God Bless Modernity

In Honor of Troubled Times (§120-126)

(§1-7; §8-14; §15-21; §22-28; §29-35, §36-42; §43-49; §50-56; §57-63, §64-70; §71-77; §78-84, §85-91, §92-98, §99-105; §106-112; §113-119)

§120. The Peril and the Promise

There’s precious little more that need be said about the peril in which we modern humans find ourselves. Among other things, we observe that “artificial intelligence” is poised not to become sentient, but rather to rob sentience from vast swathes of people, seducing them into a regression to its own mineral level. And yet, for all of that, the entire project of modernity is ignited by a drive for spiritual liberty, no matter how misguided. A lot of our troubles can be chalked up to the simple fact that God is not a helicopter parent. He is quite willing to allow us to make our own catastrophic mistakes, bring ourselves to the very edge of annihilation—and all in the name of a soul that is mature and a love that is true. If God really is our Abba, then presumably, like any good father, He wishes for His kids to grow into autonomous adults; to become men and women who are still His progeny but who have imbued themselves with enough of His Spirit that He does not need to directly instruct and command them at every moment. And thus we may say of the modern venture that, if we manage to not exterminate ourselves, this grand experiment could still turn out pretty great.

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§121. Inescapable Decision

It is epistemologically impossible for the modern mind to ever return to a naive form of faith. We imagine the lifeworld of a medieval Catholic, for whom the authority of the pope and the king may have been an all-pervasive feature of reality, on the order of time and space and gravity. But the sense of contingency and possibility is precisely what we moderns have learnt and now can never forget. To be a modern Catholic is a choice, not just the way things are and always have been and must remain—and we know it. A man may believe in the authority of the pope, say; but he could just as viably not believe in such authority. And thus the man faces an inescapable decision, which he must resolve on the basis of his own authority, drawing on the discernment of logic and conscience and the evaluation of the credibility of third-party testimonies. And in the end, whatever the man decides, he becomes radically responsible for his beliefs. Doubtless, this is why it is so grating when trad types, falling into a curious bad faith, elide this entire modern dialectic and pretend that a long-gone state of naivety is still possible for them. It isn’t.

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§122. The New Prerogative

The modern conscience insists on its own prerogative of veto over demands that violate its instincts and intuitions, and this is exactly as it should be. God’s alleged bluster to Job’s sincere questions will no longer pass muster (if it ever did, outside of the context of an over-clever thought experiment)—and why would it? A deity who responds to a seeker’s quest for answers with outbursts of crass and arbitrary power would not be deserving of respect, let alone worship. Or so declares the modern conscience , anyway, and we don’t see much of a problem here. Given that we moderns have been condemned to decide what we believe, we are also obliged to make use of our best lights when navigating our way to our convictions; and if we opt to simply ignore our screaming moral instincts, then that too would be a choice for which we bear total responsibility, probably for the worse. Such a move may even come close to the one unforgivable sin, the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost: for moral intuition itself comes from nowhere other than the image of God within the human heart; and God adores the free conscience, loving honest pushback and resistance more than blind and craven submission.

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§123. A Love of Immanence

Another blessed feature of the modern mind is its love of immanence and its inability to any longer take the life-haters, the vitaphobes, with much seriousness. The Poet says in the fulness of his wisdom that if we happen to run into a vitaphobe on the road, then we must not speak to him, but rather only whack him over the head with a large daikon radish: for such a figure is as toxic as a spider, incapable of preferring life over death or even telling the difference. Historical Christianity has surely been shot through from an early date with a pseudo-Gnostic hatred of the Creation as such, with a parade of sad-faced monks longing instead for a Heaven that is indistinguishable from sweet impersonal oblivion. By now, though, many modern believers are skeptical of people who despise life in the name of holiness, rightly suspecting that the latter’s melancholia has its roots in their own subjective psychical maladies and not in the pneumatic Good News. Those among us who want a poetic life have little to learn from those who have little use for life as such, transfigured or otherwise. The modern mind can only accept a new, existentially anchored search for presence that is liberated from the risk of inversion into such a spectral transcendence—and, ironically, this secular insistence does more honor to the Creation than any sort of holy and vitaphobic renunciation. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

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§124. Against Nostalgia

In the face of the complexity and uncertainty of the modern world, we are wont to fantasize about life in a simpler time: a time when the parameters of life and mind were more given and less decided upon; a time when a man’s religion and mode of existence were the same as they were seven generations back and would probably remain seven generations hence. But such nostalgia is an evil trick of spectral memory. In general, it is only we moderns who long for a way of life that is not our own—and that is for the exact reason that our souls are saturated by this omnipresent sense of possibility, this indelible awareness that things could be different. We not only experience nostalgia, we are also quite persuaded that the haunted visions that we see could be turned into realities, via the pure fiat of creativity and will. Surely there is a demonic element to such faith when it disdains the Real and ignores the laws of spiritual aviation, becoming spectral as a result. But all the same, we are called to resist the arcadian fallacy and to understand that whatever inspiration we draw from the past and make incarnate now, it will be a new future for us and the cosmos, not a simple restoration of any bygone state that ever was.

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§125. To Sing a New Song

One of the most famous lines of the Psalms exhorts us to sing to the Lord a new song—and in response, we sing that exact same literal song, week in and week out, presumably forever. This is right up there with the irony of Jesus commanding us to call no man father (and we can all see how that turned out). The Psalms were a major poetic breakthrough at the time, an utterly novel mode of engagement with the Lord, overflowing with subjective passion. And some of the passages across that book certainly achieve the permanent lyrical heights, right up there with the likes of any poet we’d ever care to name. But we may be forgiven for often failing to draw deep solace or inspiration from poems that often sound very much like the Bronze-Age revenge fantasies that they are, or to understand how this could possibly be the best everlasting way to address ourselves to the living God. More to the point, the gorgeous crystal of creative inspiration that is a poem—it should inspire us to be likewise poetic ourselves; to engage it in a dialogical manner and make our own contribution to the great open Canon, from the depths of our own souls just as any poet of esteem did before us. To merely remain in a state of passive and reactive awe would be a form of arrested development.

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§126. A Zillion Little Worlds

Solipsism—the theory that one’s own mind is all that is real—is a serious threat in the modern world, as all socially shared definitions of reality perpetually melt into air. But that is not to say that the problem can be solved by a regression to a more naive era of collectively calibrated culture. At its own level, solipsism is much more true than most among us would care to imagine. Much of what a man thinks and perceives is his own individual, subjective, psychical world, which he then falsely generalizes and reifies as the objective Real. More than that, the shape of consciousness does ontologically co-create the world; the water of psyche is not only altered by the pneumatic light but also in some sense alters light in turn. The fact that all our zillion little worlds even manage to touch as much and as often as they do: this itself is a sort of miracle, strongly suggestive of a latent and pre-existing harmony among all of the creatures of the Creation. In any event, this problem of solipsism has always been intrinsic to the human condition, and modernity has not created it but rather merely revealed it in its full force. The only thing to do is to go not back but through, toward a mode of consciousness that is ever more transparent and aware of its own foundations.