There’s a recently published essay, Sex After Christianity, which is interesting and insightful and tells a sketchy story of the loss of Christianity in the United States (probably the entire West), a story which might be sketchy but is more plausible than what you might gather from the way most Christians speak and far more plausible than the Nixonian gibberish about the “moral majority.” Mr. Dreher points to some standard scholarly studies of American social views which showed we were a sexually `liberated’ people even back in the decades before the 1960s. A strong version of this claim was recently raised by a scientist’s discovery that Penicillin, Not the Pill, May Have Launched the Sexual Revolution. Once the dangers of syphilis were thwarted, Americans were hitting the sack with a variety of partners not their spouses, and this by the 1950s, not the 1960s. See A Medicine Which Saved Lives and Destroyed Moral Order? for my take on this situation.
Even mainstream histories of the United States, more than a little whitewashed, will tell the tale of Americans being radical individualists, making their own moral and social rules, by the 1700s or so, as soon as a little prosperity freed them from traditional dependencies. From the beginning, we Americans have been willing to give much, our freedom or our souls, in return for a good paycheck and benefits but we don’t readily bow to the authority of family or other human communities, not even Church. Heck, God Himself has no right to tell us how to think or feel or act, unless He sends us lots of pennies from Heaven and even then… In other words, we Americans, and others in the modern West, are little different in our raw moral characteristics from other human beings for all our feelings of being special.
In Mr. Dreher’s essay, Sex After Christianity, we can read:
[I]n the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.
How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.
I would rephrase things, would write of civilization requiring us to shape ourselves to certain habits of mind and heart and hands rather than speaking of deprivation, but the analysis is basically spot-on and the entire essay is good as an analysis of our loss of respect for Christian views of marriage. Yet, there is something amiss. I’ll concentrate on the strange gap: the acknowledgment of the loss of a “meaningful cosmos” with also an apparent loss of Christian initiative resulting in the failure to even try to find a newly meaningful cosmos. The best our Christian intellectuals seem able to hope for is to patch-up the old “meaningful cosmos.” Why bother with the inconvenient fact, as one example, that our Christian view of human nature in the West comes from St. Augustine’s endorsement of the “fall from a state of grace” understanding of the story of Adam and Eve, an understanding he knew and presented as being in conflict with his alternative speculation that men arose within the natural world, not as a special creation in a special state of grace. In this other view, men arose from lower species. We now know men did so arise and we apparently have few thinkers so smart as Augustine as to see we need to radically rework our understanding of human nature. Fr. Stanley Jaki, the polymath scholar, labeled Augustine’s decision to go with “fall from state of grace” as the most damaging and most cowardly intellectual act in history; and Fr. Jaki was mostly a big admirer of Augustine. We Christians did our best to move out of this cosmos a long time ago; we are perhaps only now learning we have to live in the cosmos as God made it and not as we would like it.
Mr. Dreher sees that we Christians must struggle on cosmological grounds rather than moralistic grounds. So there are some other Christians who agree with me on that issue but there are, so far as I know, none who are willing to actually engage my efforts to so struggle, to join with me in assent or respectful debate aimed at some better view. The readership of my blog grows slowly and there are increasing numbers of downloads of my books, even into countries where Christian writings are, shall we say, frowned upon, but I see few signs that others are actively agreeing with my way of carrying out this struggle or trying to develop other ways. Yet, it’s early in this sort of struggle, a sort which is carried out over centuries of seeming peace interspersed by open conflict. In a manner of speaking, God began seriously irritating me about 30 years ago and forced me into a desert 25 years ago. I shouldn’t expect others to be able to re-turn toward God’s Creation any faster than did I. And the initial stages of looking into a blinding light, of learning to tolerate it and responding to it in such a way as to reshape your own self, are—shall we say—painful in ways described well by my confirmation saint, St. John of the Cross.
