← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hilaire Belloc
Thread ID: 10969 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2003-11-07
2003-11-07 02:47 | User Profile
I find myself very much in agreement and admiration of the writings of the European New Right, particularly men like Alain de Benoist. However, I can't help but disagree with their anti-Christian stances. In my opinion, there's really nothing that incompatible with traditional Christianity in the New Right's philosophy except for its endorsement of pre-Christian religion. I'm just wondering, are there any movements/thinkers/etc. within the European New Right that actually have pro- or non-hostile views towards Christianity?
Madrid Burns, you seem to be a real expert on the European new right, do you know anything related to this?
2003-11-07 03:37 | User Profile
[QUOTE=perun1201]I find myself very much in agreement and admiration of the writings of the European New Right, particularly men like Alain de Benoist. However, I can't help but disagree with their anti-Christian stances. In my opinion, there's really nothing that incompatible with traditional Christianity in the New Right's philosophy except for its endorsement of pre-Christian religion. I'm just wondering, are there any movements/thinkers/etc. within the European New Right that actually have pro- or non-hostile views towards Christianity?
Madrid Burns, you seem to be a real expert on the European new right, do you know anything related to this?[/QUOTE]
You could check the works of NR intelectuals like Guillaume Faye and Thomas Mollnar (the former is pagan and the latter is Catholic). They just criticize the egalitarian philosophical aspects of the Christianity.
On the other hand, the criticism of the ENR toward the Christianity is not a religious criticism but a philosophical one, the ENR thinks that the Christianity is the main progenitor of the ideas and the values of equality, progresism, individualism, the feeling of Guild, the lineal vision of the history, the morality of the sin and universalism.
Without the arrival of the Christianity it had been impossible that such ideas they had been adopted by Europe.
2003-11-07 03:41 | User Profile
Actually, while DeBenoist and most ENR types are clearly not Christian for philosophical reasons they do wortk with Christians all the time and as I mentioned before they are heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine. Keep in mind that pointing out publicly why one disagrees with Christian doctrine does not make one anti Christian.
I also would recomend to to you that familarize yourself with Action Française ( [url]http://action.francaise.free.fr/[/url] ) which has in recent years become very much influenced by the ENR while being as ardently Catholic as they were during the hayday of it's founder Charles Maurras whose articles I post here from time. I would also mention Forza Italia which was founded by my now dead compartriot M.Marsello (I wrote a Memorium to him here a few weeks back) which also an ultra-Traditional party that has wonderful activism, a great website, newsparer with a cirulation of 200000 weekly. As well as the ITP ([url]www.politicalsolider.net[/url]) which I strongly support although it is also very strongly Catholic. Naturally, I am very much in favour of Pamyat although they are not at all ENR in their outlook. Lastly I would recomend that you consider Dansk Forum and Nactional Restoration which are two public organizations I belong to that whilenon religious actively court Christians with a good deal of sucess.
Hopefully, that addresses your concerns
2003-11-07 03:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Madrid burns] On the other hand, the criticism of the ENR toward the Christianity is not a religious criticism but a philosophical one, the ENR thinks that the Christianity is the main progenitor of the ideas and the values of equality, progresism, individualism, the feeling of Guild, the lineal vision of the history, the morality of the sin and universalism.
Without the arrival of the Christianity it had been impossible that such ideas they had been adopted by Europe.[/QUOTE]
I'm sorry but I have to disagree with this, unless they mean the perverted Judeo-Christianity. Traditional Christianity was never eqalitarian except in a very metaphysical sense, but never in a physical sense. The universalism of the Church is very much of a ethno-pluralist bent; in that each culture has its own unique way of celebrating the universal truth of Christianity. Individualism and progressism have their roots in the Protestant reformation, but in both the Catholic(well traditional Catholic) and Orthodox churches you find none of this.
Again I assert that there's nothing really incompatible between many ENR views and traditional Christianity.
2003-11-07 03:53 | User Profile
[QUOTE=triskelion]Actually, while DeBenoist and most ENR types are clearly not Christian for philosophical reasons they do wortk with Christians all the time and as I mentioned before they are heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine. Keep in mind that pointing out publicly why one disagrees with Christian doctrine does not make one anti Christian.
I also would recomend to to you that familarize yourself with Action Française ( [url]http://action.francaise.free.fr/[/url] ) which has in recent years become very much influenced by the ENR while being as ardently Catholic as they were during the hayday of it's founder Charles Maurras whose articles I post here from time. I would also mention Forza Italia which was founded by my now dead compartriot M.Marsello (I wrote a Memorium to him here a few weeks back) which also an ultra-Traditional party that has wonderful activism, a great website, newsparer with a cirulation of 200000 weekly. As well as the ITP ([url]www.politicalsolider.net[/url]) which I strongly support although it is also very strongly Catholic. Naturally, I am very much in favour of Pamyat although they are not at all ENR in their outlook. Lastly I would recomend that you consider Dansk Forum and Nactional Restoration which are two public organizations I belong to that whilenon religious actively court Christians with a good deal of sucess.
Hopefully, that addresses your concerns[/QUOTE]
Thank you Trisk! It's a good thing we reconciled during that debate about political correctness and neo-paganism. :) Thank you too Madrid Burns, you're another favorite of mine on this forum.
I know many Russian nationalist movements are very much influenced by the ENR but are staunchly Orthodox. The Slavophiles, Gogol, Dostoevesky, and others held views very similar to the ENR yet were also staunch Christians. So I was confused as to why the ENR seemed to have an anti-Christian stance, but I guess I was mistaken for the most part. As for Pamyat, I find some redeming qualities to it but I say much of my philosophical thinking is more inclined towards the Solidarist ideology of the National Toilers Society(NTS).
2003-11-07 04:03 | User Profile
[QUOTE=perun1201]I'm sorry but I have to disagree with this, unless they mean the perverted Judeo-Christianity. Traditional Christianity was never eqalitarian except in a very metaphysical sense, but never in a physical sense.[/QUOTE]
Of course, but the problem is that the primitive Christianity it tends to overvalue the spiritual sense over the physical, and to reject the latter. Although it have never said "all the men are same physically" it said "All are same spiritually" that which given the oriental (semi-gnostics) characteristics of the first Christianity it achieved the same effect of the biological egalitarianism of the Liberalism.
2003-11-07 04:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE=triskelion]Actually, while DeBenoist and most ENR types are clearly not Christian for philosophical reasons they do wortk with Christians all the time and as I mentioned before they are heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine. Keep in mind that pointing out publicly why one disagrees with Christian doctrine does not make one anti Christian.[/QUOTE]
In fact, they are influenced by Distributivist and the Pope Pius' Rerum Novarum
2003-11-07 04:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Madrid burns]Of course, but the problem is that the primitive Christianity it tends to overvalue the spiritual sense over the physical, and to reject the latter. Although it have never said "all the men are same physically" it said "All are same spiritually" that which given the oriental (semi-gnostics) characteristics of the first Christianity it achieved the same effect of the biological egalitarianism of the Liberalism.[/QUOTE]
Again I have to disagree. I addressed many of these issues in my debate with Friederich Braun over an essay by Edwin Clark. Christianity doesn't reject the physical world, but it rejects materialistic thinking. Now as for Liberalism getting its inspiration from Christianity, it should be noted that most if not all Liberal thinkers attack Christianity and often found inspiration from pagan Greece and Rome. Rousseau and the Jacobins looked to ancient Sparta, not Medieval Europe, for inspiration. Saint-Just also was found of Tacitius's "Germania" as a model for the new Republic.
