No Turning Back (either to Christendom or Secularism)

[HondurasKeiser]

David Bentley Hart has a typically dense review of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's latest collections of essays, After God over at Commonweal. I have never before read or even heard of Sloterdijk, much less his philosophy and so the first half of Hart's review was particularly difficult to follow. The second half however drew me in inasmuch as it seemed to jibe with a kind of Anabaptist critique of the Church's historical love-hate relationship with the State both during Christendom and up to the present of what he calls "late-Secularism'. For Hart, Christendom was a 'fruitful catastrophe' that sowed the seeds of its own destruction in what was to become Secularism (though that epoch too has run its own contradictory course). Hart hints at what might come next and I cannot help but to read my own Anabaptist desires onto that hinting. It certainly frees us from the current options on offer in American Christianity that seem to want either Integralism, Nationalism, Therapy or Deconstruction. I wonder if anyone might like to discuss the essay and what might be coming. As a last thought - and about that last thought: My reading of a lot of different Christians and their various diagnoses of the problems of late modernity/late post-modernity is the notion that this epoch is ending and something else is on the horizon though few if any are able to articulate what that might even look like. Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Rod Dreher, Sohrab Ahmari, Alisdair McIntyre, R.R. Reno, George Weigel - all in their own way seems to sense that huge epochal shifts are underway with respect to how we view the world, organize our society and relate to religion. Heck, even my wife on the way home the other day mentioned, off-handedly that everything feels like it's coming to an end - not that Christ is necessarily coming back tomorrow - but that the current structures and securities and givens and assumptions are crumbling. She doesn't have an 'apocalyptical personality' so I took her remark to heart. I'll leave it at that and wonder if I am the only one that has been pondering at the edges of these ideas.

What might Christians make of any of this story? Why should they care? Well, to begin with, they should acknowledge that Sloterdijk, in confirming Nietzsche’s diagnosis of God’s death in the developed world, is doing nothing more than stating an evident fact of history. The disappearance of that transcendent horizon of meaning and hope within whose commodious embrace just about all persons and cultures once subsisted is simply a fait accompli. The frantic extremism of the fundamentalisms and religious nationalisms and crypto-fascist integralisms of our current moment poignantly attests to the inconceivability for late modern culture of a God who is anything other than the construct of either the will to power or a desperate emotional need. None of them is a true sign of a revival of faith; all of them are only the hideous contractions of a deepening rigor mortis. And inasmuch as the genuinely living Christianity of the past was the vital wellspring of “Enlightenment” in the Western world, the departure of that Christianity from Western culture has carried away all those earlier possibilities of “co-immunity” that it had summed up in itself.

Epochs of the spirit are not reversible, or even susceptible of recapitulation. This is an Hegelian insight that no one should doubt: great historical and cultural transitions are not merely ruptures, but also moments of critique. The rationality of history lies in the ceaseless triumph of experience over mere theory, and so in the impossibility of any simple return to pre-critical naïvetés. Sooner or later, just about every cultural economy is defeated by its own inner contradictions, barring interruption of this natural process by a sudden foreign conquest. And the new order that succeeds it is probably no freer from contradictions of its own, which will be exposed in their turn. More to the point, every cultural order’s collapse is also the exhaustion of the synthesis that that culture embodied. Innocence yields to disenchantment, and disenchantment cannot revert to innocence.

Certainly this has proved so in the case of Christendom and its sequel, secularization. The Christendom of the empire or the nation state, being an alloy of two ultimately irreconcilable principles, inevitably subverted itself. It persisted for as long as it did by virtue of a genuinely organic cultic devotion with a durable practical and theoretical infrastructure. But its inherent contradictions ultimately destroyed that basis. The language and principles of the Gospel frequently illuminated the society that cherished them; the offices and powers of the state consistently sheltered, preserved, and advanced the religion that legitimated them. But the alliance was a suicide pact. The most devastating solvent of Christendom, in the end, was the ineradicable presence of Christianity within it. The corrosive force most destructive of Christianity as a credible source of social order was in the end the crushing burden of Christendom upon it.