We have no meaningful cosmos and we have plenty of analyses which tell us this, all from a group of viewpoints describable as baptized paganism. See Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small and Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason for my analyses of speeches by Pope Benedict XVI, a man who was far too good for our age just because he had shaped himself to the task of helping us to leave the Christian “intellectual ghetto” as Etienne Gilson, a man of similar outlook and temperament, termed the places where we hide from God and His Creation. In the speech which is the subject of the second essay, Pope Benedict XVI told us: “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.” In any case, Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope and before that, has failed to accomplish much in this area during his own public career. We can only pray he planted many seeds.
Over these 25 years, I’ve moved toward a complete Christian understanding of Creation, stuff and relationships and narratives and so forth. My main blog, Acts of Being is something of an intimidating pile of essays written at an average pace of six a month or so since the middle of 2006. There are also some relevant essays at my other blog (it exists but is no longer active), To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
I’ve collected and partially organized most of those essays in book form, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2012, and it can be freely downloaded; it includes references to other downloadable books in the Overview. This collection is somewhat of a work in progress as I have no editors nor any coworkers; a bad situation since I’m inclined to carelessness such as the tendency to read what I meant to write rather than what I did write. Many essays need to be cleaned up and lots of typographical improvements could be made, but I think the substance is the best any Christian thinker can offer in response to the questions raised in the modern world, questions answerable only by producing an understanding of Creation through use of both revealed knowledge and modern empirical knowledge, both subjected to speculation.
In the above referenced essay, Sex After Christianity, Mr. Dreher writes, “You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).” Of course, natural-law theory convinces no one; it’s based upon an understanding of nature, of created being, of God’s way of telling this story which is our world; but our current natural-law theories are based upon an understanding which is centuries old and which ignores modern empirical knowledge—knowledge of nature, an understanding which sounds like gibberish to young men and women in our society, young men and women who’ve been watching documentaries about genes and evolution as well as historical documentaries which present a bad image of Christian civilization by telling the truth. That these documentaries, and much of the teaching in schools, are out of context is not the fault of the modern secularists and pagans but rather that of the Christians who had a great civilization and failed to protect it and nurture it.
Apparently, we Christians had better things to do than preserve the Christian civilization which was the work of multitudes of our ancestors over many centuries. Or maybe there have simply not been enough Christians in recent centuries to form a viable cultural mass. In any case, most human beings, other than speculative thinkers, are not to be persuaded. They are usually to be raised to be part of a story, whether the creation myths and heroic legends of a tribe or the more fact-based, but often ideologically deformed, histories of the modern West or any of its major regions. What’s shocking from this angle is the ease with which such thinkers as Locke and Kant were able to deform a Christian viewpoint into a de-communalized and, consequently, secularized viewpoint. The struggle for salvation became the journey toward the Big Rock Candy Mountain, at least in the United States.
In earlier writings, Joseph Ratzinger wrote of moral irresponsibility on the part of modern Christians who had inherited a treasure of a civilization and then failed to care for it. Etienne Gilson had written of a failure to provide Christian answers to the modern questions (circa 1800) followed by a retreat into a Christian intellectual ghetto. In a similar vein, though it might appear different at first, Hermann Melville spoke of a streak of moral insanity in the American character, an insanity which was a rebellion against God and His Creation not quite good enough for us Americans. Melville was seconded by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. at least so far as Emerson and Thoreau were concerned; these oh-so American philosophers despised communal human nature, that of—ultimately—the Body of Christ. Again, Americans had already turned away from the God of Jesus Christ more than a century ago and perhaps well before that. How many ways can I point out that this was never a Christian country?
In my recently released and freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, I propose a general Christian understanding, more exact as well, of human being. This understanding pays no attention to metaphysical categories such as those of vice and virtue, concentrating instead upon the effort to develop a moral order which builds upon our stuff as understood through our best empirical knowledge but disciplines it to our best understanding of God’s story. This understanding also assumes that we were born and live to participate in the growth and development of the Body of Christ. It may or may not prove another charge against Christianity that I found myself relying upon insightful analyses of the communal nature of Biblical religions made by the Jewish thinkers Jacob Neusner and Abraham Heschel; Martin Buber also is in the background though not explicitly mentioned.
