization is the unfolding, the evolution, of our natural sociality. In the New Science Vico sets out to record a “reasonable and civil” theology based on sociability as civic virtue and on divine providence which was primitively expressed in the guise of religious authority, later in the political form of an absolute authority, and ultimately in a humanistic and philosophical perspicacity for the principles upon which reside the idea of law. In this historical evolution, despite the differences among peoples and societies, there holds a common root to humanity, such that similar circumstances will produce similar outcomes. History itself, therefore, has a nature, an observable, trackable, probable flow of event, progress, maintenance, decline, and end. It is this nature, not that of the cosmos, we must contemplate and map. It is this nature, this civic world, the history and historicity of mankind, which we write, but—to our peril–tend to neglect in order to speciously dwell upon the nature made by God.[i]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is perhaps the most influential apostle of the new light. His publications on the arts and sciences, social structure, education, and religion still impassion response, pro et contra. In reading Kierkegaard one might well feel the meaning of angst; in reading Rousseau one feels the meaning of ennui. There could have been neither arts nor sciences in Paradise, for they are the ruin of humanity. The pulses of progress and private property have created a distortion within the foundational equalitarianism of humankind. The arts have fostered politeness, political correctness, and convention–a veneer of insincerity concealing and crushing natural man and his impulses. The sciences have torn away the veil from secrets nature had seen fit to conceal from man for his welfare. Natural man–simple, naïve, fearful, suspicious—becomes the artificial and artful, and Rousseau thinks that awful, and not in a positive manner.
The root of this unfortunate situation is man’s freedom. Whereas brutes must obey Nature’s commands, man, who hears them, has no compulsion to comply. He knows himself free to do as he will. Man can change himself, and in this malleability, by this power, he can not only ruin himself, but perfect himself. Primitively, man is driven by two forces: self-preservation, and a loathing of pain—in self or other. These alone excite in him fear. In the primitive human state man is a solitude. There are no relations with others. It is only when relationships with others are undertaken that differences, that “I” and “other” appear, and with that vanity, scorn, dependence, servitude, and inequality. Paradise, the Golden Age, name it as you will, ends irretrievably and society begins with some One convincing others “this is mine”. The notion of private property eradicates the primal solitude and causes all to become enslaved to one another and to things. Salvation, a return to spontaneity and empathy, to a society of men wherein liberty is celebrated as a natural and inalienable right, resides in working toward the protection of the person and the goods of each by the force of all. If each man alienates himself and his goods to the united will of all, he therein submits to no “other”, rather he enters into the being of a public person, a body politic, a will of the commune, a “general” will, a sovereignty of wills, a moral freedom which replicates imperfectly the functionality of the lost natural freedom. Man must be educated toward this, for this cannot be imposed by authority, only submitted to—impersonally–as a necessity.
To reinforce, indeed, to elevate this state, Rousseau ponders a natural theology wherein man, unencumbered by empiricist or rationalist quagmires, knowing himself at once passive, active, sensitive and intelligent, can forthrightly assent to the reality, to the common sense patency, of his own existence, that of others, and the world. He can embrace as reality causality, the laws that govern the being and movement of things, and thus ultimately, a primal cause and intelligence on which order and law must rest. As it is man’s freedom, the ability to defy reason and nature, which spins out evil among men, it follows that good, man’s happiness, arises only in freely electing to act justly, equitably, in all things. This is not a matter of reasoning but of something more primitive–of feeling, of conscience, a divine instinct within. The cosmos, in divine care, ordered in divine providence, will balance all man’s actions in the due course of time or eternity. But to enquire further into the divine beyond such notions of providence, into the divine nature and attributes, is to enter into confusion and delusion. God is beyond man, and the simplicity of this acknowledgement is the heart of true worship.
As Rousseau battles his own weariness to postulate only education, natural religion, and the summons of conscience aid to remedy the inequality and servitude man has fallen into, the Marquis of Condorcet optimistically confesses the ability of man to continuously progress toward perfection, despite the regrettable ravages of the very real battle betwixt reason and prejudice, good and evil. New errors and prejudices may continue to arise, but philosophy and science will continue to merge and progressively guide, and ultimately deliver peoples and nations into moral rectitude, truth, and happiness. Charles-Louis Montesquieu, muchly preoccupied with notions of law, was perhaps more grounded and astute then either Rousseau or Condorcet. He acknowledges the fallibility of reason and man, and ominously cautions it is because of such God has given men the laws of religion and wise men have set out the laws of ethics that men might ever be drawn back to social and political propriety.
