Through modernism, humanity has done all it can to throw God away. His existence is seen as meaningless, and the world goes on. Humans continue to live and breathe, continue to succeed and fail at life, just as they did when they focused their attention on God. Such, it seems, makes God superfluous. The rise of humanity, where we take our place as master of the world, is to be our right. What seems like the ultimate human achievement, when looked closely, can be seen to be its ultimate failure. What a dark, bleak reality we have created for ourselves. Yes, we have our reason, and through the sciences, we are increasing our understanding of the world around us, but our understanding is the understanding of the vivisectionist. At the same time as our knowledge progresses, as our control over the world and its destiny continues, the dark underbelly of humanity makes itself that much more known. We destroy all that is around us, and we can’t recreate what we destroy. Endangered species, once they die out, are gone forever. Great mountain landscapes, once blown up, will never be seen again. Nothing is out of bounds; we manipulate all things, from the smallest of sub-atomic particles, human life, to the whole of the earth. The utility of our research justifies the wreck we leave in its wake. And yet what we produce, what we make, does not satisfy the human heart: all our rationalistic progress leaves the open existential question, indeed, makes it grow larger, as our sense of meaning becomes less and less.
By ejecting God from the cosmos, much of what was full of meaning has either died or become a source of dread. Just look the diverse ways time has been understood in different epochs of world history. Currently, time is just a unit of measure, telling us when to work, when to watch television, when to eat, when to sleep; ultimately, it is telling us when to do things, controlling us without spiritually nourishing us. Discontent is the outcome of such cyclical existence. Time has, for the most part, lost its sense of meaning, its ability to enrich our experience of life. Christian history, on the other hand, is history because it is about the incoming of God into time, filling it up with things of beauty which can point us back to God. The day, the week, the month, the year, can all be sanctified. They can all be filled with meaning. Time is an actual thing but it is an open, relative thing, allowing for the boundlessness of God’s grace to enter into creation. Time is dependent upon eternity, and eternity is what allows it to have meaning. Christians experience eternity through liturgy, making it a concrete reality. Time is shown to be meaningful because all time is united in the one eternal present.[1] The various parts of the day reflect the darkness we are born in and the light which entered the world through the incarnation; the days of the week, with their various feasts, reflect upon the deeds of the saints. But they do more than that. Allowing us to remember them, they allow us to experience them in communion, showing us how relative the boundaries of time which separate us from them can be. The changing seasons and months of the year can be seen as symbolic of the work of Christ, which is why we put in a whole year the celebration of his whole life. All throughout the year we are shown that our life is in Christ, not external to him, and our mode of existence in the world is elevated because of it.[2]
Pure human rationalism has nothing to do with this; it can’t see the way things relate together; it can never seem the forms, but only the parts contained within such forms. It can break things apart, but rarely can it put things back together. Division is much easier, establishing the individual constituents behind the forms, but the riddle of their relationship within the form is incapable of being overcome.[3]Life is understood as physical and chemical processes working themselves out. There is, there can be, nothing more to it. A holistic approach to life transcends such rational constructs, and so it must be rejected. The sense of beauty and wonder once given to us by the poets serves no function; their words are all so often incapable of being understood by those enthralled by siren of scientism. The world has for them become an ugly place filled with ugly people. That is the end product of the modernist enterprise. H.P. Lovecraft, a staunch believer in materialism, fought hard against it. In his personal writings, he would express such a view, and tell people there is nothing to worry about it.[4] He believed we should just accept the situation for it is, get beyond all delusions, and see the world without fear: “all of this need give worry to none.“[5] And yet his stories tell us something else: in them he shows the true end of such positivism; it is horror. Humanity has been thrust into a pitiless universe of natural forces which will always be greater than us. To truly understand the place of man in the cosmos is to go mad.[6]
Theologians, as we have seen, had a role in the development of the practical atheism of the modernist worldview. They provided “theological support” for it conclusions, despite the fact that they were believers in God, and desired to speak and for God, for the benefit of humanity. It is quite difficult to know how influential theological speculations have directly shaped the dominant worldview, but it is clear, theologians certainly didn’t prevent it. They fell for its traps like everyone else, and so they have at least indirectly influenced the current situation by giving material support for those traps. Indeed, even for those who try to hold out something for God find God evaporating before their eyes. All around us, more people turn to this practical atheism, if not outright atheism, the more our scientific advances seem to suggest humanity can live well enough on its own. Even those places in the world which are still religious find that religiosity compromised when confronted by the miraculous might of technology. “Whenever modern technological civilization penetrates areas that are still religious, it infuses a post-Christian, secular, atheistic consciousness as well. This comes not only through the human beings who make the machines but through the machines themselves; these new fetishes cast a previously unknown spell precisely because they are manipulable.“[7]
Footnotes
[1] “In all true Christian worship the basic emphasis must always be on this eschatological element; on salvation history, yes, but as one indivisible, eternally present reality which is the Kingdom of God realized in the fulness of the Passover of Christ,” Robert F. Taft, “Towards a Theology of Vespers,” pages 161 – 186 in Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2001; 2nd ed.): 183.
[2] “In this way we live in God. We remove our life from this visible world to that world which is not seen by exchanging, not the place, but the very life itself and its mode. It was not we ourselves who were moved towards God, not did we ascend to Him; but it was He who came and descended to us. It was not we who sought, but we were the object of His seeking. […] He did not remove us from here, but He made us heavenly while yet remaining on earth and imparted to us the heavenly life without leading us up to heaven, but by bending heaven to us and bringing it down,” Nicholas Cabasilas. The Life in Christ. trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 50.
[3] Thus, society is understood individualistically, people warring against one another, without any sense of unity behind the individuals.
[4] “The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate – automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability,” H.P. Lovecraft, “Nietzscheism and Realism,” pages 172 – 175, Miscellaneous Writings. ed. S.T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1995): 173. “Nothing matters – all that happens happens through the automatic and inflexible interacting of the electrons, atoms, and molecules of infinity according to the patterns which are co-existence with basic entity itself. The general idea is that of a kaleidoscope with its endless rearrangements – there is no object or purpose in ultimate creation, since all is a ceaseless repetitive cycle of transition from nothing back to nothing again,” H.P. Lovecraft, “The Materialist Today,” pages 176 – 178, Miscellaneous Writings. ed. S.T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1995): 178.
[5] Ibid., 178.
[6]Perhaps one of the best expressions of this is at the beginning of his famous “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hithero harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,” H.P.Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” pages 135 – 154 of The Dunwich Horror and Others. ed. S.T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1963; 11th, correct edition): 135.
[7]Hans Urs von Balthasar. Theo-Drama IV: The Action. Trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 65.
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