This can also be further proven in the philosophy of art during the Age of Enlightenment(the birthplace of modern liberalism). Art is often reflective of the ideals of the society and period its made. 18th century art is filled with all sorts of Greco-Roman themes, including Jaques-Louis David's famous "the Oath of Hortaii". Yet Christian themes are hardly noticed, but is largely filled with depictions of Greco-Roman gods. So why is it that during periods of traditionalism in Europe we find more art with more Christian themes(like in the Middle Ages) but in periods of liberalism we find more Greco-Roman themes(like the Renaisance and Age of Enlightenment)? I find this interesting.
To blame Liberalism purely on Christianity is not fair since many elements of liberalism(universalism and moral relativity) can be found in ancient Greece and Rome as well. Need we forget, the Skeptics and Sophists of Greece gave birth to moral relativism.
2003-11-07 04:19 | User Profile
Hello Perun,
Yes the politically correct paganism debate was of the very few such ones that has gone anywhere so I am glad that it happened. I also thank you for your kind words and am very pleased that America can produce a Slavophile such as your self rather then the vile beast "Polish Noble."
Solidarist ideology ideology is something that I would like to see you and the other Slavs here write much more about as that is a folkish vision fully compatible with the Nordic Imperium school of National Socialism I am comited to. I too like Gogol and some Polish comrades promote the same neo-guildist alternative I do which I could post some stuff about but my Polish is too lousy so i'd upset the Slavs by butchering their tongue which is something i'd rather not do.
As to the always informative MB i'd say that I agree with your position about Christianity although those poins have always been tangential to my concerns with that group of faiths.
A good site for Heathens is [url]www.asatru.de/vanaheim.htm[/url] and for Balts I recomend [url]www.pagan.drak.net/wwcrew/[/url] although note that while bth sites are good I don't agree with everything found on them.
2003-11-07 04:55 | User Profile
[QUOTE=perun1201].
To blame Liberalism purely on Christianity is not fair since many elements of liberalism(universalism and moral relativity) can be found in ancient Greece and Rome as well. Need we forget, the Skeptics and Sophists of Greece gave birth to moral relativism.[/QUOTE]
Yes is truth that the liberals despise the Church and the Christianity, but you cannot deny that they took several principles and values from Christian Metaphysics and they secularized them, these principles are the spiritual equality, the linear vision of history/Progresism in the Bible (The idea that the History have a a beginning and an end: Genesis-History-Final trial and to the second coming of the Messiah), individual salvation (that idea strongly influences the Individualism of Liberalism), universalism (the idea that its doctrine is applicable to all the human beings),anthropocentrism (the idea that the Man is Superior to the animals and he have the right to do that he want with the Earth, that idea strongly influences the thought of Descartes and the Rationalism), etc.
However, I am not accuse to the Christianity of having created the Liberalism directly, because the Liberalism is a product of the Illustration and the secular minds, but the Christianity it facilitate the rising of that ideology, when She introduced those concepts to the European thought.
2003-11-07 05:07 | User Profile
The Christian Question
The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation James C. Russell New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. $19.95 US
xiv + 258 pp.
Reviewed by Samuel Francis
ââ¬ÅChristian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism,ââ¬Â Oswald Spengler wrote many years ago. What he meant was that Christianityââ¬â¢s endorsement of such ideas as universalism, egalitarianism, peace, world brotherhood, and universal altruism helped establish and legitimize the ethics and politics invoked by socialists and communists. Socialists and communists donââ¬â¢t always agree, however, which is why another German scholar, Karl Marx, pronounced that religion is in fact a conservatizing force, the opiate of the masses, the drug that prevents the workers of the world from rebelling against their class enemies.
Both of these Teutonic heavyweights might have profited from reading James C. Russellââ¬â¢s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, since it speaks, at least indirectly, to the tension between their different views of Christianity, differences that continue to be reflected in political and ideological disputes on the European and American right today. The main question in the controversy is this: Is Christianity a force that supports or opposes the efforts of the right to defend the European-American way of life? Christians on the right argue that their religious commitments are central to Western civilization, while pagans and secularists on the right (especially in Europe) argue, with Spengler, that Christianity undermines the West by pushing a universalism that rejects race, class, family, and even nation.
Mr. Russell, who holds a doctorate in historical theology from Fordham University and teaches at Saint Peterââ¬â¢s College, does not quite answer the question, but his immensely learned and closely reasoned book does suggest an answer. His thesis is that early Christianity flourished in the decadent, deracinated, and alienated world of late antiquity precisely because it was able to appeal to various oppressed or dissatisfied sectors of the population -- slaves, urbanized proletarians, women, intellectuals, frustrated aristocrats, and the odd idealist repelled by the pathological materialism, brutality, and banality of the age.
But when Christian missionaries tried to appeal to the Germanic invaders by invoking the universalism, pacifism, and egalitarianism that had attracted the alienated inhabitants of the empire, they failed. That was because the Germans practiced a folk religion that reflected ethnic homogeneity, social hierarchy, military glory and heroism, and ââ¬Åstandards of ethical conduct ... derived from a sociobiological drive for group survival through ingroup altruism.ââ¬Â Germanic religion and society were ââ¬Åworld-accepting,ââ¬Â while Hellenic Christianity was ââ¬Åworld-rejecting,ââ¬Â reflecting the influence of Oriental religions and ethics. By ââ¬ÅGermans,ââ¬Â it should be noted, Mr. Russell does not mean modern residents of Germany but rather ââ¬Åthe Gothic, Frankish, Saxon, Burgundian, Alamannic, Suevic, and Vandal peoples, but also ... the Viking peoples of Scandinavia and the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain.ââ¬Â With the exception of the Celts and the Slavs, ââ¬ÅGermansââ¬Â thus means almost the same thing as ââ¬ÅEuropeanââ¬Â itself.
Given the contradictions between the Christian ethics and world-view and those of the Indo-European culture of the Germanic peoples, the only tactic Christians could use was one of appearing to adopt Germanic values and claiming that Christian values were really compatible with them. The bulk of Mr. Russellââ¬â¢s scholarship shows how this process of accommodation took place in the course of about four centuries. The saints and Christ Himself were depicted as Germanic warrior heroes; both festivals and locations sacred in ancient Germanic cults were quietly taken over by the Christians as their own; and words and concepts with religious meanings and connotations were subtly redefined in terms of the new religion. Yet the final result was not that the Germans were converted to the Christianity they had originally encountered, but rather that that form of Christianity was ââ¬ÅGermanized,ââ¬Â coming to adopt many of the same Indo-European folk values that the old pagan religion had celebrated.
Mr. Russell thus suggests, as noted above, a resolution of the debate over Christian universalism. The early Christianity that the Germans encountered contained a good many universalist tendencies, adapted and reinforced by the disintegrating social fabric and deracinated peoples of the late empire. But thanks to Germanization, those elements were soon suppressed or muted and what we know as the historical Christianity of the medieval era offered a religion, ethic, and world-view that supported what we today know as ââ¬Åconservative valuesââ¬Â -- social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice. In being ââ¬ÅGermanized,ââ¬Â Christianity was essentially reinvented as the dynamic faith that animated European civilization for a thousand years and more.
