Voltaire had seen and admired firsthand the consequences of England’s religious toleration, which in turn, with the superior intellectual clarifications of Bacon, Locke, and Newton, he enthusiastically presented to the Continent for emulation. Armed with science, reason, and empirical facts, the Enlightenment saw itself as engaged in a noble struggle against the constricting medieval darkness of Church dogma and popular superstition, tied to a backward and tyrannical political structure of corrupt privilege.13 The cultural authority of dogmatic religion was recognized as inherently inimical to personal liberty and unhampered intellectual speculation and discovery. By implication, the religious sensibility itself—except in rationalized, deistic form—could well be seen as antagonistic to human freedom.
Yet one philosophe, the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, asserted a very different view. Like his fellows in the vanguard of the Enlightenment, Rousseau argued with the weapons of critical reason and reformist zeal. Yet the progress of civilization they celebrated seemed to him the source of much of the world’s evil. Man suffered from civilization’s corrupt sophistications, which alienated him from his natural condition of simplicity, sincerity, equality, kindness, and true understanding. Moreover, Rousseau believed religion was intrinsic to the human condition. He contended that the philosophes’ exaltation of reason had neglected man’s actual nature—his feelings, his depths of impulse and intuition and spiritual hunger that transcended all abstract formulae. Rousseau certainly disbelieved in the organized churches and clergy, and thought absurd the orthodox Christian belief that its form of worship was the exclusively and eternally genuine one—the only religion acceptable to the Creator of a world most of whose inhabitants had never heard of Christianity. Even Christianity notoriously disagreed on what was the exclusively correct form of worship. Rather than through the mediation of theological dogmas, priestly hierarchies, and hostile sectarianism, Rousseau believed humanity could best learn to worship the Creator by turning to nature, for there lay a sublimity that all could understand and feel. The rationally demonstrable God of the Deists was unsatisfactory, for love of God and awareness of morality were primarily feelings, not reasonings. The deity recognized by Rousseau was not an impersonal first cause, but a God of love and beauty whom the human soul could know from within. Reverent awe before the cosmos, the joy of meditative solitude, the direct intuitions of the moral conscience, the natural spontaneity of human compassion, a “theism” of the heart—these constituted the true nature of religion.
Rousseau thus set forth an immensely influential position beyond those of the orthodox Church and the skeptical philosophes, combining the religiosity of the former with the rational reformism of the latter, yet critical of both: if the one was constricting in its narrow dogmatism, the other was scarcely less so in its arid abstractions. And here lay the seed for contradictory developments, for at the same time that Rousseau reaffirmed man’s religious nature, he encouraged the modern sensibility in its gradual departure from Christian orthodoxy. He gave a rational reformist’s support to the lingering religious impulse of the modern mind, yet he gave that impulse new dimensions that served the Enlightenment’s undermining of the Christian tradition. Rousseau’s embrace of a religion whose essence was universal rather than exclusive, whose ground was in nature and man’s subjective emotions and mystical intuitions rather than in biblical revelation, initiated a spiritual current in Western culture that would lead first to Romanticism and eventually to the existentialism of a later age.
Thus whether it was the anticlerical Deism of Voltaire, the rationalist skepticism of Diderot, the agnostic empiricism of Hume, the materialistic atheism of Holbach, or the nature mysticism and emotional religiosity of Rousseau, the advance of the eighteenth century brought traditional Christianity into ever-lower regard in the eyes of progressive Europeans.
By the nineteenth century, both organized religion and the religious impulse itself had been subjected by Karl Marx to a forceful and acute social-political critique—and prophetically redirected to embrace the revolutionary cause. In Marx’s analysis, all ideas and cultural forms reflected material motivations, specifically the dynamics of class struggle, and religion was no exception. Despite their high-minded doctrines, the organized churches seldom seemed to concern themselves with the plight of workers or the poor. This seeming contradiction, Marx held, was in fact essential to the churches’ character, for the true role of religion was to keep the lower classes in order. A social opiate, religion effectively served the interests of the ruling class against the masses by encouraging the latter to forgo their responsibility for changing the present world of injustice and exploitation, in exchange for the false security of divine providence and the false promise of immortal life. Organized religion formed an essential element in the bourgeoisie’s control of society, for religious beliefs lulled the proletariat into self-defeating inaction. To speak of God and build one’s life on such fantasies was to betray man. By contrast, a genuine philosophy of action must start with the living man and his tangible needs. To transform the world, to realize the ideals of human justice and community, man must rid himself of the religious delusion.
The more moderate voices of nineteenth-century liberalism characteristic of the advanced Western societies also argued for the reduction of organized religion’s influence on political and intellectual life, and put forth the ideal of a pluralism accommodating the broadest possible freedom of belief consonant with social order. Liberal thinkers of a religious persuasion recognized not only the political necessity of freedom of worship, or freedom not to worship at all, in a liberal democracy, but also the religious necessity of such freedom. To be constrained to be religious, let alone bound to a particular religion, could scarcely encourage a genuinely religious approach to life.
