Last week, I dealt with the description by Alisdair MacIntire of Western Civilization as invaded by the New Barbarians and waiting for a kind of “New St. Benedict.” Naturally, many Christian writers have taken up the call. I’m not immune from this temptation. MacIntyre has warned that he does not mean this to be taken in a narrow or fundamentalist way. This week, I will continue with this blog, primarily taken from my book, Path of Life, as we investigate how we got into this situation in the first place. [1]
Christians in Early 21st Century America
Alisdair MacIntyre begins his book, After Virtue, with a story. [2] “Imagine,” he says, “that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.” He goes on to describe an environmental disaster that is unfairly blamed on the scientific community. After riots, acts of violence, deaths, and destruction, a “know nothing” party takes control and abolishes the teaching of science in schools and universities. The remaining scientists are imprisoned. After some time, there is a change in public mood, and a few leaders attempt to restore and revive the scientific community, though hardly anyone remembers exactly how science was practiced. All that remains are fragments of the outstanding achievements of the past.
Slowly but surely, the group attempts to restore science as a discipline, but it isn’t easy. No real scientists are remaining to lead the effort. There are no remaining university departments of physics, chemistry, biology, and the like. Only fragments of the body of past scientific literature remain. Although some of the theorems of science remain known to scholars, they are disconnected and incomplete. Therefore, they memorize parts of the remaining literature, debate the meanings of specific theories, and attempt to teach children elementary principles of science. Unfortunately, what they are doing does not in any way resemble science.
Then MacIntyre makes his point: Moral thinking in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is in just such a condition. From the beginnings of moral inquiry until the Enlightenment, a form of life dominated Western Europe, and a significant body of literature illuminated and analyzed that way of life. Over the past 300 years, the foundations of Western civilization and culture have been eroded in a period of growing skepticism.
What is sometimes called “Judeo-Christian Culture” forms the historical foundation of Western life and thinking, but the reality of this culture is far more subtle and complex than its name implies. Jews and Christians were profoundly impacted by various cultures of the ancient world and, most importantly, by that culture we sometimes refer to as “Greco-Roman,” the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. For example, the writers of Biblical wisdom literature were deeply impacted by the broader culture of the ancient Middle East, especially Egypt. They, in turn, were affected by other cultures with which they came into contact. By the beginning of the Modern World (circa 1492 A.D.), Medieval culture was already in contact with, and impacted by, Muslim culture. A portion of what we call Greco-Roman literature was mediated to the West by Islamic sources. The culture of the Far East has deeply impacted modern culture. All of this impacted the development of Western Culture in profound ways.
Attack on the Judeo-Christian World-View
Over the past 300 years, that way of life and body of literature has been attacked, questioned, ridiculed, distorted, forgotten, diminished, and shattered. All we possess today are fragments. We continue to use expressions from the past, but we no longer have a practical comprehension of much of this long history, so we have largely lost the actual practices to which the theories referred. The way of life formed by our history has slowly disintegrated. This is true in secular culture. Worse, it is true among Christians. We use the language of faith, but too often, we think, will, choose, and live based on the secular world around us.
Nowhere is the problem of a loss of cultural heritage more apparent than in the church. Church members and leaders often use the traditional language of Christian faith, life, and morality. Still, that language has lost its connection with the concrete reality of their day-to-day lives. Their lives and ours are often formed by the values and lifestyle of a culture increasingly alienated from its roots.
For example, most Christians understand that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits adultery and that marriage is in some sense sacred. Pastors preach sermons on the subject. Members attend Bible studies where the principles are espoused. Guest speakers and cultural commentators speak and write about family values. Christians often send their children to Christian schools where traditional ethics are taught, sometimes too forcefully. Yet, studies show that American Christians have affairs, divorce, and dishonor marriage in pretty much the same way as non-Christians.
