USA > Connecticut > New London County > New London > Fiftieth Anniversary celebration publication, Connecticut College, 1911-1961 > Part 4
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
The process of secularization can be seen most easily in the New Testament in the transformation of the Greek concept of the cosmos into the Christian concept of the "world." The cosmos had been eternal and divine, full of gods, and it was man's final destination. The "world" is the area of human experience, time-bound, and typically the "this world" of sin (but remember that even though the world is regularly seen as the sphere where the devil now reigns supreme, the term itself is neutral, and Paul speaks, for example of God's reconciling the world to Himself through Christ. (II Corin- thians V. 19). And with this transformation of the cosmos into the world, we find a fundamentally changed statement of the context of human experience. The Greek stood in a single relationship to the cosmos; it was his home and his destination, and so was Israel for the Jew. The Christian, however, stands in a double relationship to the world, for while he is "in it," he is also "not of it."
The simplest statement of this new double relationship is found in Christ's prayer to his disciples: "I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of
34
the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. . .. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world" (John XVI, 14-16, 18).
The Greek was grounded in an eternal cosmos; the Jew was grounded in Jehovah's holy Israel. But while the Christian is sent "into the world," he is saved only insofar as through God's grace he is not "of the world." And we shall see this double relationship, almost a necessary consequence of secularization, appearing again and again in the West in different contexts.
Further, as the Christian in the New Testament is not of the world, he appears as in some sense its lord and master. Paul speaks of the Christian before salvation as "in bondage under the elements of the world" (Galatians IV, 3; see also IV, 9). Now that they have been saved, he glories to them: "All things are yours ... whether the world, or life or death, or the things which are present, or the things which are to come; all are yours. But you are Christ's and Christ is God's" (I Corinthians III, 21-23).
The second Christian movement with which we are concerned, that of relativization, is best seen in the New Testament in Paul's treatment of the Law, and his argument is primarily directed against the absolute claims of the Mosaic Law as a holy order, though he also takes account of the comparable Greek concept of the natural law. Paul writes in Romans that God sent the Jews the Law of Moses and that he also gave to the gentiles the law of nature. Both laws are divinely ordained, and each would suffice for those who used it rightly. But man in sin can be saved through neither of these, and salvation comes only through the grace of Christ. And Paul goes on from the relativization (which is almost a secularization) of the two laws, to a comparable relativization of Israel and Greece themselves: "There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord is over all" (Romans X, 12). "Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all in all" (Colossians III, 11).
In all of these passages, Paul is relativizing what had been absolute in Israel and Greece. He tells the Jews, proud in their possession of the law of Moses, that they are no better than the heathen Greeks. He tells the Greeks, proud in their culture and their philosophy, that they are no better than the Scythians, symbols of an illiterate barbarism.
And as the Christian in the New Testament doctrine of seculariza-
35
tion is above the world and somehow its master, so the Christian in the doctrine of relativization is somehow above all relativized laws and civilizations, and somehow their master. Paul boasts: "For being free of all men, I have made myself a slave to all men that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews, I became as a Jew. ... To them that are without the Law, as without the Law. . .. I am made all things to all men" (I Corinthians IX, 19-23). Or more generally, "All things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not" (I Corinthians X, 23).
To take stock once more, we have now examined a Christian state- ment which is still firmly committed to one position shared by Greece and by Israel: there is in the end an absolute necessity for individual decision and choice, for life cannot be lived merely by hearsay or without examination. But Christianity is here also committed to a more complicated position of its own, a position which no longer sees the man making these decisions as at home in an absolute holy order such as that of the Greek cosmos or the Jewish Law. The cos- mos has been secularized; the law has been relativized; and in con- sequence the Christian must always play a double role. He is sent into the world, but he is also in some way above the world and its master. He is a Greek or a Jew or a Scythian, but he is also in some way above and free of all Jewish or Greek or Scythian standards or laws. They do not in the end possess him; he must possess them.
There were of course a great many other things in Greece and Israel that I have not said anything about; there are a great many things in the New Testament that I have not said anything about. What I am attempting is a work of reduction to discover, if we can, the elements of the Western inheritance which bind us all today. And the Western inheritance will emerge, I believe, not as a com- plicated and detailed picture like the world-views of Israel or of Greece, but rather as the grouping of a very few, very simple, and very difficult commitments.
