Paying Attention To The Sky

Lisbon 1755

Reading selections from David Bentley Hart’s The Story of Christianity that focus on the decline of Christianity and the rise of secularism.

It was in the 17th and 18th centuries that Europe began clearly to become a ‘post-Christian’ civilization. It was a period not only during which the Church as an institution began to lose much of its political power and social influence, but during which many persons — educated and uneducated alike — began more openly to reject the Christian story and to adopt alternate narratives of reality.

In some cases, this shift of attitude meant the embrace of a ‘rational’ theism or ‘Deism’, shorn (so its adherents believed) of the absurd tangle of superstition and metaphysical obscurantism that made the old faith incredible to them. In other, rarer cases, however, it meant the total rejection of all faith in transcendent reality.

Deists And Metaphysical Optimists
Beginning as early as the mid-16th century, ‘Deism’ was a style of religious philosophy that enjoyed its greatest vogue from the early 17th to the late 18th centuries. It varied in form, but its content was fairly uniform: it was an attempt at a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion, common to all nations and cultures, available to all reflective minds without recourse to childish mythologies, ‘revealed’ truth, miracles or abstruse metaphysical systems. The ‘Bible of Deism’ was Christianity as Old as the Creation (first edition 1730) by Matthew Tindal (1657-1733); but the ‘father’ of the movement was Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), and it was he who first enunciated its general principles: belief in a supreme being who created the cosmos, who is a moral being, who is worthy of our reverence, who requires moral goodness of us all and who assigns rewards and punishments to human souls. Not all Deists retained Lord Herbert’s belief in the immortal soul, hut most did; and all shared his certainty that this sort of ‘reasonable faith’ was the true form of religion before its degeneration into cult, superstition and intolerance.

Deist writers tended to imagine God principally as the designer of nature, and sought evidences of his existence in the intricacy and regularity of nature’s laws, and reserved a special antipathy for any form of religion that involved belief in God’s miraculous interventions in the operation of those laws. One of the principal intellectual projects of developed Deism, in fact, was the elaboration of theodicy’ — that is, the attempt to defend the justice of God in light of the sufferings of his creatures — meant to demonstrate the impossibility of a created order governed by uniform natural laws that does not involve chance, catastrophe, pain and moral evil; and hence to prove that ours is the best of all possible worlds. This sort of ‘metaphysical optimism’ was a tremendous fashion in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and became the common intellectual currency even of many traditional Christians; it was given especially sophisticated metaphysical form, for instance, by the Lutheran philosopher G.W Leibniz (1646-1716). Again, though, Deism was not a single creed, and its elements varied. One could, for example, number among its French adherents the satirist and public philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), than whom no one was more censorious of ‘metaphysical optimism’.

By the latter half of the 18th century Deism was perhaps the most respectable religious philosophy among the educated classes of England, Germany, France and North America; it was the system of belief favored by — to choose a few notable examples –Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Soon, however, the fashion would fade, defeated in part by the devastating assaults upon the argument for God’s existence from cosmic design mounted by David Hume (1711-76) and others, and in part by Deism’s own inherent blandness; and what vestiges of Deism remained were swept away in the 19th century by the rise of Darwinism.

Atheists And Revolutionaries
The rise and fall of Deism was part of that larger cultural movement traditionally called the ‘Enlightenment’, the chief tenet of which was that human reason possesses the power not only to penetrate to the natural laws underlying the world, but to determine the nature of a just society, to advance the cause of human freedom, to discover the rational basis of morality and to instill moral behavior in individuals and nations. And though there were many fairly orthodox Christians who shared the aims of the Enlightenment, the general tendency of those who held to the ideal implicit in this ‘new awakening of reason’ was either towards a more ‘rational’ religion, or towards an even more ‘rational’ irreligion.

Voltaire and The Disaster Of Lisbon
Voltaire’s most passionate and most eloquent assault on the arguments of those such as Leibniz) who thought this the best of all possible worlds was his great Poem On The Disaster Of Lisbon, written soon after that city — the resplendent capital of the Portuguese empire was devastated by a massive earthquake on ALL Saints’ Day (1 November) 1755.