But in such a liberal and pluralistic environment, a more secular sensibility became the increasingly usual outcome, for many the natural one. Religious tolerance gradually metamorphosed into religious indifference. It was no longer mandatory in Western society to be Christian, and in coincidence with this growing freedom, fewer members of the culture found the Christian belief system intrinsically compelling or satisfying. Both liberal utilitarian and radical socialist philosophies seemed to offer the contemporary age more cogent programs for human activity than the traditional religions. Nor was the tenor of materialism unique to Marxism, for while capitalism had earlier been encouraged by certain elements of the Protestant sensibility, the capitalist societies’ increasing preoccupation with material progress could not but depreciate the urgency of the Christian salvational message and the spiritual enterprise generally.14 While religious observance continued to be widely upheld as a pillar of social integrity and civilized values, that observance was often indistinguishable from the conventions of Victorian morality.
Moreover, the Christian churches were themselves unwitting contributors to their own decline. The Roman Catholic Church, in its Counter-Reformational response to the Protestant heresy, had reinforced its conservative structure by crystallizing its past—doctrinally as well as institutionally—thereby leaving it comparatively unresponsive to any changes necessitated by the evolution of the modern era. Catholicism maintained a certain impregnable strength among its still vast membership, but at the cost of its appeal to the growing modern sensibility. Conversely, the Protestant churches in their Reformational response to Catholicism had established a more antiauthoritarian and noncentralized structure by overthrowing the past in its monolithic Catholic form, setting forth literal Scripture alone as a new foundation. But in so doing, Protestantism tended to fray out in ever-diversifying sectarianism, while leaving its later membership, under the impact of scientific discoveries antithetical to literal interpretations of the Bible, more susceptible to the secularizing influences of the modern age. In either case, Christianity lost much of its relevance to the contemporary mind. By the twentieth century, with uncounted thousands quietly leaving their inherited religion, the latter had b
een radically diminished in cultural importance.
Christianity now experienced itself as not only a divided church but a shrinking one, dwindling away before the ever-widening and ever-deepening onslaught of secularism. The Christian religion now faced a historical situation not unlike that encountered at its inception, when it was one faith among many in a large, sophisticated, urbanized environment—a world ambivalent about religion in general, and distanced from the claims and concerns of the Christian revelation in particular. The once perfervid enmities existing between Protestantism and Catholicism,. the mutual distancing between all the various sects of Christianity, now diminished as these recognized their close affinity in the face of a growingly secular world. Kinship even with Judaism, so long the outcast in a Christian world, began to be more warmly acknowledged. In the modern world, all religions seemed to have more in common, a fading precious truth, than in dispute. Many commentators on the modern sensibility believed that religion was in its terminal stages, that it was just a matter of time before the irrationalities of religion would have relinquished their hold on the human mind.
Nevertheless, the Judaeo-Christian tradition sustained itself. Millions of families continued to nurture their children in the tenets and images of their inherited faith. Theologians continued to develop more historically nuanced understandings of Scripture and Church tradition, more flexible and imaginative applications of religious principles to life in the contemporary world. The Catholic Church began to open itself to modernity, to pluralism, ecumenism, and new freedom in matters of belief and worship. Christian churches in general moved to embrace wider congregations by making their structures and doctrines more relevant to the challenges—intellectual, psychological, sociological, political—of modern existence. Efforts were made to reconstruct an idea of God more immanent and evolutionary in character than the traditional one, more congruent with current cosmology and intellectual trends. Prominent philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists continued to claim personal meaning and spiritual comfort in the Judaeo-Christian framework. Yet the general movement of the culture’s intellectual elite, of the modern sensibility as a whole—of the religiously reared child as it reached a skeptical and secular modern maturity—was largely otherwise.
For beyond the institutional and scriptural anachronisms discouraging a universal continuation of Christian faith lay a more general psychological discrepancy between the traditional Judaeo-Christian self-image and that of modern man. As early as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the heavy taint of Original Sin ceased to be experienced as a dominant element in the lives of those born into the bright world of modern progress, nor could such a doctrine be readily combined with the scientific conception of man. The traditional image of the Semitic-Augustinian-Protestant God, who creates man too weak to withstand evil temptation, and who predestines the majority of his human creatures to eternal damnation with little consideration of their good works or honest attempts at virtue, ceased to be either palatable or plausible to many sensitive members of modern culture. The internal liberation from religious guilt and fear was as attractive an element in the secular world view as was earlier the external liberation from oppressive Church-dominated political and social structures. It was also increasingly recognized that the human spirit was expressed in secular life or not at all—any division of spiritual and secular was an artificiality, and an impoverishment for both. To locate the human spirit in another reality, transcendent or otherworldly, was to subvert that spirit altogether.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s epochal pronouncement of “the death of God” that culminated this long evolution in the Western psyche and foreshadowed the existential mood of the twentieth century. With ruthless perceptiveness, he held up a dark mirror to the soul of Christianity—its inculcation of attitudes and values opposed to man’s present existence, to the body, to the Earth, to courage and heroism, to joy and freedom, to life itself. “They would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their Redeemer: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” And with this critique many agreed. For Nietzsche, the death of God signified not just the recognition of a religious illusion, but the demise of an entire civilization’s world view that for too long had held man back from a daring, liberating embrace of life’s totality.