OUR problem now is to see how the original components of the Western inheritance, Greece, and Israel, and Christianity, fare in later history, and particularly in the history of the West itself, in Europe and America. But it should be noted in advance that in- heritances often have peculiar histories. In one sense it may be said that nothing of what we have noted was ever lost; throughout the
36
period with which we are concerned, the Old and New Testaments were always accessible and read, and even in the darkest periods at least the Latin writings of the Graeco-Roman inheritance were available. Perhaps more important, however, is that fact that the more radical and dynamic parts of the inheritance are constantly in danger of being ignored in favor of a solution in the form of a new single and absolute holy order. Thus, for example, in the history of Eastern Christianity, in Byzantium and in Czarist Russia, Christian- ity was to a large extent transformed into a new cosmology. The Byzantine Empire, for example, is interpreted as a copy of the King- dom of Christ, and it is difficult to find any trace of the movements of secularization and of relativization, which, I have argued, will be essential in the Western tradition for us. Similarly the first age of Western Europe, say from the time of Charlemagne through the middle of the eleventh century, again presents us with a Christian civilization which sees itself as an absolute and total holy order. All aspects of life are sacral and holy; all rule and government is sacra- mental, and the unction of a king transmits a divine grace as ef- ficaciously as the unction of a bishop.
But in Western Europe, the movements of secularization and of relativization, ultimately of Christian origin, gradually disintegrate this holy order to produce the modern West, and this is the process which we must now study.
The movement of secularization is the earlier, and here the first and perhaps the decisive step is taken by Pope Gregory VII at the end of the eleventh century. Gregory's main work is the destruc- tion of sacral or sacramental kingship. The king is a mere layman; he has no special sacramental grace; and his office is not specifically Christian at all. When Gregory VII thus secularizes kingship, by implication he secularizes all rule and government, and I do not see that in later Western history this secularization of government has ever been successfully undone.
In the second main stage of secularization, St. Thomas (1225-74), following in the path of Abelard (1079-1142) secularizes Christian reason. Man's knowledge, according to Thomas, is gained partly through his own reason, partly through revelation and faith. But while faith is always ultimately the more important, reason is valid in its own right and independent of Christianity. There is no speci- fically Christian reason; it is merely natural, to use Thomas' term, or what we have been calling secular and worldly. In part St.
37
Thomas is here attacking and modifying the earlier medieval Christian position of a single, holy order as seen, for example, in St. Anselm (1033-1109), for whom reason is never finally serious except as a way of meditating on faith. Perhaps more important for our purposes, Thomas is here attacking the Greek holy order as it was known to him through the writings of Aristotle. Thomas will ac- cept much of Aristotle's philosophy and much of Aristotle's "reason," but only on the condition that philosophy be limited to the worldly and natural sphere and on condition that reason itself be de- sacralized and excluded from any experience of the holy.
The third and last stage of Christian secularization is achieved by Martin Luther (1485-1546). While St. Thomas had distinguished between the natural and the supernatural, the worldly and the religious, he had also argued that the two could be combined within the unity of a Christian society or the unity of a Christian man; in his familiar generalization, "Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it" (e.g. Summa Theologica I, q. 1, a. 8 ad 2um). But if in Thomas the secular and the religious, the natural and the super- natural, can still be combined within the Christian's experience to form a harmonious whole, Martin Luther goes further and maintains that the worldly aspect of the Christian's experience is a total aspect.
According to Luther, the Christian has already been saved in heaven, and he participates this salvation through faith, but his heavenly justice is a passive justice which is hidden in Christ and which can never appear in the world. In the world, however, all things are worldly. The various forms of authority are God's masks; but God cannot be apprehended through the masks, and in the world we deal with God is hidden. Hence for Luther, the Christian leads a paradoxical existence in two separate realms. He is already saved in heaven; he continues to lead a life of merely secular justice on earth. Each realm is in some sense total, and while the Christian experiences them simultaneously, he cannot combine them.
With Luther then, we are far from Charlemagne and St. Anselm, and we have returned to a position on secularization which is in many ways similar to the radical aspects of the teachings of St. Paul noted earlier. Perhaps Luther's position seems to us even more extreme since it is a Christian and not a Greek or Jewish holy order which he is attacking. The world is merely the world, for Luther holds that only thus can God be God. Every man, even the Christian, is sent into the world, but the Christian through his salvation is also
38
above the world. Within the world man faces the various forms of authority which are the masks of God, but except for his awareness that these are the masks of God, the Christian knows no more about them than does anyone else. There is no such thing as a Christian morality or government or world-view. Further, within the world God subjects all to change and to history; the masks of authority which were binding for the Babylonians did not bind the Romans. And within the world, through the world, by the world no one is saved.