Mr. Russellââ¬â¢s answer to the question about Christianity is that Christianity is both the grandmother of Bolshevism (in its early universalist, non-Western form) and a pillar of social stabilization and order (through the values and world-view imported into it through contact with the ancient barbarians). Throughout most of its history, the latter has prevailed, but today, as Mr. Russell argues in the last pages of his work, the enemies of the European (Germanic) heritage -- what he calls ââ¬Åthe Euro-Christian religiocultural fusionââ¬Â -- have begun to triumph within Christian ranks. ââ¬ÅOpposition to this fusion, especially as it might interfere with notions of universalism and ecumenism, was expressed in several of the documents of the Second Vatican Council,ââ¬Â and he sees the same kind of opposition to the early medieval Germanic influence in the various reform movements in church history, including the Protestant Reformation, which always demand a return to the ââ¬Åprimitive churchââ¬Â -- i.e., pre-Germanic Christianity. It is precisely this rejection of the European heritage that may have driven many Christians of European background out of Christianity altogether and into alternative forms of paganism that positively affirm their racial and cultural roots.
Whatever primitive Christianity or true Christianity or historical Christianity may or may not have believed and taught, what is indisputably happening today is the deliberate extirpation from Christianity of the European heritage by its enemies within the churches. The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.
Mr. Russell has produced a deeply learned book that assimilates history and theology, sociology and comparative religion, and even sociobiology and genetics within its pages. Moreover, it is an important book that addresses a highly controversial and philosophically and culturally significant issue that few others will address at all.
2003-11-07 19:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Madrid burns]Yes is truth that the liberals despise the Church and the Christianity, but you cannot deny that they took several principles and values from Christian Metaphysics and they secularized them, these principles are the spiritual equality, the linear vision of history/Progresism in the Bible (The idea that the History have a a beginning and an end: Genesis-History-Final trial and to the second coming of the Messiah), individual salvation (that idea strongly influences the Individualism of Liberalism), universalism (the idea that its doctrine is applicable to all the human beings),anthropocentrism (the idea that the Man is Superior to the animals and he have the right to do that he want with the Earth, that idea strongly influences the thought of Descartes and the Rationalism), etc.
If the Liberals got that out of Christianity, they obviously resorted to much historical and theological revisionism. That and they revised many Protestant teachings.
This website explains the differences between Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity [url]http://www.orthodox.net/articles/orthodox-mind.html#n1_1[/url]
Yes, Christianity teaches the dignity of the individual, but the individual can only reach his full potential within the community. Only Protestantism resorts to individualism that we see today.
As for universalism, I've already addressed that this does not mean cosmopolitanism or uniformity but actually ethnoplurality; each culture has its own unique way of celebrating the truth of Christ.
Anthropocentrism is also highly taken out of context. Man has dominion over the animals, but this does not mean Man has the right to do what he pleases with them. No man has the duty to look after the animals and protect them, much like what Noah had to do during the flood. Jesus and many other early Christian theologians spoke in praise of nature and of animals, so Traditional Christianity in no way advocates the raping of the earth.
However, I am not accuse to the Christianity of having created the Liberalism directly, because the Liberalism is a product of the Illustration and the secular minds, but the Christianity it facilitate the rising of that ideology, when She introduced those concepts to the European thought.[/QUOTE]
I've already stated that many elements of Liberal ideology were already in place in Greco-Roman philosophy.
Need we forget the 4th century BC cynic Diogenes declared himself "a citizen of the world" with no loyalties to any country. To this day, his quote is a favorite among Liberal globalists.
2003-11-07 19:16 | User Profile
Yes Madrid, I've read that essay by Francis before. The Germanization of Christianity happened entirely in the West. The Eastern Churches were never Germanized and there is not a drop of liberalism/globalism in its theology then or now. Irionically the Germanized churches of the West surrendered to liberalism while the non-Germanized churches did not. Even the Communist regime's persecutions were not able to break the Eastern churches into summiting.
The Eastern Churches are also fiercely nationalistic, more so than the Western churches ever were. So again I'm hardly convinced of this notion that liberalism grew out of Christianity. If it did, it was probally because Western christianity summitted too much to Germanization and Greco-Roman paganism.
More of this is explained in Father Michael Azkoul's "What is Secularism" [url]http://www.stvladimirs.ca/library/what-is-secularism.html[/url]
** What is Secularism?
By Father Michael Azkoul
Have you ever listened to a debate, perhaps on television, concerning abortion and not heard the name of Christ or God mentioned? Have you ever been dumbfounded by the number of teachers and scholars who publically defend sexual perversion and promiscuity? Have you ever wondered what brought about the Woman’s Liberation movement? What is the ultimate cause of the new wave of vulgarity in music and art? What explains the “slob syndrome” or the excessive informality which everywhere confronts us? Why has “democracy” become almost a political dogma? Have you ever reflected on the gradual disappearance of kingship over the last two hundred years? What is the explanation for relativism and pluralism? What has made ecumenism possible? Why have so many people spurned “organized religion?” In human terms, the word which describes the attitudes, values, and ideas behind this lamentable state of affairs is secularism.
We want, in the time allotted to us, to identify the most characteristic features of modern secularism. We ought to know, at the outset, that it is a Western phenomenon and this explains our preoccupation with the history of Western philosophy and theology. Special attention will be given to France and Germany of the nineteenth century, because it was there that the principles of modern secularism were formulated. Finally, there will be an Orthodox critique of what has become the Churches “changing environment,” the one with which She must contend henceforth.
As a background to our remarks about modern secularism, it will be useful to briefly discuss previously held ideas about the world. Such a discussion, too, will with the aide of historical perspective, bring clarity to the word world in its present understanding. One should be cautioned that the term secularism is a neologism, a new word invented and popularized in this century. We are taking liberties therefore, by applying secular, secularism or anti-secular to those other world-views. To be sure, there has always been a secular tradition in every culture, but its adherents used different language, the language of their time and place, to express their feelings and attitudes.
Among the ancient Greeks the distinction between the world in time and the world in space was never made clear. There is no way to match aion with saeculum or kosmos with mundus. Aion is surely the word for age, but age for the Hellenes was more than a period of time; it was a description of the movement of time itself. Time, said the Greeks, moves in a circle and they saw this cyclicism in everything” the course of empires, the seasons, biological, animal, and human life. Nothing escaped the power of time, of fate: everything came into being, reached its acme, deteriorated and passed into the oblivion from whence it had come, as the Greek historian, Polybius, tells us. This view was surely very common, yet there was also a “mystical tradition,” as some scholars say, which came into greater prominence after Alexander’s conquest. Ideas about the soul and reincarnation, about time and the prison of the body, about the escape from the cycle of time, became very popular.
The Hebrews believed that time was not circular, but linear; time had a definite beginning and was subject to the God who created it with the universe. Time was divided into “ages” (yom) in imitation of the seven “days” if creation. The ideas of duration, extension in space, universe and world (olam) were synonymous. Interestingly, some Hebrews denied the existence of heaven and immortality and looked rather for a political Messiah and a Kingdom of the Jews on earth. The Prophets, at least, preached a heavenly Messiah and a heavenly Kingdom, in anticipation of the gospel.
