The attack on the transcendent becomes conscious of itself

In my 2005 article, “What is transcendence and why does it matter?”, based on an unpublished manuscript written in 2001, I spoke of how modern society systematically reduces the world to material need and desire and banishes the transcendent—that which constitutes culture and makes the human, human. I wrote:

The Secular-Democratic consciousness, especially in its more radical stages, devalues and denies this invisible dimension of existence. To the Secular-Democratic mind, a police officer is not a symbol of the constituted authority of society (which is itself a transcendent idea), but just a man with a gun. A priest is not the representation of Christ, but just a man in a funny uniform going through obscure, even absurd, gestures.

On August 12, 2008, columnist Charlie LeDuff wrote in The Detroit News:

CLINTON TOWNSHIP—At precisely 8:57 a.m., under an overcast sky, Francesco and Francesca Imbrunone were re-laid to rest. A man in a dark suit stood over their remains proclaiming that they “await the resurrection.”

A man in a funny uniform going through obscure, even absurd, gestures—a man in a dark suit proclaiming the day of resurrection. LeDuff has actually done what I only stated as an idea or possibility, stripping away the priest’s special identity and function and making him ordinary, and thus meaningless.

When Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science comes to the town square and proclaims the death of God, the townspeople mock and dismiss him, because, as he realizes to his shock, though they themselves have killed God, they are not yet aware that he is dead and that it is they who have killed him. The passage from The Detroit News seems to carry Nietzsche’s prophecy to a new stage. When a reporter in a mainstream American paper dismissively describes a priest officiating at a burial and proclaiming the day of resurrection as merely a “man in a dark suit,” we can fairly say that the murder of God—the systematic removal of the divine and the transcendent from human life—has become a deliberate and conscious act, supported by the institutions of society.

Such is the real, emerging nature of the “secular liberal society” that even so-called conservatives now uphold as their ideal.

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August 18

Reader Ed S. sent this e-mail to Charlie LeDuff

Your article “Flight of the Dead” was one of the most disrespectful pieces of “journalism” I have ever read. A man in a dark suit (clearly a priest) proclaiming that they “await the resurrection.”? I have never seen such outright hostility toward religion in what passes for newspapers these days. Oh well, at least I don’t live in Detroit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 14, 2008 10:33 PM | Send