The Enlightenment heralded a new day wherein the encompassing artificiality of human society will be scrutinized, purified, and cauterized by the light emanating from common sense and general consensus, yielding equity, peace and fraternity among men. Equity, its peace and brotherhood, rested in everyman’s access to Nature, but who had the right understanding of Nature? The artlessness hidden within this new day is grotesquely sketched as the great Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame becomes The Temple of Reason and then hastily morphs into a stable for horses. The Enlightenment is extinguished when France is literally exsanguinated in a Reign of Terror. Everyman may have access to the wells of Nature and the reasonability of Common Sense, but neither of these seemingly survives either institutionalization or man’s mythical primal solitude, his basal self-interest. Neither conscience nor science can cure man’s insular selfishness, and so the liberty, equality and peace of each and all ever search out something more transcending in which to place their root. Thus, religion (be it the ritual and dogma of a church, the vision and dogma of a state, or something of more global compass), spirituality, meditation, centring, find it a name you have comfort with, will ever arise as the prerequisite atmosphere wherein man can breathe, have breath, rȗach, as the scholar of Genesis’ opening lines knew so well.
[i]There is a tendency to think of history as a temporal line, a thread of events. It is a tendency toward error. History, like time, is akin to a cloth, a complex of weft and warp within which man, variedly sheering and knotting, both makes and discovers himself. It is the living entity of time, space, nature and man wherein we make, plot, and espy our destiny, our destinies. Judaism has always been of a mind that the grand designer that inspires both nature and man is the Lord, and that this Lord is also among the weavers, not only inspiring, but actively inserting his own talents into the work. The Hebrew Scriptures arise out of the unshakable belief that God is maker of the loom, creator of the weavers, and master of all that will unfold of their work. The sovereignty of God is revealed in history. The promise of God materializes in history. The Hebrew mind is turned to the world to not only see the hand of God, but in so observing, to worship the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth. The first Christians inherit this tradition, but receive it as fait accompli in the death and resurrection of Jesus.* They are “at the end of times”, and merely await the last burst of light when all will be consumed back into God. This embrace of an imminent eschatology cannot sustain the Hebrew sensitivity for history. This loss of a perceptivity for the divine vitality within history renders the Christian movement something in tempo with the Greco-Roman world into which it is born. The ancient Greeks were not interested in history as a source of meaning or understanding. The ancient Romans could only conceive of history as theirs. The early Christian theologians who speak of history do so rather polemically against Rome as it having been completed either in Jesus (Irenaeus), or in the Church (Augustine)—its meaning is past.
Fortunately for the West, Christianity, despite the occasional vexation to do so, never abandoned the Hebrew Scriptures as part of its religious and spiritual heritage. While a sentience for history long vanished from the forefront of Christian thought, it abided the centuries hidden in the words of mystics and the mystically inclined (Erigena, Eckhart). The Renaissance gave space for many things lost, forgotten, or hidden to be born again. The ancient world was re-discovered. The how and why of empires past, the how and why we emerged from their collapse, and the how and why of our future were questions beginning to brew in the minds of some (Campenella, Bruno). In the concomitant Reformation, the Hebrew Scriptures (that ancient testament variably understood as of, by with, or to The Lord) long designated a footnote text in support of a “New” Testament, re-emerged before learned minds as a text in its own right. Hebrew was learned by Christian theologians. The meaning of the flow of history was again to be searched, albeit, the early reformers did so too often bounded by sin and woe rather than liberated by grace and graciousness.
Vico’s work is but a weft in this evolution. The notion of evolution itself is now upon the loom, and as the thrust–evolution’s own thrust–to investigate, experiment, observe, and continuously test conclusions gains momentum, physical sciences, and soon after the social sciences, will make the consideration of history an endeavour unto itself, propel the world into a sense of intellectual ephemerality and spiritual relativity, which will in turn toss accepted morals and mores into the wind, question the viability of all things once held eternally true, and set the Western world into its present lassitude wherein passion and reason have been disjoined in the ensuing psychic cyclone. (Neither Spengler nor Toynbee, I think, would here wish to counter.) We are, I fear, losing our history and our perceptivity for history resultant of this separation of passion and reason. We charge ahead or cling blindly. We are either infantly engrossed toward one end without foresight or hindsight or heart, or we are all impulse without input from anything beyond some unenlightened instinct or hunch ill-named knowledge. Nature and polis are both imperiled, and their defalcation will mark our demise, at least the demise of that we name “our” world.