The Church, while confessing that God made the world good, also teaches that it is in a fallen condition, subject ot the Devil, the “god of the age.” His domination, of course, is temporary. With the Second Coming of the Lord, he will be banished, the resurrection of all flesh will occur, there will be a new and deified universe in which God will be “all in all.” In other words, the Church conceives the world to have been created, governed and judged by God. According to the Fathers, He has divided time into a number of ages, the last or “eighth age” being without end. The history of the world leads to that great and glorious consummation. The Church is the vehicle of God’s Power, a Power which is “in the world but not of it.” The world is both Her enemy and the object of Her love. The task of Orthodoxy is to sanctify the world, to rescue it from the Devil.
Thus, when St. John the Theologian wrote in his first epistle (ii, 15), “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” he was not alluding to the creation, but its fallen state: to the world of sin, corruption, death, and the devil. For this reason, St. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “what fellowship hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?” (II Cor. vi, 14f). Nonetheless, this opposition between the Church and the world does not mean that She does not yearn to embrace all men, to transform their lives and destinies; on the other hand that love (agape) does not imply that She will disobey Christ. Her hand is out to the man in the pit, but She will not jump into it with him. She cannot save the world by sharing in its folly. The way of the Church is to pull the man out of the pit, that is, to free him from the Devil. God wants regeneration, not re-adjustment.
Modernity demands involvment in “a changing environment,” “changing” because unbelief is always “cast about by every wind of doctrine.” Modernity does not share the Church’s vision of history. The contemporary understanding of the world has antecedents deep in the life of the West, the post-Orthodox West. The movement of its independent existence, of the forming of its own brand of Christianity and its own historical perspective, is not easy to determine. The clear sign that the West was no longer Orthodox, surely, is 1204, the sack of Constantinople. Thomas Aquinas and the thirteenth century constructed the papal worldview, mingling the pure tradition of the Apostles with Hellenism, especially Aristotle. Herein lies a certain irony, for Scholasticism begat the Rennissance, which begat the Protestant Reformation, which begat Pietism and the Enlightenment, which begat Romanticism, which begat the nineteenth century, which begat the twentieth.
Of course, we are guilty of some oversimplification, but, in one sense, the history of the West is the story of gradual secularization. For a more precise statement of the facts, listen to the words of Henry Aiken, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University:
From one point of view, the whole history of ideas in the modern age may be regarded as the history of the progressive breakdown of the medieval Christian synthesis most powerfully articulated in the Summas of Thomas Aquinas and most movingly and persuasively expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Since the Renaissance, the primary and increasingly crucial ‘existential problem’ of man has been the adjustment of new attitudes and ideas to the orthodox vaules and traditional conception of human destiny that are represented in the medieval synthesis. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, however, the very possibility of such an adjustment came increasingly into question, and on more and more fundamental cultural levels. IN the nineteenth century, many philosophers can no longer credit such a possibility. They determined, therefore, to reconstitute the ideals of Western culture on a radically secular and humanistic, that is to say, a radically non-Christian basis (The age of Ideology. New York, 1956, p. 25).
With the twentieth century, and especially with the Bolshevik Revolution, the West and, indeed, the world, has entered what Harvey Cox has called the “epoch of the secular City.” By this expression he means “a change in the way men grasp and understand their life together” or the determination of modern man to replace the City of God with the City of Man. Man has displaced God as ruler of the earth. “The world has become his city,” Cox observes, “and his city has reached out to include the world. The name for the process by which this has come about is secularization” (The Secular City. New York, 1965, p. 4).
What more specifically is secularization? It is the “liberation” of man “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and language…the dispelling of all closed world0views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” Secularization is “man turning his attention from worlds beyond, and toward the world of this time (saeculum)…” (l.c.). His “liberation” signifies also that man has entered a new period of history, a period when, to use the celebrated phrase of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, man has “come of age.” He is responsible for the world. He is a “big boy” who no longer needs God, the celestial “big daddy” to provide, guide and protect him. As Professor J.C. Raines remarked, “He comes to know himself now as an active citizen and caretaker of this homeland, earth, who must bear, without benefit of eternal interventions, the consequences of his own world-making, world-shattering activity.” He will eradicate his ancient enemies --- death, disease, war, oppression and hatred. The great tools of his genius are science and technology. The “end of the Constantinian era has come” proclaims the German historian, Guenter Jacob, “and a new world has begun.”
a. The Death of God
The expression “the death of God” or, as some prefer it, “the absence of God” is not a new one; it dates at least from the Eighteenth century. Sometimes it is a declaration of naked atheism; sometimes it means that the Christian God, the God of “New Testament mythology” has been put to rest. Not that the post-Orthodox West or the rest of the world ever knew the true God, but now even their misconception has been eliminated. Modernity is conscious of the unpleasant truth, i.e., no God, and is determined to live without him.
“The death of God” means, therefore, that He is gone as a cultural fact; the God of the old metaphysic has vanished and no longer influences our institutions, our creativity, our morals and manners. Even the soi-disant “secular Christians” are busy redefining the “God” in whom they wish to believe, a God who will not interrupt man’s construction of a “brave new world.” This vision of an empty universe, a universe without a personal, loving God --- indeed, without any deity at all --- is given shattering utterance in the nihilism of the German poet, Jean Paul. His Siebenkaes, composed around 1796/7, presents “The Speech of the Dead Christ from the Top of the Universe” in which He mourns the loss of “the Supreme Father.” Jean Paul puts these terrible words into the mouth of Christ who wanders aimlessly in the land of eternal shadows.
“Now a tall and noble form, in pain without surcease, sank down from the heights on to the altar, and all the dead cried: ‘Christ! Is there a God?”
He answered, ‘none!’
The whole shadow of all the dead shook, not just the breast alone, and one after the other was torn by the shuddering.
Christ went on: ‘I went through the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and flew along the milky ways through the wastes of heaven. But there is no God. I went down as far as being cast into its shadow and looked into the abyss, and called, “Father, where art Thou?” But I heard only the eternal storm, ungoverned, and the trembling rainbow of life stood without a sun that created it, and fell drop by drop into the abyss. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world for the divine eye, it glared at me with an empty and baseless socket; and eternity lay upon chaos and gnawed it and chewed the cud. Cry on, discords, tear the shades apart with your crying. For He is not!’
(Then came the children and said) ‘Jesus! Have we no father?’ And he replied with streaming tears, ‘We are all orphans, I and you, we have no father.’
Then the discords shrieked more violently - the trembling walls of the temple broke apart - the temple and the children sank down-and the whole earth and the sun sank after them - and the whole structure of the world sank past us, in its immeasurable extent- and at the summit of immeasurable nature Christ stood and gazed down into the structure of the world shattered by the light of a thousand suns, as it were into the pit hurled into eternal night, where the suns move like miners’ lamps, and the milky ways like veins of silver.
…then tall as the supreme finite one he raised up his eyes to the void and to the unfathomable emptiness and said: ‘Stiff and silent void! Cold and eternal necessity! Mad chance! Do you know it, among yourselves? When will you smash the whole structure, and me?… How alone each is in the broad tomb of the universe! I am only by myself. O Father, O Father, where is your infinite breast that I may rest upon it? --- Alas, if each I is its own fathers and creator, why can it not also be its own destroying angel?’
