Is our civilization already dead and in the grave?

In April 2006 a reader said that America and Christianity are dead, they died in the Sixties or even sooner, so that the notion of keeping them alive or reviving them is false:

I really don’t see that either American history or Christianity have any philosophical, sociological, political and psychological credibility to define our experience (separately or together) any longer except as forms of nostalgia.

Once something has died, to “return” to it usually means returning to a pale copy of it, sometimes to a counterfeit of it. When “the spirit has left the temple,” useless to worship at that tabernacle…

I replied:

But of course the starting point of traditionalism is the recognition that there has been a liberal revolution that has transformed the world, that liberalism is completely in the saddle and is set on finishing off whatever remains of the civilization it has toppled and taken over. These grim realizations are the starting point of traditionalism. Yet traditionalism also recognizes that this liberalism is itself false and built on lies and unsustainable and cannot form the basis of an enduring society. Meanwhile the things you so evidently despise and casually dismiss, traditional America and Christianity, while no longer dominant, still exist and have not disappeared.

Then I continued:

As for the supposed deadness of Christianity, you write that “the only Christian viewpoint available these days is based on an existential ‘leap in the dark’ without any rational foundation.” This is false. You are approaching Christianity as though it were a matter of believing or disbelieving certain intellectual assertions. I don’t think that’s the way people become believers. They become believers because the truth becomes manifest to them, as Paul speaks of in the first chapter of Romans. It’s not just revelations from above like the Bible that tell us that God exists, it is the world itself that tells us that God exists. It is mountains and trees and animals that tell us that God exists—that this visible world emerges from something infinitely greater than itself.

Twenty years ago I was on an Appalachian Mountain Club hike on a steep trail leading up from the Hudson River a few miles north of West Point. As we got up to a certain height I looked back and saw the beautiful mountains flanking the river to our south, and the words came to me out of nowhere, the opening words of a psalm that I hadn’t thought of in years, “The earth is the LORD’S and the fullness thereof.” That wasn’t just an uplifting, poetic idea; it was the truth. It is this kind of experience, whether communicated by nature, or by scripture, or by the liturgy and sacraments of the Church, that tells us, in the most immediate, convincing, transforming way, that God exists. Jonathan Edwards wrote of how faith is triggered by an experience of the “divine excellency” of the words of Scripture. What this means is, the person sees the truth that is being conveyed, he sees that these words are not ordinary human words, that they come from above, just as, with nature, we see by an immediate yet rational intuition that nature comes from something beyond itself. This is not about an existential leap in the dark (one of those fashionable modern notions). This is about SEEING the truth, a truth that exists independently of us.

So when you talk about the only recourse being an “existential leap in the dark,” you are speaking in the categories of false modern intellectualism…

Here’s the bottom line: you’re saying that FOR YOU Christianity is dead; FOR YOU America is dead. And therefore you conclude that they actually are dead. And then you tote out all these spiritually lost, modernist authorities (you actually cite Freud—hey, man, talking about living in the dead past!) to buttress your point.

You may reply that you have not had such glimpses or experiences of God as I describe, and that I say are the basis of religion, so what are you supposed to do? I don’t have an answer to that, any more than I know why, say, some people have an ear for music, and others don’t. But I will say this. There is a great difference between a person saying, “I have no experience of God, the idea of God makes no sense to me,” which in individual instances may be a true and sincere statement, and a person saying, “God doesn’t exist, because the gods of modernism say he doesn’t exist.” The latter is just an arrogant, baseless assertion.

- end of initial entry -

Rick Darby writes:

Your response is profound and beautiful.

I would add only that, God being infinite and incomprehensible to the rational mind, there is no limit to the ways that God can manifest in the human soul.

Certainly, some people find—or at least, find themselves open to—spiritual reality through nature or aesthetic experience. For others, as you say, it can be reading a line from scripture and suddenly grasping its inner meaning.

But other traditions include spiritual disciplines, primarily meditation, as a path to God. (The medieval Christian church had an analogue in the form of contemplation, now all but lost in Christianity, I’m afraid.) I have heard spiritual teachers say that it is enough to ask, sincerely, day after day and in season and out, that God reveal himself.

Sometimes revelation happens gradually and, up to a point, unconsciously. William James analyzes, in Varieties of Religious Experience, cases of “sudden” conversion and concludes that a shift was going on in the background for a long time: the human consciousness has many unknown spaces, our Father’s house many mansions. Then, with some apparently trivial stimulus, the balance shifts; what was in the background is now in the foreground. It’s like the tiny speck that, inserted into a solution, causes it to crystallize.

I believe no two people have quite the same path to spiritual realization, although most can learn something from others so long as they don’t slavishly follow it. But I agree with you, you can’t think your way to knowing God exists. The faith that leads a person to keep seeking, believing in what is not yet known, believing that truth will appear at the right time in the needed form, has to be there. In reply to the objection that religion is illogical, Chesterton said that there is no logic to the shape of a key. Its logic is that it opens the door.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2008 08:20 AM | Send