ONE might expect, perhaps, in the light of its extremeness and com- pleteness, that Luther's restatement of the Christian inheritance of secularization would have ended this development and that we should still face secularism in such a form. Actually, this is not what has happened. Luther's radical insights on the world were dis- missed, or at least relegated to obscurity by most of later Lutheran orthodoxy, and I do not think that Luther speaks directly to our common commitment in the modern world.
What happened is rather that from the early modern period we find the growth of secularism in a new context. This is no longer a secularism based on Christianity, which wishes the world to be the world so that God may be God. The new secularism instead wishes the world to be the world for the world's sake and as a final value. We have so far seen a number of world-views which claimed to be absolute and unique, Israel, Greece, or early Western Europe, but all of these claimed to be absolute and unique as holy orders. What we now have to examine is another attempt to set up a single abso- lute answer, best illustrated for most of us, I suppose, in the thought of the Enlightenment, where the absolute answer is asserted as simply natural and secular, a solution which far from relying on Christian or any other revelation, will prove all its points without recourse to revelation or religion or the holy.
I believe that it is this development which has led to the definition of the world which is binding on us of the West today, but a pro- found irony has presided over its history. Here was a movement of non-Christian or even anti-Christian character, and a movement whose aim was to make everything secular, to make the "world" total and exclusive. But its end result has been much nearer to the New Testament sense of "this world" than to the high hopes of its modern advocates.
39
The development produced a world of greatly increased knowl- edge and a world in which it was increasingly difficult to live hu- manly. It may have produced the world into which we have been "sent" in the language of the New Testament, or into which we have been "thrown," to use the language of modern existentialism, but it does not seem that we can really be "of" this new world; it cannot be our home or our destination. Secularism itself, one might suggest, has been secularized and relativized.
This is a most difficult development to analyze at all, let alone to do so briefly and simply, and I bespeak your tolerance. I shall use two main approaches. We shall first examine the tendencies of the modern world in terms of the ways we have of knowing it, and we shall do this for two main types of knowledge, natural science and history. Perhaps if we look at these basic modern ways of knowing, we shall be able to see something not only of what the world happens to be for us at a given time but also, and more important, what any "world" would have to be. Secondly, we shall look briefly at the different vision of the modern world as it appears not in our objective and common intellectual disciplines but as it is seen in the immediate awareness of philosophy and poetry. Here one must pick and choose, and I shall look briefly at the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889- ) and somewhat more at length at the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).
Let us look first at the development of a wordly natural science. In terms of the broadest history of thought what happened here in the early modern period was the transformation or disappearance of a Greek "cosmic" science in which man's mind intuited and compre- hended eternal essences and divine beings. With Christian seculariza- tion such a science became impossible. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), for example, writes in the fifteenth century that man can have only knowing ignorance of God and of Being; he can know only that he does not know. But God intended that man should study the crea- tures so that he might find out something about himself and about his creator. He can do this only by a process of comparison and measurement, and he compares and measures by a mathematics which he has himself constructed. (Compare De docta ignorantia I, 1 f. and De beryllo VI). And it is this new perspective, with its great renunciation of the wider aims of Greek science, which leads to the tremendous growth of modern science.
But as a result there have been crucial changes in the knowable
40
"world" in which man lived, for while a Greek could exist within the cosmos of Greek science, modern man cannot exist within the universe of modern science. First of all, as we have already seen, there is the exclusion of God and of Being from its world. Second, there is the exclusion of all questions of value and ultimate decision, since such terms always involve an arbitrary freedom which is excluded from the answer to the scientist's question (though of course remem- ber that the scientist does not argue that things do not exist because they are not the answer to his question). Here Machiavelli leads the way in his new science of government as he excludes the question of justice and the question of ought "But my intention being to write something of use to those who understand, it appears to me more proper to go to the effective truth of the matter than to its imagina- tion ... for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation" (The Prince XV). Thirdly, there is the exclusion of the ordinary world in which we live and its replacement by a world consisting only of num- bers arrived at operationally. In place of the cosmos there is the vision of infinite mathematical space filled only with geometrically defined extended objects. This is the universe from which Pascal re- coils in human terror, "Le silence éternal de ces espaces infinis m'effraie (Pensées III, #206). And lastly, it would seem that in recent years, in the oldest of the modern sciences, an even more extreme stage has been reached where the world disappears entirely as a humanly meaningful object. Man cannot make any models from his experience by which he can understand his formulae; through the formulae he can operate on nature, but he cannot comprehend that on which he operates. In the end the world in which man lives be- comes a hidden world, and man remains alone with strangeness. To use the words of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, "Thus even in science, the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature. Here, again, man confronts himself alone."2
Let there be no doubt of my hearty support of this development. It seems to me that we are committed to this science by the very heart of our tradition which will settle nothing by hearsay and which will accept nothing without examination. But I think it is also clear that the science to whose questions we are committed and which from one aspect determines our "world" involves not merely a triumph but also a possible desperation. We have perhaps found a world into
41
which we are sent, but we can only protest that humanly speaking we are not "of it."