…Here Christ looked down, and his eyes were filled with tears, and he said, ‘Alas, once I lived upon the earth. Then I was still happy, then I still had my infinite Father, and still looked joyfully from the mountains into the infinite heaven, and pressed my pierced breast on its assuaging image, and still said in bitter death: “Father, draw your son out of the bleeding body and raise him to your heart!” Alas, you happy earth-dwellers, you still believe in him…you wretched ones, after death, your wounds will not be closed. When the wretched one lays himself down in the earth, with wounded back, to sleep into a more beautiful day, full of truth and joy and virtue, he awakes in tumultuous chaos, in eternal midnight, and no morning comes, and no healing hand, and no infinite father! You mortal beside me, if you still pray, then pray to him: otherwise you have lost him for ever.’
And as I fell down and looked into the bright structure of the world I saw the rings of the great snake of eternity rising up around the universe and falling down to coil yet again around the All, then winding a thousand times around nature, and squeezing the worlds together, crushing the infinite temple into one little church - and everything became narrow and dark and fearful--- and an infinitely extended bell-clapper was about to sound times least hour and shatter the structure of the universe --- when I awoke.
My soul wept with joy that it could once more worship God-and my joy and weeping and faith in him were my prayer. And as I stood up, the sun gleamed deep behind the full purple ears of corn, and peacefully cast the reflection of its evening red upon the little moon, which rose without an aurora in the morning; and between heaven and earth a joyful and passing world stretched out its brief wings and lived, as I did, in face of the infinite Father. And from the whole of nature round about me there flowed out peaceful soundws, as from distant evening bells.
Later, in the next century, Friedrich Nietzsche will say very much the same thing in his Joyous Science:
Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lantern at noonday, ran to the market place, and cried unceasingly, ‘I am looking for God! I am looking for God!’ Since there happened to be many standing there who did not believe in God, he roused great laughter. ‘Is he lost?’ said one. ‘Or gone astray like a child?’ said another. ‘Or has he hidden himself? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?’ SO they shouted and laughed. The madman leapt into their midst, and pierced them with his glance. ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I will tell you. We have slain Him. You and I. We are all his murderers. But how did we do it? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe out the whole horizon? What did we do, when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? And where are we moving to now? Away from all suns? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in every direction? Is there an above and a below any more? Are we not wandering as through infinite nothingness? Does empty space not breathe upon us now? Is it not older now? Is not night coming and ever more night? Must we not light lanterns at noon? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers, as they bury God? Do we not smell God decaying? Gods too decay! God is dead. God stays dead. And we have slain him. How shall we console ourselves, chief of all murderers? The holiest and most powerful that the world has ever possessed has ebbed its blood away beneath our knives - who will wipe this blood from our fingers? What water can make us clean? What propitiations and sacred rites will we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed to great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods, in order to seem worthy of it? There was never a greater deed, and because of it all who are born after us are part of a higher history than ever was before!’
The madman fell silent, and I looked at his hearers again. They too were silent, and looked at him with shocked eyes. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces, and went out. ‘I come to early,’ he said, ‘it is not yet my time. This monstrous event is still on the way---it has not yet penetrated men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they have been done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still further from men than the remotest stars---and yet they have done it.’
The story goes that the madman went into the several churches on the same day and sang his requiem aetarnam deo. Led out and questioned, he replied just the one thing: ‘What are the churches, if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?’ (pages 161-163 of RG Smith. Secular Christianity. New York, 1966)
There seems little coincidence in the fact that Jean Paul wrote his poem during the era of the French Revolution and Nietzsche was drawing out the implications of that event to their fullest extent. Indeed, there is no more important moment in the history of the West. The French Republic and its Declaration of the Rights of Man, with the motto: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” Is the first serious attempt to erect a purely secular state, a state without God, a City of Man, of Humanity. Here, too, is the end of the traditional Western notion of descending political power---power conceived as “descending from God through the king; henceforth, political power will “ascend” from the people to their elected representative. In the words of Albert Camus, the condemnation of the king by the French Revolution is “at the crux of contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God… God played a part in history through the medium of the king, but his viceroy has been killed. Therefore nothing remains but a resemblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles” (The Rebel. New York, 1956, p. 120).
AN Orthodox might agree with Camus with a single exception. The disappearance of the French king does not signal the end of the Christian era, for, in the West, it ended long before the death of Louis XVI. For mankind that era, “the Constantinian era,” was terminated with the regicide of Tsar Nicholas II, successor to the Byzantine Emperors, charismatic ruler of God’s people. His assassination at the hands of those who were indeed heirs of the French Revolution, the Communists, is the time when “that which restrains” restrained no more: the “age of lawlessness,” “the age of apostasy” had begun. There is no more sacred monarchy, there is no more sacred nation.
TO be historically precise, the secularization of Russia began with Peter the Great, nearly seventy years before the French Revolution; and, as we know, the process of Western secularization has its roots in the Middle Ages. The French Republic was the climax of that process: the first attempt by Western man to build a new order without God. The supporters of the Revolution gave a new interpretation to the history of the human race and began to relocate heaven on earth. As Professor Carl Becker put it, the philosophers of the French Revolution (Voltaire, Diderot, Montaigne, etc.) “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date (secular) materials.” Thus, for God was substituted Humanity, for the Saint the genius, for divine wisdom science, “for hope of immortality in heaven, the hope of living memory of future generations,” to quote Becker once more.
Everywhere through the following century, the significance of the French Revolution was diligently examined. No people were more zealous in their work and none more portentious in their conclusions than the Germans. The first name which comes to mind is George Hegel (1770-1830). A devout Lutheran, Hegel saw that the Revolution called for a new defense of Christianity. He gave his contemporaries a secularized version of it. The only response to the atheism and the deism of the French, he said, was a theology of Immanence: the Trinity became the very world-process itself. Nature was a manifestation of the Absolute, so he referred to God; man was God come to historical consciousness.
When Hegel died in 1830, he had many disciples, not all of whom agreed with his philosophy. Heinrich Heine, the Jewish essayist, described the “Young Hegelians” as “these godless, self-gods” who with their master, had murdered God. “Hear ye not the bells sounding?”, he lamented. “Kneeel down. They bring the sacraments ot a dying God.” The particular objects of his enmity David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner and Karl Marx. This group will also earn the wrath of Dostoyevsky who became acquainted with their ideas through the Russian anarchists, Bellinski and Bakunin.
Among others who wrote works of a similar character was Strauss, who wrote in 1835 his famous The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. His intent was to entirely discredit Christian “supernaturalism” or “transcendentalism.” At the same time, he taught that the entire human race is the unity of God and man. The Incarnation did not take place at one moment in time and to one man, but it has been happening from all eternity. “Humanity is the union of two natures---God become man, the infinite manifest in the finite…” he declared in The Life of Jesus. Christ was only the supreme example of that unity. Strauss argued, furthermore, that nature itself “pulses within the womb of the divine.” Like Hegel, then, he was also a pantheist. Everything for him was divine: all phenomena a manifestation of the Absolute.