Resistance to this destiny has always proved fruitless, precisely because it has tended to proceed from within the rationality of the old Christendom. In Catholic culture, for example, since at least the time of the Council of Trent, the struggle against the reality of the old order’s intrinsic fragility has been constant and utterly futile. It has been like an attempt to save a house already swallowed by the sea by adding new locks to its doors. Despite the countless cultural and social riches created by the unstable accommodation between the Gospel and empire—and even though many of those riches could yet perhaps be recovered within a new Christian synthesis—still the Christendom of the past was a fruitful catastrophe and its inevitable terminus was always secularism. And in the fullness of time, this secularism had to become a fully self-conscious metaphysical nihilism.

As for the liberal secular order that succeeded Christendom, its own inner stresses and volatilities are all too obvious. In the economic realm, it has created prodigies of material production and destruction, as well as forms of power and oppression on a scale formerly unimaginable. In the social realm, it has created ceaseless struggles among incompatible visions of the good while providing no clear transcendent index of values for adjudicating their conflicts. For better or worse, it has eliminated or marginalized almost all mediating or subsidiary forms of social agency and reduced meaningful social order to the interdependent but necessarily antagonistic claims of the state, capital, and the sovereign individual. And Sloterdijk is quite right: under such conditions, we have little defense against the ecological and social calamities that we have created for ourselves. So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.

[temporal1]

.. Heck, even my wife on the way home the other day mentioned, off-handedly that everything feels like it's coming to an end - not that Christ is necessarily coming back tomorrow - but that the current structures and securities and givens and assumptions are crumbling.

She doesn't have an 'apocalyptical personality' so I took her remark to heart.
I'll leave it at that and wonder if I am the only one that has been pondering at the edges of these ideas.

The over reaching turn toward tech+cold efficiency does not nurture souls.

[joey_the_ox]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

[joey_the_ox]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

[HondurasKeiser]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

What do you make of his concurrent turn towards universalism? Does one inform the other?

[joey_the_ox]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

What do you make of his concurrent turn towards universalism? Does one inform the other?

Good question. I don't have a well-formed opinion about it.

[HondurasKeiser]

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

What do you make of his concurrent turn towards universalism? Does one inform the other?

Good question. I don't have a well-formed opinion about it.

One of my sisters, who incidentally has taken a turn towards Catholicism of a Tridentine flavor, has also quasi-declared herself a universalist in large part due to the influence of DBH.

[joey_the_ox]

Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Rod Dreher, Sohrab Ahmari, Alisdair McIntyre, R.R. Reno, George Weigel - all in their own way seems to sense that huge epochal shifts are underway with respect to how we view the world, organize our society and relate to religion.

If I may add to your list, the folks at New Polity (https://newpolity.com/) have a point of view that I generally find compelling.

[barnhart]

...I wonder if anyone might like to discuss the essay and what might be coming... I'll leave it at that and wonder if I am the only one that has been pondering at the edges of these ideas...

I am left with a similar feeling as reading Rod Dreher, most of the observations seems obviously true, the current order is under possibly fatal stress and dramatic change seems inevitable. But I can't summon the low level sense of panic.
General points I appreciated: 1. The nod to a Hegelian sense that the past is irretrievable. Not only so, it was undesirable in many ways. Bemoaning a lost period of greatness seems ineffective and disalligned with the hope of Jesus' message of a growing, ever present, literal kingdom. 2. The admission that Secularism is the natural outworking of Christendom. Both exist in the philosophical space opened by true faith in Jesus, all the while denying large parts of it. And there is an order, one will produce the other.

Several years ago our church hosted bro.Yun, a leader from the Chinese underground church noted for his book of recollections, "The Heavenly Man." I remember his limited English and how carefully and forcefully he made this statement, "In China there had never been a greater servant of God than chairman Mao." He went on to say no one has ever have created such hunger for the word of God. The future may be painful in many ways, but it will also be full of the glory of God. Those who see it will be full of vision for Jesus kingdom, not yearnings for the past.

[barnhart]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

Excellent.