Many young people are frankly nonchalant about the Biblical teaching concerning pre-marital sex. As a pastor, I can testify to what young people will say and admit to in a safe environment. Publicly, they mouth the principles of traditional morals—especially in front of their parents and religious leaders. Privately, they find their way around them—or ignore them altogether. They do this because the moral world they truly inhabit is formed by the cultural world in which they live and breathe every moment they are not in church or Bible study. While they know the language of Judeo-Christian culture, they no longer inhabit and live out the reality of it.
Sex is not the only area in which Judeo-Christian culture no longer meaningfully impacts social behavior. Pre-modern societies usually regulated, and perhaps even overregulated, economic life. There was an attempt to regulate economic life so that the rich and poor could live together without one party taking undue advantage of the other. For example, the limitation of interest rates through usury laws was based on religious and moral concerns. Late modern and post-modern societies, capitalist and socialist, have tended to exclude religious and ethical considerations from business and economic policies. The result is that many Christians and Jews employ in their business lives strategies that the Bible and their respective traditions expressly or implicitly condemn.
There is something deeply mistaken with how modern and post-modern people fail to internalize Scripture, the truths of the Christian faith, and the way of life they imply. Even when Christians memorize the foundational texts of the Christian tradition, they often have ceased to express and control the realities of everyday life. On the theological left, the words of Scripture do not have objective content; they express religious feelings. On the theological right, the words of Scripture express a proclaimed inerrant content, an infallible truth that is often mentally accepted but does not impact behavior. In neither case does it seem that these words end up “written on the tablet of the heart” (Proverbs 3:3).
From Enlightenment to Modernity
What went wrong? The story Alystair MacIntyre tells is a hidden retelling of the story of the modern world. There was a time when what might be called Judeo-Christian faith and ethical practices and theories stemming from the works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas dominated Western life. The majority of people were Christian, at least in name. The Roman Catholic Church, the monastic orders, and the teachers of the nascent universities in Europe were dominated by the thinking of these great teachers. Yes, there were doubters. Yes, there were other traditions. However, the Christian faith and the ethics of Aristotle, as modified by Thomas Aquinas, reflected an intellectual and moral consensus.
This societal consensus deteriorated during the Renaissance (1500-1600) and Reformation (1517-1648). The Renaissance was a time of rediscovery of the classical Greek tradition. It also laid the foundations for the Reformation’s convulsions. The Reformation was a time of Biblical renewal in faith and morals, but it was also the beginning of the modern questioning of authority, secular and religious. Then, in the 1700’s, the “Enlightenment” began. The Enlightenment was a time when Western Europe discovered the power of human critical reason (Descartes), the method of science (Newton), skepticism towards authority (the French “Philophes”), and belief in human progress (the scientific and industrial revolution).
A central feature of the Enlightenment and the Modern Age has been rejecting tradition, religious institutions (especially the European Roman Catholic Church), and any kind of knowledge that cannot be “proved” by human critical reason. The result has been a loss of the social and religious foundations for moral and ethical reasoning. Although our society is a scientific and technical marvel, it is culturally, intellectually, ethically, morally, and spiritually impoverished—with all the human suffering and damaged lives that the word “poverty” implies.
From Modernity to Post-Modernity
“What does this have to do with me?” some may ask. The answer is simple: the world we live in was created, for better and for worse, by the upheaval of the Enlightenment. We see the wonders of technology and the results of the scientific method. All of us experience the benefits of modern medicine. We all understand the benefits of industrialization and the dramatically increasing living standards. The benefits and progress of the Modern Age have been enormous.
Just as we all experience the benefits of the Modern Age, we also experience its limitations. With the successes of the scientific method, people began to see that method as applicable to all knowledge—and forms of knowledge, such as religious and moral beliefs, that are not susceptible to scientific proof, were often ignored or scorned. With the successes of science and technology, people began to believe that all the problems of human society could be solved by science and its application to human problems.
With the advancement of human society’s material aspects, people began to believe that material progress, often visualized in scientific and industrial terms, was both inevitable and potentially unending. Science and human reasoning, when applied to the problems of human life and existence, would continue to improve human life and provide a final consummation of the human heart’s yearning for meaning, purpose, health, prosperity, goodness, truth, and beauty.