No one seemed more impressed with Strauss than Ludwig Feuerbach. He was not a pantheist, but a materialist. Spirit did not exist for him. Strauss had made it clear that man was indeed at the center of things. From that notion, Feuerbach developed his theory that man is “God.” All questions about God, he said, are really questions about man. To affirm God is to deny man as to affirm man is to deny God. His magnum opus, the Essence of Christianity, was written to demonstrate such assertions.
The true sense of theology is anthropology, he wrote. The God of Christian theology is only a dream of the human heart, an awareness of man’s own infinity. Therefore, God is nothing more than a projection of man’s true self, of his ideal being. Feuerbach blamed religion for man’s alienation from himself: it led him to worship a phantom. The elimination of religion will mean that man will overcome that “alienation” and uncover his true self. He will come to realize that all the attributes-omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, justice, etc. - heaped on “the Supreme Being” really belong to himself, to his ideal self. Man will only be happy, then, with the disappearance of religion.
With this kind of thinking, Max Stirner, another disciple of Hegel, evolved his own philosophy---a philosophy of total egotism. His The Ego and His Own is the attempt to delineate what Stirner meant by the uniqueness of the individual, the ego. “I have set my cause on nothing,” he wrote. Nothing “concerns” me, nothing but myself---not mankind, not truth, not freedom, not love, not justice, not fatherland, nothing but myself. Each man is his own cause: man is god to himself. Stirner despised “organized religion,” because it always demanded self-sacrifice. Nothing was more immoral to Stirner. Also, he despised the French Enlightenment, because this movement offered the world the idea of “equality.” Equality, he grumbled, forces me to be like others, to think of the rights of others: it breeds mediocrity. “But nature entitles me to nothing. If I can win a status or privilege, I will take it. I take it by my superior power.” The world can survive only with the genius, the great man, the superior talent or, what Nietzche will later call, uebermensch.
Stirner’s natural enemy was Karl Marx, who opposed to Stirner’s Egotism his own socio-economic collectivism. Marx, as a materialist, could only interpret history in terms of that materialism which meant, as he said so often, the struggle of economic classes. The lack of equality and the existence of egotism has produced misery and injustice. Religion is largely responsible for the unhappiness that man has endured hitherto. He not only believes in a God which is no more than a projection of himself, but he yearns for a heaven which does not exist and cannot exist, save for here on earth. Religion keeps him from this truth: it acts on him as a drug---“religion is an opiate.”
If men are ever to find happiness, they must forget their superstitions and band together to fight those very natural things which prevent it. Negatively, this means the establishment of “the truth of the world” by unmasking “human self-alienation” and, positively, to convert religion and theology to law and politics. Once it is affirmed that “man is the supreme being for man,” then, human consciousness will be raised and we shall become “a new species of being” (Gattungswesen). Only this “new man” will be able to live in the new order, a world in which equality prevails, exploitation ceases, conflict, injustice, hatred, slavery and privilege have withered away. At that moment, love, freedom and plenty will characterize human life. Marx, Socialism and secularism in general are eschatological, utopian, and future-oriented, anticipating a new world on earth.
Until that time, however, revolution is necessary: it is necessary because the privileged will not surrender their power voluntarily for the common good. In particular, Marx wanted the eradication of private property, because those who possess always exploit those who do not possess; and the latter is always envious of the former. IN addition, the possessor always puts his interest before the interest of all. Private property precludes any serious possibility of common action against the enemies of mankind. Society must be united, integrated, if the enemies of man are to be eradicated. There is, too, a certain danger to the common good in the family, because its members work for the survival and prosperity of a unit of society rather than the whole of it.
Those who have the most to lose by the status quo, Marx said, is the “working class,” the proletariat. No one is more exploited and oppressed, as history proves. That class will take its rightful place only with the elimination of all classes, when all men contribute their talents for the good of all. Meanwhile, the proletariat must spearhead the revolution, acting together with other oppressed peoples, in order to achieve their common socio-economic goals. The “capitalist” must be forced to pay a just wage, an action which will lead him to capitulate more and more of his power and which will eventually bring him down. Marx had a lingering fear that the proletariat would settle for security; it must be constantly pushed. Lenin used the word “vanguard” to describe the leaders of the people, an elite which would inform and inspire them.
Now, we are aware that the onus for secularism cannot be laid entirely at the feet of Hegel, Marx and their followers. The Nineteenth century was filled with sages and scientists who wished to displace what they believed to be the Christian world-view, the Christian “mythology.” What makes Marxism and Hegelianism the object of special treatment is the special deference the Twentieth century pays to them. No one doubts the impact of Marxism on our milieu; and it is a tribute to Hegel that every important secular philosophical movement of this century began with an attack upon his doctrine. Nevertheless, his spirit pervades them all---existentialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, logical analysis. It is noteworthy, too, that there is at present a Feuerbachian revival, probably as an addendum to Socialism.
The last century, moreover, is a time of unprecedented advances in the physical sciences. They claimed and continue to claim the territory once held by religion. For example, who can deny the immense significance of Darwin? His theory of evolution eliminated the need for any spiritual explanation of life on this planet. Darwin drove God from the earth as Newton, a hundred years before, drove him from the heavens. And, too, how shall we forget the technological discoveries which have become for us now the source of every good thing, a “source” which men in former times called “Beneficent and Merciful God.”
But, of course, the Ninteenth century struck down, once and for all, the so-called “God-hypothesis;” or, indeed, if there was to be some kind of deity to explain the design of the universe and the maintenance of its laws, this “god” was hardly personal, hardly anything we could worshipl instead, science and philosophy has permitted us a “force,” a “life,” “the élan vital” of Henri Bergson. The God of Christianity, the Blessed Trinity, is gone. He has evaporated so quietly, so gradually from government, from theater, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, education, mores and family living, that His passing is hardly noticed.
If this God of the Prophets, Apostles and Fathers stubbornly persists, if the true God still lurks somewhere in the dark recesses of the universe, it is in the hearts of the lonely and despised men or in “reactionary institutions” such as the Russian Church Abroad. Undoubtedly, men everywhere want the consolation and inspiration of religion, but they want no creeds and canons, no discipline and dogma. If they want a Bible at all, they want to bend it to their understanding. More and more they want the peace and salvation the world can give, for these do not convict them of sin.
b. Pluralism
With “the death of God,” the mind is left stranded, without criteria from which to function. When I use the word God, of course, I mean a personal Creator-God. Only a God Who speaks with man, Who communicates with His creatures, Who enlightens them, has any meaning for the problem of knowledge. Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” or the Hindu “Brahman” or Hegel’s “Absolute” are useless to us. They do not love us, they do not reveal the truth to us, they do not change our hearts. Thus, “the death of God” deprives us of those foundations which make knowledge possible, which allow us to receive and apply the truth. Without God, truth cannot be distinguished from falsehood. Nothing at all can be known with any certainty.
Since there is no absolute criterion, truth must forever elude us and we are condemned to live by the arbitrary rule of “tolerance” or, as modern sociologists and political theorists say, “pluralism.” Necessarily then, just as no sex, race or ethnic groupcan claim superiority over others, no religion may claim to be the “true religion,” that is, a religion established by God for all men. Obviously, since God is “dead” or absent or indifferent, we can only believe, each in his own way, in what we choose to call good and evil, true and false, right and wrong. Logically, then, the modern secular state can be linked with no particular religion. Secularism demands pluralism which automatically precludes a privileged position to any religion.