The modern mode of knowledge as seen in the discipline of his- tory comes out of a similar secularization of earlier methods as in the case of science, but in history the exclusions and limitations take different forms. Perhaps we can analyze this most quickly by noting the way in which our modern history differs from that of the Old Testament. The Old Testament offers us a typical story of the past within the context of a single and absolute holy order. The history of the Jews tells of the way in which the one true God dealt with His chosen people, of the Jews' loyalties and disloyalties toward Jehovah, and of His crowning mercies.
Here are some of the main things which we have seen excluded from the purview of natural science: God, the holy, and absolute standards of value, but while it is true that history keeps all of these in some sense, it is more important for our purposes to notice how they must be transformed before they can appear in a modern schol- arly history. Basically the change from the Old Testament approach is that our modern history is not a unique history of salvation but a relativized and secular story. God may appear, but we learn of Him only through the men who believed in Him. This historian qua historian does not know whether these particular men believed in the true God or, indeed, whether there is any true God. As historian, he has gone all the way and further, with the relativization of Paul: "There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek. . . " (Romans X, 12). Similarly the absolute values of any civilization may appear in modern histories, but we can learn of them only through the state- ments of the men who were committed to them, and the historian, qua historian, does not know whether this particular civilization is the one true civilization or, indeed, whether there is any true civiliza- tion.
Once more, as in the case of natural science, our knowledge of the world, where it is knowledge which binds us all, seems to be knowl- edge of a world into which we may have been sent, but humanly speaking we can only exclaim again that we are not of it. We cannot exist where there is simply no difference between Jew and Greek, between this civilization and that, for this is a world of mere pos- sibility, of complete freedom to accept everything but no power to choose anything, and there is no place in such a world for human existence as we are involved in it.
42
.
So far we have examined natural science and history as two main theoretical approaches which define our modern "world." Both worked out to extreme solutions quickly, perhaps because their questions were so framed as to exclude the problem of man in his wholeness. By contrast, the problem of man in his wholeness, in his immediacy, is central to philosophy and poetry, and therefore their development could not quite follow the course of natural science and history. Nevertheless I think we can argue that they reflect the same context. Perhaps one could suggest that natural science and history have triumphed just because they have excluded the general problem of man and that philosophy and poetry, well aware of this triumph, find that for them it is not a triumph but a crisis, not an end but only a demand for a new beginning.
To look briefly at some aspects of modern philosophy first, one might regard its first main effort, say from Descartes (1596-1650) to Hegel (1770-1831) as a great attempt to discover and to demonstrate the total solution demanded by modern secularism, and I think that in the final analysis the attempt failed. If we take the tremendous system of Hegel as a typical culmination of the movement, it never- theless seems that modern Western man could not accept such a philosophical theology or theological philosophy as an adequate description of himself and of his "world." The fundamental and perhaps in the long run the decisive attack on positions such as that of Hegel came from the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813- 1855). Kierkegaard denies the possibility of any public or objective solution to man's problems, and he insists that the only starting point is the unique individual's existence. (It may be noted that the Greek philosophers of the cosmos never troubled themselves much about mere existence. Their thought was directed rather to the dis- covery and analysis of essences which were eternal and for which existence could not be more than an accident. With secularization, the world no longer contains such essences, and we have seen one reaction to their disappearance in science and history, both of which refuse as a matter of method to take any cognizance of them. What we are now seeing in Kierkegaard is an example of early awareness of what it means to man himself that eternal essences are no longer there.)
If Kierkegaard first achieved in theology the basic insights of what we have come to call existentialism, within our own time there have been important philosophic treatments of it. In Germany, for
43
example, one thinks of Martin Heidegger (1889- ) and of Karl
Jaspers (1883- ), and in France of Gabriel Marcel (1887- ) and of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905- ). In many of their details, these philosophies are very different, and it may be that to group philoso- phies under the heading of existentialism is itself dubious. Never- theless, all of these men have attempted to take philosophic account of what we may call an existentialist experience, and it is this which concerns us here. I think that what these men have expressed in their various ways is true in general of Western man, is true of us, and can help us to see our own place in the world of modern secular- ization.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.