The quake struck just off share, in three discrete shocks, with what is now estimated as a Richter force of 9.0. As it was Sunday morning, and a. Feast Day, most people were in church. In a matter of moments, thousands were killed, crushed beneath collapsing buildings, or swallowed by the crevices that opened in the streets; soon thereafter, many more — including the invalid patients of the city’s great hospital — perished in the fires that raged through the city; and many thousands more who had fled to the mouth of the River Tagus and to the shore to escape the catastrophe were killed by the enormous tsunamis that reached land half an hoar later. At least 60,000 died in the city; and many thousands more were killed by the waters in North Africa, Spain and the Algarve.

Voltaire was a theist but of a rather austere variety. He may not have been convinced by the Christian idea that creation has been corrupted by the fall of rational creatures, but he was quite certain that the cosmos does not reflect a morally or metaphysically necessary order. In his poem he disdainfully dismisses the notion that the world is governed by a universal law in place to assure the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of persons. He asks by what moral calculus we can reconcile ourselves to infants crushed upon their mother’s breasts, thousand devoured by the earth, thousands more slowly expiring in their broken bodies or buried alive beneath their fallen roofs all crying out in torment. Was this, he asks, some vengeance on the city’s iniquities? Was Lisbon more wicked than other cities, were the children who died there guilty of some crime? And would the natural and moral order of the universe have somehow been worse had the city not been engulfed in this ‘hellish abyss’? Does the cosmos become morally beautiful if we imagine that some sort of ‘general happiness’ is somehow mysteriously preserved by this fatal chasm of individual miseries’?

Immanuel Kant
The greatest thinker of the time to retain the idea of God — but then only as a deduction of reason — was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who argued forcefully against traditional metaphysics, but who believed that God and the soul were necessary postulates of the ‘metaphysics of morals’ (though, one must add, Kant’s moral philosophy depends upon no supernatural premises). Others, though, believed that true enlightenment was possible for mankind only if every concept of God was rejected, as an irrational superaddition to the evidences of experience, and only if all religion was repudiated, as a system of fanciful deceptions, invented principally by priests for their own benefit. Paul-Henri Thiri, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89). for instance — most especially in his 1770 book The System of Nature – argued that all religion is the work of ignorance and dread, exploited by tyranny, that reality consists in nothing more than matter in motion, and that the conventions of morality are simply- that, and ought where they interfere with the happiness of the individual to he abandoned. Denis Diderot (1713-84), an equally fervent (and more brilliantly insightful) materialist, famously declared that ‘Never shall man be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest’.

Such sentiments, if they are in any way amusing, remain so) only until someone takes them literally; and among the more radical political champions of a ‘progressive’ or ‘enlightened’ social revolution there were many disposed to do just that. It was natural, of course, for the society that emerged from the French Revolution of 1789 and after to include a certain powerful tendency towards anti-clericalism, given how closely the Roman Catholic Church in France — for all intents and purposes, little more than a Gallican establishment — had been associated with the interests of the ancien régime. But the revolutionary government of 1793 to 1794, which instituted the ‘reign of Terror’, and which was administered according to the ‘ideals’ of the radical Jacobin Club, nor only closed the churches in Paris, and forbade most public worship and the display of the cross, but directly participated in the murder of hundreds or perhaps thousands ‘non-juring’ priests (that is, priests who would not vow allegiance to the new government), bishops and nuns. Massacres, rigged trials and summary executions were routine; and, throughout the country, the killing was often accompanied by one or another sadistic mockery of the beliefs of the victims — for instance, the rite of ‘republican matrimony’, which consisted in tying a naked priest to a naked nun and drowning them together in a lake or pool. Even after the Terror had subsided, the persecution of Catholic clergy continued, ending only when the revolutionary regime itself was replaced by the rule of Napoleon (1769-1821), who in 1801 signed a Concordat with Rome restoring (limited) liberties to the Church in France.

However, a pattern had been established that other ‘utopian’ revolutionary movements of later years would repeat, on an ever greater scale: a radical hostility to religion, emphasized by mass murder.