It is no wonder that ecumenism must take the same position. It may believe that the Church is divided and one day will be reunited, but in the meantime ecumenism must accept an “alliance of traditions.” Doctrinal differences may not be taken seriously, because the full truth is not yet achieved. Without that truth, ecumenical dialogue is in vain. Some ecumenists have come to just that conclusion: pluralism means that either we dismiss doctrinal divergence as meaningless (and thereby offend some of the membership) or we find some common basis by which to justify the continued existence of “the movement for Christian unity.” The answer: common social action, the pursuit of social justice and equality--- such as running guns to African terrorists and revolutionaries and disseminating information about birth control. In a word, supporting every secular cause on the face of the glove. As one ecumenist at the Zagorsk meeting in 1968 said, “Let the world write the agenda of the council.”
No doubt one still hears traditional religious concepts and language at ecumenical meetings, but, if they were ever understood Biblically and Patristically by the post-Orthodox West, their authentic meaning is rapidly deteriorating. The words God and Church and Christ do not have the same connotation for all members of the World and National Council of Churches, not even from the inception of these organizations. Such movements have always been implicitly pluralistic. Perhaps, initially some viewed “tolerance” as a suspension of hostilities, a way of promoting genuine love and unity, but pluralism has become an ecumenical dogma. Indeed, there is a new perception of the Church and the world because there is a new perception of God. Recent developments in the metaphysic of becoming and immanence have strongly influenced the ecumenical movement, especially the teachings of Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Barth, Heideggar and, yes, Marx himself.
Inevitably, the Orthodox Church is just another “tradition,” “experience” or “denomination.” Most Orthodox ecumenists are either ignorant or insensitive to the danger which this movement represents. Some of them bask in their fame and delusion. For example, Patriarch Demetrius, Archbishops Iakovos and Bartholomaios believe that uncompromising loyalty to any “Confession” is “religious fanaticism.” They support the idea that the new Orthodox Council, which the Patriarch of Constantinople has proposed, is for the promotion of Christian unity and the opening of the Orthodox Church towards Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, “towards contemporary (secular) culture, with its aspirations for brotherhood…” (Pat. Christ. Ency., 1977).
Such a belief is a tacit denial of the finality and infallibility of Gods’ revelation. The ecumenical Patriarch and his followers are conducting a revolution of their own. They seem totally oblivious to te fact that they are advocating pluralism and introducing secularism into the Orthodox Church. They like to think of their opponents as “religious fanatics” who refuse to face the realities of the modern world. But it is they who are not facing those realities, it is they who fail to comprehend the radical significance of the times through which we are now passing.
There is one more aspect of this unhappy situation that we should mention --- the secular attack upon monasticism in which many Orthodox ecumenists have not failed to join. On the ideological spectrum, monasticism and pluralism are polar opposites. The one is “other-worldly” and the other a product of “this-worldliness.” The first is the ideal life, the pattern for all life, the model and criterion of all human existence and, as St. Basil declared, “the monk is the true and authentic Christian.” The second, pluralism, reduces monasticism to an option, reshaped, of course, to accommodate modernity, for in its traditional form monasticism is the negative of secularism. Ecumenists and/or “secular Christians” believe a compromise is possible; that the way of the monk and the way of the world may be reconciled. The result, of course, is simply to reduce monasticism to a secular service.
A Jesuit, E. Larkin, has, for example, called for monastic reform. “Whereas the Christian of yesterday feared egoism and worldliness and tended to seek God outside the world in pure adoration,” he states with some exaggeration, “the Christian of today begins with himself and the world as he finds them and expects to find God there.” The Christian of today views “efforts to neutralize or frustrate inordinate love as something outside the axis of the spiritual endeavor. He is less concerned with purification than with commitment, and for him the means of action, work, is doing for others. He is very optimistic, sometimes quite presumptuous, in the appropriating human motivations and identifying his projects as the work of the Lord. He accepts difficulties: he knows he must rise above ambivalent or selfish feelings and overcome frustrations, ingratitude and other obstacles…”
One may question in what sense the Rev. Larkin is talking about monasticism or even Christianity. There is no mention of holiness as the presupposition to goodness or Grace as the presupposition to holiness. His entire article, “Asceticism and Modern Life” (1963) pays absolutely no deference to doctrinal truth and there is very little allusion to “asceticism.” Monasticism is become just another, but differently organized form of service to man. It is a service which ultimately is no more than self-service.
That the secularist, as a pluralist and relativist, must repudiate or dilute monasticism is the supreme irony of the dream to build a new world. He may learn to late that he has cut away the very foundations of civilization and, if he thinks at all about heavenly immortality, the very possibility of salvation.
c. Relativism
Relativism is the Siamese twin of pluralism. In the vernacular, we say, “doing your own thing.” This means the ability to do what I wish without criticism; to do it in my own way. Since there are no universal, necessary and public criteria for conduct, my actions, my “life-style” cannot be judged to be right or wrong. Choice is a matter of taste not law. God is “dead” or, at least, “absent”: there is no commandment, no unimpeachable principle, no sacred injunction. Morality is a personal attitude, a perception, a preference, a value. The Anglican bishop, John Robinson, in his popular book, Honest to God, describes the morality of the Bible as “legalism.” It forces men to live by external and abstract laws, he insists, rather than freely and creatively.
In point of fact, I can do what I want, even murder and suicide, for, as Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” If I wish to kill you for the sake of my cause, my revolution, my whim, none may condemn me. If I wish to kill myself, no one should prevent me. Dostoyevsky goes further in The Possessed, arguing that relativism --- which implies there is no God --- demands the highest form of self-will, that is suicide. Kirillov is bound to show his self-will, says the Russian novelist, because it is the only way for him to demonstrate his conviction that God does not exist. “I am bound to show my unbelief,” exclaims Kirillov, walking around the room. “I cannot understand how an atheist could know there is no God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognize there is no God and not to recognize at the same moment that one is god is an absurdity, else one could certainly kill oneself… So I must certainly kill myself to prove that I am god…”
I suspect that not many people would surrender to Kirillov’s logic. Rather they have adjusted to or happily embraced relativism or self-will. Of course, it is an old idea, an idea first propounded by the ancient Greeks. The Cynics and Epicureans espoused it. In modern times, it has won a new popularity. The most famous book in recent times on the subject of relativism and morality is Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics: The New Morality, published in 1966. He maintains that the terms “right” and “wrong” are relative to the “situation,” that is, “we cannot approach every decision-making occasion with a whole apparatus of prefabricated rules and regulations.” The only guide for human conduct is my conscience and the Holy Spirit. He informs me according to the needs of the “situation.”
For example, there is no law which states that sexual activity is always wrong before marriage. We have no right, Fletcher scolds, to label pre-marital sexuality as fornication; it may or may not be. Fletcher agrees with Bishop Robinson that “chastity is chastity only if it is charity---caring enough. And this is the criterion for every form of behavior, inside of marriage or out of it, in sexual ethics or in any other field. For nothing else makes it right or wrong…” In other words, we live for persons and not by laws. The “loving thing to do in a particular situation” is “the right and good thing to do.” One cannot say that living together without benefit of marriage is necessarily wrong. For instance; indeed not, for if it is “the loving thing to do,” the Holy Spirit is present.