Centrally, however, to the considerations of this series which exists to illuminate the living interrelationship of Western ideas and religion, it is this new sensitivity to history, to finding meaning, even the “ultimate” meaning, within history which regenerates Christian theology. History, for the believer, becomes not merely the work of man in Nature, but the work of God with man in Nature. In theological terms it is dubbed “salvation history”, or German theologians having taken early command of the field, “Heilsgeschichte”. As history evolves, so too does man and his understanding, his ability and grace to see God in all things, to appreciate the contingency of one thing upon another, the relativity of all things temporal within the eternality of faith and hope. Thus, words, doctrines, rites, structures—all become relative to time and place, and this pulse electrifies (some may opine it electrocutes) Biblical studies, dogmatic theology, and moral theology from the eighteenth century to the present. The constant actors are three: God, Man, Nature. The only and constant approach is enshrined in Gospel as that which is the essence of both faith and hope: Love. Such openness and relativity, of itself, creates in the individual neither fear nor miasma, invites in the institution neither surrender nor bushido. It is an astonishment which liberates and challenges humanity to think and to act, to be everything “be-ing” human is Christianly meant to be—spiritually, socially, and intellectually at once considerate, aware, centred, com-passionate.
*Early Christianity is a child of its time and place. It absorbs the common view of an earth surmounted by a celestial realm of spirits. It accepts notions of an above where upper aspirations are glorified, and a below from which the personifications of lower instincts agitate the basal aspects in man. It lives in a world that receives ideas of heavenly gods, of god-men, and demons. It is a creature encultured and socialized, and were it not such, it would be nearly incomprehensible to its time and place. It is unfortunate that they who disparage this fail to comprehend that they actualize in their disparagement the very historical contingency they critique. We are creatures of our times and place. We, as individuals, societies, and cultures evolve. A Christianity that seeks to be the same today as it was in that first century is a religion doomed to irrelevance and incomprehensibility.
The early church received as given a Jesus of both celestial and terrestrial nature, now wholly elevated into the highest realms, and accordingly, worthy of worship. It accepted his death as the dawn of the end of time, an event ushering in a golden age of peace and spiritual bliss. Thus, St Paul discourages marriage, prompts abstinence and virginity. The terrestrial tomorrow does not matter. In a blink all will be changed. Within a generation of such sermonizing the ominous end would need to be spiritualized. Nevertheless, the mortification (literally the making-dead) of all earthly things consequent to their being now in their last moment persisted. Again, the reason has more to do with au currant pagan, gnostic, dualistic ethical ideas (wherein all physical things are of evil origin and only those things spiritual are good) than with the teachings of Jesus, the injunctions of fraternity, care, hope and love. Briefly put, early Christianity is a religion totally caught up in theological, philosophical and ethical ideologies of the Greco-Roman world. Faith must ever speak to the world in its own tongue, be incarnate in its time and place, and with this comes the fearful and real potential for distortion, for wisps of authenticity in dogma and ritual, in teaching and action, for the human and temporal ever imperfectly translate the divine and eternal.
We, today, are not in the time and place of the primitive church, the mediaeval church, the eighteenth church, or any other. Many who lead the church, many who in varied ways support the church are so imbued with some antique (they might prefer “ancient”) en-cult-uration that they mistakenly receive it as essential. Many among these enthusiasts decry evolution in general, because they subconsciously recognize such a notion challenges not only the literalism of sacred writings, but the very foundations of their ideograms of faith: a heaven up there, a very real and burning hell, a God enthroned with his Christ in splendours, and an end to all things worldly soon to come.
There is at times of crises, times when Christianity is trying to find is footing, a haunting glance toward that elusive divinity, the Holy Spirit. The early church had a rather long trek to finding a theology of this divine persona. This theology has never held much importance, as its space in countless dogmatic texts attests. The Holy Spirit is very much a footnote, an appendix to the discussion of Father and Son. Liturgically, the Spirit is always the milieu within whom the Father and Son ever act, the power by which the believer lives out his faith, but beyond these sure foundations, there is little either done or said. Christianity is still rooted in the ancient practice of worshipping Jesus. The Godhead is for all practical purposes subsumed in Jesus. Christianity is still more about ritual than real action, about focusing on the divinized person of Jesus than on divinizing the person and world of the believer in the way Jesus preached. I cannot dismiss the value of ritual and of symbol in general to reinforce spiritual focus and force, but they can never be regarded as entities unto themselves; they are buttresses whose meaning stands in support of a greater structure. If one looks to the meaning of Gospel, it is about not Jesus, but about being filled with that same divine Spirit which caused him, created him, revealed him. It is about opening oneself in faith to that same power and taking on the hope-filled act of sharing in the being and proclamation of Gospel, of lovingly and creatively being that which the ritual of worship iconizes, Christ. The ambiguity that has always accrued to the role and person of the Holy Spirit is founded in this, the constancy of Christian contingency, this having of each believer to need be to his time and place God’s presence, God’s embassador, God’s Christ. No bowed uttering of “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit…” is of worth unless he who does so be to his time and place creator, redeemer, and giver of life, unless he be graciously caring and careful in and of all things.