Perhaps most importantly, critical reason, the very center of the Enlightenment project, began to attack the foundations of society itself. It attacked all moral claims and all claims for truth. With the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers, the principles of the Enlightenment began to be attacked first in the Apartments of philosophy, then in departments of literature, and finally in popular culture as a whole.
The Post-Modern World
Then came the tumults of the Twentieth Century. Two Great Wars, one ending with the use of a weapon that made possible the destruction of civilization, cast doubt upon the inevitability of progress. The destruction of human civilization became as realistic an alternative as its continued progress. The myth of progress and the hope of a human paradise created by science and human reason began to die.
Although scientific innovation continued at an accelerated pace and the standard of living improved in Western Europe and America, people remained the same. Although industrial society continued to develop, socio-economic inequities and environmental degradation troubled many people. Amidst the wealth of the West, doubts and anxiety plagued many people. Much was gained due to the Enlightenment and the Modern Era, but much has been lost.
Until recently, the moral skepticism of intellectual and cultural elites, which emerged during the modern period, impacted only a few people. The moral tradition of the West formed the majority of people. With the increasing importance of the media, the moral values of the few have become the moral values of the many. We now live in a society without consistent and widely accepted personal morality and behavior norms. The results of this phenomenon can be found in every city, town, village, church, school, and neighborhood in America.
Most observers believe that the human race is entering a period that, for now, takes the name “postmodern.” In a way, the name reflects uncertainty concerning the positive aspects of our new cultural environment. All the term “postmodernism” connotes is that the postmodern world is after the modern world. In some ways, we can’t see what the postmodern world is or will be like in the future; we only know that the modern era is over. What is to come is unclear.
The pillars of the Enlightenment were (1) confidence in human critical and scientific reason, (2) a faith that human reason, and especially the scientific method, would usher in a kind of Golden Age in which many of the world’s most vexing problems were once and forever solved, (3) a belief in a universal morality discernible by reason alone, and (4) hostility towards tradition, traditional forms of life, and traditional religion.
Each of these pillars of Enlightenment thinking crumbled under the pressure of the wars and violence of the 20thcentury, the terrible suffering inflicted by the ideological regimes of Nazism and Communism, and the perception that Western Capitalism is itself a kind of ideology that has destructive impacts on the environment and local cultures. Philosophically, the critical posture of philosophers from Nietzsche to the present, and especially the advocates of what is sometimes called “deconstructionism,” further undermined a belief in universal reason and morality. Culturally, the growth of education and the rise of what is sometimes called “multiculturalism” further relativized almost any imaginable moral or religious system or belief. [3]
Back to the question, “What does this have to do with me?” Although few of us ponder the deep religious and philosophical issues raised by modern culture, we live in the boiling social and cultural cauldron of its results. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up in rural communities. Our parents and grandparents built great industries and the cities their growth required. Today, all over the world, many people live in giant metropolises. Most of us live in relatively large cities. Some of us live in great conglomerations of cities, including New York-Washington, Houston-Dallas-San Antonio, and the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridors.
Most of us do not live near relatives, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in close-knit extended families. Let’s listen to or watch the media. We see it played-out lifestyles deeply at odds with not only traditional Judeo-Christian lifestyles but also profoundly at odds with the cultural traditions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or almost any other traditional cultural norm. Day after day, the popular media, driven by advertising, promotes a culture that is deeply materialistic, deeply romantic, deeply sensual, and (despite its claims to reasonableness) deeply unreasonable. Those who work in social service agencies, churches, and other religious areas see daily the impact of our shared culture on the lives of ordinary people.
For a long time during the Enlightenment and much of the Modern world, losing contact with a tradition of faith and morals did not devastatingly impact culture. Ordinary people continued to go to church or synagogue. They grew up with their character formed by the saga of Israel, Christ, and the Church. They read Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Romans and Greeks.” People knew the old songs and old stories. They lived in a world formed by a heritage that began when God appeared to Abraham and Socrates walked the streets of Athens. Though intellectual and cultural elites had long ago given up the faith that formed them, they were still formed by the heritage they rejected.