Fletcher’s theory is, if I may say so, as superfluous as it is silly. Moral relativism requires no guidance from the Holy Spirit. IN any case, there is no way to determine the Presence of the Spirit; neither can we maintain that love is the sign of His Presence. Not only do we often confuse love and lust, but there is no reason to believe that love is the sign of anything more than my own attitude. Whatever Professor Fletcher may have intended, there is simply no way to reconcile relativism and Christianity. IN fact, there is no need: God is “dead” and pluralism, along with relativism, is the order of the day. There are many life-styles, none of which can or should be refuted. Even Biblical morality has a place. Yet, any course of action is a “value-judgment,” good to him who wants it. One may not even condemn murder, assassination or terrorism by appealing to “the dignity of man” or the “rights” of the individual. Everyone has his own understanding of these clichés. Besides, there is no right or wrong except to him that thinks it is. I cannot be criticized for anything I do, because there is no sin or, to be more exact, sin is relative. If you think fornication is sinful, that is your business; but you cannot impose your opinion on others.
Relativism, as you now, has a far wider application than morality; it enervates religion, politics, art, etc. The consequence is terrible, because all communication must break down between persons and groups. Relativism renders anything outside my self-will, anything impartial and objective, impossible tor each. Conflict is inevitable. As Thucydides, long before Karl Marx, said: relativism invites compulsion and strife. Marx observed that the rights of one individual or group must sometimes clash; the class or individual that prevails, must resort to force---revolution, if necessary. There is the force of the ballot which imposes the will of the many on the few; and there is the more drastic force of violence. In a few words, “might makes right.”
By now the connection between “the Death of God,” pluralism and relativism should be clear. If there is no God, no personal God, then, we may do and believe what we wish in the way we want, anything from the most detestable and inhumane to the most imaginative and bizarre. Secularists consider the growing state of anarchy, lawlessness and apostasy as temporary. They anticipate that a new and perfect unity will emerge from it. Secularism is, then, the futile search for a rational, man-centered world-order. Here is its entire hope, its faith-one which seems very familiar. It was Adam, was it not, who first wished to place his destiny in his own hands; Adam who wanted to be a “god?” How strange, how ironical, for that was precisely God’s Plan for His creation. He intended that man should become divine, that he should share His Life through participation in the divine energies.
Conclusion
Secularism is a faith, a faith in man, a faith in his future, a future without God or, as the Process theologians say, a future which is God. Orthodoxy is a faith, a faith in God, a living God which it is “meet and right to hymn, to bless, to praise, to thank, to worship,” for He is a God of Mercy and Justice and Power. Secularism was born of a false theology, or more precisely, of a decaying post-Orthodox Wesetern theology. It is an observable decay from Aquinas in the Thirteenth century to Max Scheler in the Twentieth century: a traceable continuum of ideas, a rationalism of the most presumptuous kind.
Secularism is the creature of Western man. He is responsible for what we have euphemistically called “the changing environment.” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his Nazi prison more than three decades ago, “Western civilization is about to deny its historical heritage as such. Western civilization is inimical to Christ. That is the peculiar situation of our times and its real decadence.” That denial has been labeled a “revolution,” as indeed it is: a far more reaching and radical revolution than the world has ever seen, infecting every level of culture. Anything “traditional” is not only discarded but discredited. The past is being “salted” and the ground turned over.
The secular revolution has no place for God or, at least, no place for the traditional God. It demands a new concept, if any at all. If there is to be a deity, he must be “the ground of being” or some evolving cosmic principle, anything but a deity, as Nietzsche pouted, that will arous guilt or pity and interfere in my life. This “force” or “ground” of things itself will be perfected with man and the universe in the future---in that new and glorious age. At the same time, a new idea of God implies a new idea of man and, of course, a new idea of nature: sinless but imperfect, man is master of his destiny and nature is his responsibility.
What does this hope for a new world-view mean for the Church and for religion in general? If there is to be a place for them, it is as private preference. The Church as an institiution is entirely historical, even as “God” is something immanent and developing. If She is to survive, if She is to make Her contribution to “the brave new world,” She must begin to thinkof Herself as a wholly natural organization and way of life. She must understand that She, even as people, has no privileges, no quality or power which sets Her above other religions. As all men are “equal,” so are religions. Moreover, She must “demythologize” Her Bible and traditions: all their teachings about the supernatural must be sociologically and philosophically reinterpreted (e.g., the Resurrection signifies the exaltation of mankind). Christ, of course, was simply “a man for others;” doctrines, dogmas, and canons are neither infallible nor absolute, for in a pluralistic and relativistic world, nothing has such attributes. The Mysteries of the Church are symbols of human love and unity; and asceticism, although a “rejection of the world,” is a rejection of the status quo, of the world as it is now; and mysticism is the union of one member of humanity with the whole, the vision of complete harmony and love.
What can the Orthodox Church do in the face of such a challenge, a challenge She must meet if She is to fulfill Her divine Mission? Firstly, let us remember that the Church has always known that this challenge would come. The Saints have for centuries predicted the coming of these times, of this “age of lawlessness,” of this “age of apostasy.” Secondly, the Orthodox People, as God’s People, are Stewards of God’s Revelation, His Treasure. He has stored that Treasure in earthen vessles, to be sure, but he has also sent us the Holy Spirit to guard it. For that reason, too, the Church is “the ground and pillar of Truth:” She cannot err, She cannot lie, She cannot willfully deceive, because the Holy Spirit guides Her into all Truth. Thirdly, we are obliged to “hold fast,” as individual members of the Church, to the Tradition which Christ delivered to the Apostles. Our fidelity to that Tradition brings us sanctification, a sanctification which renders us, lights to them who dwell in darkness.
The Faith we preserve has not developed or changed. The Church has not been seduced by Plato or Aristotle or Freud or Darwin or Marx. She has never found it necessary to follow current trends and fashions to make Her Message appealing. Indeed, She is no beggar of souls. Moreover, She belongs to no century. She is not, therefore, a Twentieth century Church, but the Church in the twentieth century. She exists to change, not to be changed. The Orthodox Church has a Message for the modern world, the same one Christ preached almost two thousand years ago---“Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!” Here is the essence of the Gospel, here is the answer to poverty, crime, racism, war, leadership, mores and manners, sex and feminism, egalitarianism, fraternalism and supposed liberty---to all the human problems, national and international. The Church’s answers are sacred not secular, because Her voice is the voice of eternity.
The Orthodox Christian Youth Conference Lectures IN Ontario, Canada, 1978 Part One St. Nicholas Educational Society (Roslindale, Mass. 1978) **
2003-11-07 21:45 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Madrid burns]In fact, they are influenced by Distributivist and the Pope Pius' Rerum Novarum[/QUOTE]
Quite true. Those tendancies are part of the larger Catholic social doctrine that has been in existance since the advent of the later. The ENR simply took the Organic quality and public policy substance of modern guildism, distributalism and Christian Socialism schools of the late 19th & early 20th centuries and dumped the theological justification behind them. The "vitalistic" current within National Socialist and Fascistic movements of various nations have done the same and I have done like wise.