With Freud, the modern psychological evaluation of religion achieved a new level of systematic and penetrating theoretical analysis. The discovery of the unconscious and of the human psyche’s tendency to project traumatic memory constellations onto later experience opened up a crucial new dimension to the critical understanding of religious beliefs. In the light of psychoanalysis, the Judaeo-Christian God could be seen as a reified psychological projection based on the child’s naive view of its libidinally restrictive and seemingly omnipotent parent. Reconceived in this way, many aspects of religious behavior and belief appeared to be comprehensible as symptoms of a deeply rooted cultural obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The projection of a morally authoritative patriarchal deity could be seen as having been a social necessity in earlier stages of human development, satisfying the cultural psyche’s need for a powerful “external” force to undergird society’s ethical requirements. But having internalized those requirements, the psychologically mature individual could recognize the projection for what it was, and dispense with it.
An important role in the devaluation of traditional religion was also played by the issue of sexual experience. With the rise in the twentieth century of a broad-mindedly secular and psychologically informed perspective, the long-held Christian ideal of asexual or antisexual asceticism seemed symptomatic more of cultural and personal psychoneurosis than of eternal spiritual law. Medieval practices such as mortification of the flesh were recognized as pathological aberrations rather than saintly exercises. The sexual attitudes of the Victorian era were seen as parochial inhibitions. Both Protestantism’s puritanical tradition and the Catholic Church’s continuing restrictiveness in sexual matters, particularly its prohibition of contraception, alienated thousands from the fold. The demands and delights of human eros made the traditional religious attitudes seem unhealthily constraining. As Freud’s insights were integrated into the ever-growing modern movement of personal liberation and self-realization, a powerful Dionysian impulse arose in the West. Even for more staid sensibilities, it made little sense for human beings systematically to deny and repress that part of their being, their physical organism, that was not only their evolutionary inheritance but their existential foundation. Modern man had committed himself to this world, with all the entailments of such a choice.
Finally, even the long schooling of the Western mind in the Christian value system eventually worked to undermine Christianity’s status in the modern era. From the Enlightenment onward, the continuing development of the Western mind’s social conscience, its growing recognition of unconscious prejudices and injustices, and its increasing historical knowledge shed new light on the actual practice of the Christian religion over the centuries. The Christian injunction to love and serve all humanity and high valuation of the individual human soul now stood in sharp counterpoint to Christianity’s long history of bigotry and violent intolerance—its forcible conversion of other peoples, its ruthless suppression of other cultural perspectives, its persecutions of heretics, its crusades against Moslems, its oppression of Jews, its depreciation of women’s spirituality and exclusion of women from positions of religious authority, its association with slavery and colonialist exploitation, its pervasive spirit of prejudice and religious arrogance maintained against all those outside the fold. Measured by its own standards, Christianity fell woefully short of ethical greatness, and many alternative systems, from ancient Stoicism to modern liberalism and socialism, seemed to provide equally inspiring programs for human activity without the baggage of implausible supernatural belief.
The Modern Character
Thus was the movement from the Christian to the secular world view an overdetermined
progression. Indeed, it would seem that the overall driving force of secularism did not lie in any specific factor or combination of factors—the scientific discrepancies with biblical revelation, the metaphysical consequences of empiricism, the social-political critiques of organized religion, the growing psychological acuity, the changing sexual mores, and so forth—for any of these could have been negotiable, as they were for those many who remained devout Christians. Secularism, rather, reflected a more general shift of character in the Western psyche, a shift visible in the various specific factors but transcending and subsuming them in its own global logic. The new psychological constitution of the modern character had been developing since the high Middle Ages, had conspicuously emerged in the Renaissance, was sharply clarified and empowered by the Scientific Revolution, then extended and solidified in the course of the Enlightenment. By the nineteenth century, in the wake of the democratic and industrial revolutions, it had achieved mature form. The direction and quality of that character reflected a gradual but finally radical shift of psychological allegiance from God to man, from dependence to independence, from otherworldliness to this world, from the transcendent to the empirical, from myth and belief to reason and fact, from universals to particulars, from a supernaturally determined static cosmos to a naturally determined evolving cosmos, and from a fallen humanity to an advancing one.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 41