The Nineteenth Century: A Time Of Radical Doubt
By the end of the 19th century, the decline of Christianity in Western Europe that began in the early modern period seemed irreversible, and had come moreover to be regarded by many as representing the natural course of history, for all of humanity. The educated classes of the continent had more and more detached themselves from the faith of their ancestors, and atheism had even begun to acquire the kind of quiet respectability in some circles it bad never enjoyed in any previous age. To some, the decline of Christianity was a cause for rejoicing; to others, it was simply a cultural fact, probably to be rued. Whatever the case, a great many thought they could foresee a time when religion would vanish entirely.

Elegies For Faith
Throughout the 19th century; of course, the vast majority of Europeans were not only nominal Christians, but in all likelihood believers of some variety or another. In absolute numbers, skeptics and unbelievers constituted a distinct minority; but they were an increasingly public minority; and their explicit rejection of received belief was in many ways symptomatic of a more general loosening of traditional Christianity’s hold over the imagination of Western culture.

The causes of this larger cultural movement are impossible to isolate with any certainty: No doubt some were material, some intellectual, some social and some more or less unquantifiable. In part, the rise of a literate middle class in an age of discovery had created a culture in which differing ‘narratives of reality’ naturally multiplied. In part, the early modem disintegration of Christendom into often irreconcilable versions of Christianity had served to make all dogmatic claims seem somewhat less credible. And, in part, a general (if not necessarily logical) sense that the modern scientific picture of the universe was somehow irreconcilable with Christian doctrine began to take hold. But the phenomenon of ‘secularization’ has no single explanation.

Many reflective observers of the time — even many who were themselves no longer believers — wrote of the new reality in distinctly elegiac tones, aware that with the departure of faith, much of what had in the past given form and meaning to existence, and had provided hope and solace to those most in need of these things, had also disappeared, and aware also that the moral nature of a society devoid of religious belief might not necessarily be something in which one could vest much confidence. The most famous expression of ‘wistful unbelief’ was ‘Dover Beach’, the 1867 poem by Matthew Arnold (1822-88), with its imagery of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ‘sea of faith’, and of a world devoid of joy, love, light, certitude, peace or help for pain, in which the poet descries only ‘a darkling plain! Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night’. Less known, however (deservedly, perhaps), is the poem ‘God’s Funeral’ by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), written around 1908, which describes a vision of a funeral cortege upon a ‘twilit plain’, bearing the ‘mystic form’ of the dead God away: a procession in which, as it progresses, more and more mourners join. The poet confesses his own sorrow over the loss of something he too once had prized, and speaks longingly of those times long past when one began the day ‘with trustful prayer’ and ended it in assurance of God’s presence. Now ‘who or what shall fill his place?’ And, says Hardy, ‘how to bear such loss I deemed! The insistent question for each animate mind’.

Nature Red In Tooth And Claw
Without question, no greater blow was struck against conventional religious belief in the 19th century than the 1839 publication of The Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin for the first time publicly unfolded the concept of special evolution, as something accomplished over vast periods of time by fortunate mutation and natural selection. Though Darwin did not there discuss the evolution of humanity the implications of his thought were obvious; and those implications became explicit with the 1871 publication of The Descent of Man.

To the most literalist readers of scripture, of course, Darwin’s ideas were scandalous simply because they contradicted the creation story of Genesis; but the ancient Christian practice of reading that story allegorically had never died out in Christian culture, and there were many 19th-century Christians who found the idea of special evolution entirely inoffensive. One of Darwin’s earliest and most vigorous champions, the extremely accomplished American botanist Asa Gray (1810-88), was a devout Christian who saw such evolution as a manifestation of God’s creative power in the fabric of nature. The true challenge Darwin’s books posed to the Christian vision of reality was not so much one of logic as one of sensibility: it was not so much the idea of evolution as such, but that of the mechanism of natural selection, that seemed to exercise a corrosive effect upon the power of the imagination to see the world in a Christian light. Darwin’s argument summoned up before the mind of his society an image of the world as a reality governed at once by heartless necessity and mindless chance, shaped by countless epochs of death, and struggle, and blind striving. Could such a world have been created by the Christian God?