With the advent of modern media and the pervasive impact of movies, television, and the internet, all this has changed. Another story—a story deeply incoherent but filled with seductive images of wealth, power, violence, and pleasure—forms the character of not just a few but of the many. We now live in the aftermath of that cultural and moral disaster, a disaster precisely like the one MacIntyre describes. At best, we live among the fragments of a cultural past. Most of us live among its bombed-out ruins, like survivors of the great bombings of the Second World War in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan.
Our life among the ruins of Western Civilization breeds rootlessness in many different ways. It is the author’s conviction that the deepest need of our culture is to reconnect with the traditional wisdom of the ancient world. This does not mean that we must jettison or reject the accomplishments of the modern world. It does not mean retreating into a pre-modern culture. It means reaching deep beyond and before Modernity into the cultural traditions from which the modern world emerged to recover the best and most important part of what has been lost. In the West, this involves reaching deep into the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular roots of our culture found in the culture of Greece and Rome. Under the cultural conditions of the West today, it also means reaching into other cultures’ wisdom and moral traditions in the quest for knowledge and moral truth.
A Return to Leslie Newbigin
This is where I return to Lesslie Newbigin and his book, Proper Confidence. [4] In Proper Confidence, Newbigin outlines the importance of Benedict for Western history. Born into that period we called the “Dark Ages,” Benedict created an order that modeled a form of Christian life appropriate to an agricultural and primarily rural economy, forming one of the bedrock institutions of the Middle Ages. In the process, as his monasteries spread all across Europe, the population of Europe was given a visual, embodied example of the kind of society that Christians could flourish in. In addition, the network of monasteries, Benedictine and otherwise, allowed Christian civilization to spread throughout Europe.
Benedict was not a revolutionary. He built upon the work of others who had preceded him, particularly Pachomius, John Cassian, and Augustine. Here is how Newbigin describes his achievement:
The Benedictine rule, with its balanced combination of prayer, manual work, and study was firmly based on the Bible. At the center of the life of each community was the continual reading of the Bible, both in study and in the worship of the community. The biblical story came to be the one story that shaped the understanding of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. In the constant remembering of the great events of creation and salvation through the liturgical year, in the popular drama of the streets, and in the pictures that surrounded the congregation as they gathered for worship, it was the story that was their mental framework, the story that defined human life and its meaning and destiny. [5]
When Alistair McIntyre invites us to await the coming of a new Benedict, I don’t think he’s inviting us to wait for the return of St Benedict and the conversion of Western civilization to a pre-modern state. Unlike in Benedict’s Europe, most people today do not live in ruled areas or engage in agriculture as a way of life. More and more frequently, people live in cities today, and the world population is centered in great metropolitan areas of such size and complexity that would have been unimaginable even a century ago.
Nevertheless, we have much to learn from St. Benedict. I suggest that whatever emerges amidst the ruins of modern civilization will have a monastic look. Prayer and meditation will sit at the foundation of life. The value of manual labor will be reestablished, especially as artificial intelligence does many tasks previously done by intellectual laborers. Finally, the great religious traditions of the world, if they can learn to work together, we’ll have a place. For Christians, this means that the Bible’s story of God, who is both wisdom and love, will sit at the center of the life recommended by our new St. Benedict.
Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] G. Christopher Scruggs, Path of Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014).
[2] Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 1.
[3] For a Christian introduction to Post Modernism, see Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Irvine, CA: Crossway Books, 1994).
[4] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Disicpleship (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans 1995).
[5] Id, 13.
As indicated in prior blogs, each of the Arthur Stone novels (Marshland [1]and Peace at Battle Mountain[2]) involves an economic and legal problem, murder, and engagement with spiritual realities. In Peace at Battle Mountain, the spiritual reality is our human problem with what St. Augustine called “disordered love.” We love as primary things that are secondary and as secondary things that are primary. A good deal of the suffering and distortion of human flourishing we encounter in our lives and the lives of others involves just this problem.