Let me head in a truly positive direction… Christianity is imperialistic. The human race needs a Christian civilization, not because any Christian institutions can be said to be objectively superior to other human institutions but rather because the Body of Christ is the entirety of what is worthwhile in individual and communal human being, what is to be saved into everlasting form. The Church Herself is an organ in the Body of Christ, the organ of worship and moral conscience. She must serve God’s story primarily, serving even the poor not in some knee-jerk, bleeding-heart way but in the way dictated by that story. Politics must play its proper role as well as poetry, the deployment of technology as well as the esthetic aspects of architecture, our worship and the management of our religious communities as well as our ethnic-cultural activities, should be the best they can be by serving God in His freely chosen role as Creator and story-teller. The Body of Christ is so complex a `network’ of individual and communal human beings as likely to be yet beyond the descriptive capabilities of our best modern sciences. Christian theology and philosophy have yet to respond to God’s Creation as we now see it and, consequently, have yet to join ranks with `modern sciences’. When this happens, Christian thinkers will be able not only to make sense of what we have learned about Creation; they will be able to help shape and direct the future explorations of Creation.
Modern empirical knowledge of human beings plain and simply doesn’t seem to fit into our inherited categories. Vice and virtue, emotion and feeling and thought and act, don’t seem to provide good structures for a proper understanding of human nature. (Once again, see my recently released book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for very preliminary discussions of this and related issues.) It’s certainly relevant to discussions of any plausible understanding of marriage that modern scientists have found `male-ness’ has more to do with brain structure and brain processes than with bulging muscles or even the penis, but there’s nothing in Christian anthropological theories that could make sense of the humorously serious comment a brain-scientist made decades ago: the brain is the primary human sex organ. To Christian intellectuals, a certain human being is male and, thus, God put a male brain in his skull. Very simple. Makes no sense in the context of modern knowledge of individual and communal human being, but it’s very simple.
We like simple and don’t care for all the evidence that God shaped a world in which time and space are best described by differential geometry rather than the straightforward Euclidean geometry which generated such simple views of eternity and of the physical relationship of Heaven and Hell. We like simple and don’t care much for the evidence that God shaped human being out of nonliving matter by way of sometimes violent and bloody evolutionary processes rather than putting the life in Adam by way of an act of magic.
This all does matter to all aspects of a Christian understanding of Creation. I wrote in the previous paragraph about our preference for the simplicity of Euclidean geometry over that of differential geometry. We should note that a Ptolemaic, Aristotelian, Euclidean view of Creation allowed Dante to write his Divine Comedy and that view was the best available at the time, accepted by scientists and philosophers as well as theologians and poets. We can no longer speak in coherent or explicit terms of Heaven and Hell—modern Christians are great hand-wavers—just because any efforts to speak thus would lead to absurdities until we learn how to speak of God’s Creation in terms compatible with what we know of our Universe, that realm of His Creation which has been explored and analyzed with such courage and honesty and energy in recent centuries. When those who try to proclaim the Christian truths have no way to speak of Christian Heaven, the world of the resurrected in my terms, is it any wonder than many are losing their faith in the main Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus? How can they believe in their own possible resurrections as part of the Body of Christ? If Christ has not risen from the dead, our sacrifices of sexual pleasures are in vain. If Christ has risen from the dead, where could He possibly be? I have a tentative answer which is more than hand-waving, but no one seems interested in exploring that answer with me, and I have only 24 hours in my days.
We Christians have not done our duty. We have not kept that Easter message alive in the language and concepts of the modern world and we can no longer say that Christ rose from the dead, literally, in the flesh and in His divinity, without sounding like actors in a toga movie or outright lunatics. This is our fault and not that of the enemies of Christianity and certainly not the fault of the young men and women who have left the Church in recent years.
Lost in a Sexually Polymorphous Cosmos | ChristianBookBarn.com
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