Masters Of Suspicion
In truth, the 19th century gave birth to all the great schools of post-religious’ or materialist’ thought that have either explicitly or invisibly formed late modern culture at its deepest levels: the most notable of these being modern psychology and modern social theory Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was, of course, the most important figure for the development of the former, and though his reputation has perhaps declined somewhat in recent years, the ‘mythos’ of human consciousness created by him remains very much intact. For Freud, the self is — rather than a soul with an eternal nature — a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires, secret resentments, tacit memories and conflicting sexual urges reside. Freud, moreover, firmly believed that, as science advanced, and as the science of the mind progressively defeated supernatural thinking, the ‘illusion’ of religion — whose origin he ascribed in large measure to the human fear of death — would melt away

Of all the theorists of 19th century Europe who attempted to construct a vision of the social or political good in unambiguously materialist terms, obviously none was niore influential than Karl Marx (1818-83), the father of a somewhat heterodox form of revolutionary socialism. Marx’s reputation has also suffered considerably over the past century; but, again, his vision of politics, culture and society as creations of a ‘material dialectic’, and of history as driven almost exclusively by class struggle and economic motives, profoundly affected the thought even of many of his detractors. And, if nothing else, the 20th century demonstrated the enormous power of his sort of atheist utopianism radically to transform (and often to destroy) whole societies.

Another school of social theory that attached itself to socialist economics and ‘progressive’ thought at the end of the 19th century — with worse than tragic consequences — was that of eugenics. Its principles were first clearly enunciated in the 1860s by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), and its aims were shared by many of the most ‘enlightened’ minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries including, it seems, Darwin himself. Many who embraced this movement believed they were simply drawing the conclusions dictated by Darwinian science: if they reasoned, natural selection is the mechanism by which a species thrives and improves, then civilization should not be allowed to retard this process among human beings, and carriers of hereditary defects, as well as those who are racially, morally or mentally ‘inferior,’ should ideally be prevented from reproducing. Of course, logically speaking, to mistake Darwinian biology for a moral imperative is rather absurd; but the eugenic premise was widely accepted by liberal-minded individuals and states for decades. ln the early 20th century, many of the traditionally Protestant countries of Europe, as well as the USA, Canada and Australia, admitted certain eugenic principles into law And it was not unusual to read an idealistic socialist like H. G.Wells (1866-1946) calmly predicting a day when entire races would have to be exterminated for the good of the species.

Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Prophet of AntiChrist
In the writings of no other thinker of the 19th century did the voice of unbelief reach so pure and piercing a pitch as in those of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the brilliant classicist, philologist and philosopher.

Nietzsche was the most coherent interpreter of faith’s decline, the most uncompromising advocate of a post-religious ethos, and the most vehemently anti-Christian philosopher of his or any era. He believed that the triumph of Christianity had been a catastrophe for Western humanity one that had elevated the slavish and resentful values of the weak and ill- -constituted over the noble, life-affirming and healthy virtues of the strong and guileless. He also thought that Christi n tales of heavenly reality had drained the earth of meaning, that the ‘moral’ distinction between good and evil was a perversion of human values, and that the gospel’s concern for the frail and meek, and its cult of pity, had poisoned the wellsprings of human nature. He did not hesitate to speak of himself as an ‘antichrist.

Nietzsche was not, however, entirely sanguine in his prognostications for a future without God. He feared that, in the absence of any higher aspiration, humanity might degenerate into those he called the ‘Last Men’ (die Jetzten Menschen), an insect-like race of vapid narcissists, sunk in petty satisfactions. But he hoped that humanity might rouse itself from the stupor induced by two millennia of Christianity to will ‘that which is beyond the merely human’: the ‘Overman’ (der Ubermensch), that inspiring but indefinable hero or artist or leader to whose advent humanity might yet aspire, if it still had the strength to affirm earthly life rather than succumb to an ultimate nihilism.

In a famous passage from The Gay Science  (1882) Nietzsche relates the fable of a madman who comes into a city to announce the ‘death of God’ that is, the end of human faith in the transcendent: an event of such immense significance that the very horizons of our world have been ‘sponged away’. But no one knows what to make of his words. Even those who have ceased to believe in God cannot understand how momentous his message is. So the madman leaves, knowing that it may be centuries before humanity grasps what the death of God has meant: what an utter revision of all values it must bring about, and how utterly it will transform all things human.