Tag: disenchanted universe

Whom Are You Going to Believe?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Jody Bottom (thanks to our Pennsylvania correspondent)?

Western disenchantment was a complicated phenomenon. The general rejection of sacraments in Protestant religious sensibility acted as only one of what Weber (borrowing from Goethe) called the “elective affinities” of modernity. The bureaucratization required by the powerful new nation-states is another of those affinities that helped produce the modern world — as are the prestige of mathematical science (particularly after Descartes), the new social relations created by the rise of the middle class, the enthusiasm for democracy, and the hatred of Catholic religious authority implicit in Enlightenment philosophy. (And often explicit; notice, for instance, the affinities of democracy and anti-Catholicism blending indistinguishably in Diderot’s oft-quoted philosophe epigram, “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”)

Still, the disenchantment of the world quickly came to define the powerful Protestant cultures of Western civilization, and it infected far too many of the Catholic cultures, as well. The “great enchanted garden” of traditional societies, as Weber called it, withered to small growths on the verges and glebes. . . .

Come, leave the city, walk out in the fields, and see the night’s vast planetarium for what it is — the stars dancing in their formal Newtonian quadrillions, in honor of God’s order, even while Aries fears for his golden fleece and Andromeda longs for rescue. The world is graced with magic and wonder, Christ’s sacrifice pours through creation, and infinity lives in a grain of sand. All truths blend toward the one truth. Come, we were blind, but now, if only we open our eyes, we see.

(sort of puts a crimp in Keller’s Holy Urbanism)

Or Paul, the apostle?

7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 11 For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.

13 Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, 14 knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. 15 For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self his being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

You don’t need to turn the world into a sacrament to avoid fleeing it. (By the way, are not Scripture and Tradition supposed to cohere?)

Blame It on the Reformation (Part 1)

Published on by D. G. Hart527 Comments

In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap/Harvard), Brad S. Gregory tries to account for the Reformation’s role in the disenchantment of the medieval cosmos and the eventual dominance of a secular, scientific understanding of the universe:

Protestant reformers sought to restore a proper understanding of the relationship between God and creation as they respectively understood it. Nevertheless, some of their departures from the traditional Christian view seem to have implied univocal metaphysical assumptions in ways that probably did contribute to an eventual conception of a disenchanted natural world. One such departure was their variegated rejection of sacramentality as it was understood by the Roman church, not only with respect to the church’s seven sacraments, but also as a comprehensive, biblical view of reality in which the transcendent God manifests himself in and through the natural, material world.

I have been in conversations before with Roman Catholics about a sacramental view of the universe and it still leaves be flummoxed. It is akin to the Reformed w-w phenomenon where Christianity is nothing unless it provides a comprehensive account of everything. Aside from such similarities, a sacramental view of the universe where nature is filled with grace (and according to Gregory makes plausible the weekly real presence of Christ in the Mass) would seem to undermine the significance and uniqueness of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. If God is present everywhere in a gracious and sacramental way, then why bother with the real sacraments? Gregory’s understanding of the “traditional” Christian view against which the Reformers reacted is not one apparently shared by the U.S. Bishops responsible for the Baltimore Catechism:

136. Q. What is a Sacrament?
A. A Sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.
137. Q. How many Sacraments are there?
A. There are seven Sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.
138. Q. Whence have the Sacraments the power of giving grace?
A. The Sacraments have the power of giving grace from the merits of Jesus Christ.
139. Q. What grace do the Sacraments give?
A. Some of the Sacraments give sanctifying grace, and others increase it in our souls.

I suppose Gregory is aware of this and would not want to say that a sunrise or a waterfall are sacraments. If that’s so, then he needs to qualify what he means by a “sacramental” view of the universe. But he doesn’t:

Desacramentalized and denuded of God’s presence via a metaphysical univocity and Occam’s razor, the natural world would cease to be either the Catholic theater of God’s grace or the playground of Satan as Luther’s princeps mundi. Instead, it would become so much raw material awaiting the imprint of human desires. (57)

Gregory’s failure to qualify sacramentality reminds me of a point that the sociologist Steve Bruce made effectively about the transcendent God professed by Jews and early Christians in contrast to the polytheistic religions of their contemporaries. Here I borrow a few paragraphs from A Secular Faith which follow Bruce:

Christianity’s friendliness to if not encouragement of the secular is just as obvious to those who evaluate not only the differences between East and West, or between Christian and Muslim, but the rise and development of modernity, for some the much feared engine of secularization in Europe and North America. Steve Bruce, a British sociologist of religion, observes that one of the key factors in modernization is another infelicitous word, to which sociology is prone, rationalization. By this he means the eradication of the cosmic order typical of civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia in which distinctions between the natural and supernatural worlds, or between the human and non-human were fluid or non-existent. In effect, the divine was bound up with the cosmos, immanent in and throughout the world. But with rise of monotheism in ancient Israel, God became radically transcendent and other. As Bruce explains, the God of Israel “was so distanced from [his followers] as to be beyond magical manipulation.” This deity’s laws could be known and had to be obeyed, but he could not be “bribed, cajoled, or tricked into doing his worshipers’ will.” Bruce argues that in the same way that ancient Judaism introduced a transcendent God into ancient near eastern religion, Christianity did the same in the Roman Empire where previously “a horde of gods, or spirits, often behaving in an arbitrary fashion and operating at cross purposes, makes the relationship of supernatural and natural worlds unpredictable.” Christianity “systematized” the supernatural and made religion much less a matter of magic than a code of conduct or right response to divine order.

Although Roman Catholicism, in Bruce’s scheme, began to remythologize the cosmos and people the universe with angels, saints, and other “semi-divine beings,” the Protestant Reformation “demythologized” the world. . . . For Bruce, Protestantism “eliminated ritual and sacramental manipulation of God, and restored the process of ethical rationalization.” Historians of science have argued that this sort of rationalization was key to the development of scientific discovery. As Bruce explains, “Modern science is not easy for cultures which believe that the world is pervaded by supernatural spirits or that the divinities are unpredictable” because systematic inquiry into the natural world assumes that “the behaviour of matter is indeed regular.” Consequently, with Protestantism the domain over which religion “offered the most compelling explanations” narrowed considerably. In fact, the Protestant Reformation’s secularizing impulse reduced the power of the church and “made way for a variety of thought and for the questioning of tradition which is so vital to natural science.” (247-48)

Gregory makes it clear that he is not comfortable with the disenchanted world of modern science. But what he does not apparently consider is that such disenchantment follows from a rigorously monotheistic faith where God is completely other, except when he intervenes miraculously to reveal himself to his creatures. In between those breakthroughs, humans have no definite knowledge of what God is up to, or what developments in history or nature mean. Discomfort with a God who is beyond our ways and who only reveals himself in limited (though blessed) ways seems to be one reason why people are hostile to Calvinism (and may even explain why neo-Calvinists want to break down distinctions between the sacred and secular — they want the universe to be an obvious theater not of God’s grace but of Christ’s sovereignty).