Secular modernity and the divisions in the Church

“The Catholic does not shrink from the world’s boundless horizon, and he does not abandon a supposedly ‘secularized age’ for some safe inner sanctum; rather, he robustly spells out everything—Church and world—using the alphabet he has learned from Christ.”—Hans Urs von Balthasar¹

Perhaps the saddest characteristic of the battles going on within the Church these days is the fact that both sides so easily allow themselves to frame the issues in modern, political terms. If the world shall have its New York Times and its New York Post, then the Church shall have its National Catholic Reporter and its National Catholic Register, and one side shall be called “liberal” and the other shall be called “conservative.”

Part of the problem is the assumption that one can work out one’s Catholicism within the categories and presuppositions of secular modernity and the Classical Liberalism that gave birth to it. This needs to be challenged.

Classical Liberalism arose as a response to the fragmentation of Christendom resulting from the Protestant Reformation and the resulting loss of the unifying vision of reality which Catholicism provided for the Middle Ages. Of course, I do not deny the real divisions and debates of the Middle Ages.

The solution, in broad terms, was to invent a purely “secular” politics, one based on a very thin description of the origins and role of the political, coupled with the privatization and marginalization of religion and, over time, even any thick description of the good. What was to unify people going forward was something like a “lowest common denominator” upon which all (private) parties could agree. Only secularism, so the story goes, secures peace.

While this doesn’t sound like a bad solution on the surface, there are serious problems. First, the “thin” understanding of the origin and role of the political and the “lowest common denominator” values to which all parties could allegedly commit themselves, turns out, under scrutiny, not to be so thin or common as claimed. On the one hand, the account was much more indebted to standard Christian thought than it cared to admit. This is one of Nietzsche’s central insights. The things which Thomas Jefferson, to take one example, holds to be “self-evident” are simply not self-evident to, say, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Marxist, a determinist, a nihilist, an atheist, and so on.

On the other hand, the values turned out to be decidedly Protestant and even distinctively modern, as in, based on a novel understanding of nature, human knowledge, freedom, the human person, the political, the religious, the Church, to name just a few of the more important topics. In each of these cases, in thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and all the way down to Rawls, we see a rejection of the Greco-Catholic synthesis which reached its high point in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but also finds expression in the Church’s social doctrine (a “third” way!).

This is not the place to go into the details, but to mention just a few things, the mainstream modern view is a rejection: 1) of truth as a transcendental property of being: which is just a fancy way of saying that truth, which has its origins in God, is in the objects we encounter in the world; 2) of the philosophical realism that goes with this: that is, that our minds put us in touch with the truth of things as they really are, even if in an always imperfect way; 3) of the notion that human freedom is natural and not, first, by choice ordered to the Good and has a natural obligation to it; 4) that the human person is naturally social and that, therefore, the political does not arise, first, out of a social contract, but stems from and fulfils our human nature; 5) that religion is a natural human phenomenon that comes with a natural obligation to give thanks to the Origin of all that is (i.e., that “religion” is not first a matter of private, individual choice).

What happens in this new order is that old words get filled with new meanings: freedom, rights, religion, secular, politics, economics, sex, human being, and so forth. It is here that my friend D. C. Schindler likes to remind us of the old Steven Wright joke wherein a man steps out into his apartment one morning only to find that all of his things have been swapped out for identical replicas. When his roommate comes out, he asks, “Did you notice that all of our things have been swapped out?” To which the roommate replies, “Do I know you?”

In other words, we Catholics have gone on using these words without realizing that although they sound and look the same, they have taken on radically—to the root—different meanings in our now Liberal order.

Notice how “conservative” and “liberal” Catholics, for instance, agree to frame the abortion debate in terms of a rights struggle between two Hobbesian (and therefore competing) individuals! Notice how such a debate presupposes without question the Classical Liberal notion that there are scarce goods and that we are fundamentally and selfishly pursuing those goods and that, therefore, we need a State to come in and protect our rights from each other. In what commonsense view of the world would we ever come to think of an unborn baby as being in competition with its mother for scarce goods, and vice versa? We fail to realize, because we’ve unthinkingly thought this way for so long, how thoroughly ideological is such an account of the issues at hand. Not to mention how antithetical it is to a Christian account. When Adam sees Eve in the Garden he doesn’t say, “Oh no, she’s going to take my stuff!” He sings, with Etta James, “At last….”

This commitment to modernity, which has a particularly Americanist flavor on this side of the pond, is nothing less that mind-boggling. And it renders impossible genuine dialogue within the Church, for genuine dia-logos (literally, “through reason”) is impossible without an agreed set of first principles. The first principles of all genuinely Catholic dialogue would be the articles of faith, and the worldview that grows out of those articles, and it should be noted that those articles were defined as carefully as they were because of the Greco-Roman-Christian synthesis which provided the foundation for discourse between Christians (even of East and West!) until this synthesis was rejected at the beginning of the modern era.

Alas, it is this dominant strand of modern thought that has formed what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary,” that is, the milieu out of which we think, even we Catholics.

It should go without saying that the solution to our problem does not consist in our abandonment of the modern, secular world and a retreat to the Middle Ages. The questions raised by modernity, like the questions raised in previous eras of the Church (e.g., What do we do with this Aristotle fellow? Or, “Is Jesus just a creature?”), can aid the Church in various ways in its self-understanding. This is the central and correct insight of Vatican II, and it would be a failure of mission and of evangelization to abandon the modern world.

But the Catholic can do the modern world no good whatsoever if he has forgotten how to think and talk like a Catholic, if he has so deeply breathed the air of modern secularism that his talk has become indistinguishable from that of Terry Gross or Tucker Carlson.

Allow me to close by stating the thesis as boldly as I know how. Human beings who live in space and time are always going to interpret the world through a cultural-linguistic lens. Because of the weakness of human reason (see the first question of Thomas’s Summa), God has not seen fit to leave us groping for the ultimate meaning of things. Rather, he has offered us his definitive self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, the Truth in person. With the aid of natural reason (and philosophy), the Church has given us a grammar for how to think of the world in the light of Christ, “whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages” (Heb 1:2), and through whom “all things were made…and without [whom] not anything was made that was made” (Jn 1: 3).

We will either interpret the world through this God-given grammar, as safe-guarded in Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium, or we will interpret it through some other grammar.

Alas, the dialogue that occurs in the medium of the predominant grammar of our age will only ever rise to the level of a dialogue between two Liberals, even if one is “conservative” and the other is “liberal.” The time is ripe, then, for us Catholics to re-learn how to think and speak and even frame the issues as Catholics, for only then will we be able to dialogue with each other within the common language/grammar which makes all genuine dialogue possible, but also with the world who so desperately needs a perspective from outside of the cave of hegemonic Liberalism.

Indeed, those of us who have caught a glimpse of and taken every thought captive to Jesus Christ must be willing to enter back into that cave with new eyes in order to be its light. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1: 5), even if it feels like sometimes it has.

Endnotes:

¹ “On the Christian’s Capacity to See,” in Explorations in Theology, V: Man Is Created (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 71.

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