The tenor of Christianity no longer suited the prevailing mood of man’s self-sustained progress in and mastery of his world. Modern man’s capacity to understand the natural order and to bend that order to his own benefit could not but diminish his former sense of contingency upon God. Using his own natural intelligence, and without the aid of Holy Scripture’s divine revelation, man had penetrated nature’s mysteries, transformed his universe, and immeasurably enhanced his existence. Combined with the seemingly non-Christian character of the scientifically revealed natural order, this new sense of human dignity and power inevitably moved man toward his secular self. The tangible immediacy of this world and man’s ability to find his meaning in it, to respond to its demands, and to experience progress within it all relieved him of that incessant striving for and anxiety concerning an afterworldly salvation. Man was responsible for his own earthly destiny. His own wits and will could change his world. Science gave man a new faith—not only in scientific knowledge, but in himself. It was particularly this emerging psychological climate that made the progressive sequence of philosophical and scientific advances—whether by Locke, Hume, and Kant, or by Darwin, Marx, and Freud—so potently effective in undercutting religion’s role in the modern world view. The traditional Christian attitudes were no longer psychologically appropriate to the modern character.
Especially consequential for the secularization of the modern character was the nature of its allegiance to reason. The modern mind required of itself, and exulted in, a systematically critical independence of judgment—an existential posture not easily compatible with the pious surrender required for belief in divine revelation or obedience to the precepts of a priestly hierarchy. The modern emergence of autonomous personal judgment, prototypically incarnated in Luther, Galileo, and Descartes, made increasingly impossible any continuation of the medieval era’s virtually universal intellectual deference to external authorities, such as the Church and Aristotle, that had been culturally empowered by tradition. And as modern man continued to mature, his striving for intellectual independence grew more absolute.
Thus the advance of the modern era brought a massive shift in the psychological vector of perceived authority. Whereas in earlier periods of the West’s history, wisdom and authority were characteristically located in the past—biblical prophets, ancient bards, classical philosophers, the apostles and early fathers of the Church—the modern awareness increasingly located that power in the present, in its own unprecedented achievements, in its own self-consciousness as the evolutionary vanguard of human experience. Earlier eras looked backward, while the modern looked to itself and its future. Modern culture’s complexity, productivity, and sophistication plainly put it in a class beyond all predecessors. And whereas the past authority had been typically associated with a transcendent principle—God, mythic deities, a cosmic intelligence—the modern awareness was itself becoming that authority, subsuming that power, making the transcendent immanent in itself. Medieval theism and ancient cosmism had given way to modern humanism.
Hidden Continuities
The West had “lost its faith”—and found a new one, in science and in man. But paradoxically, much of the Christian world view found continued life, albeit in often unrecognized forms, in the West’s new secular outlook. Just as the evolving Christian understanding did not fully divorce itself from its Hellenic predecessor but, on the contrary, employed and integrated many of the latter’s essential elements, so too did the modern secular world view—often less consciously—retain essential elements from Christianity. The Christian ethical values and the Scholastic-developed faith in human reason and in the intelligibility of the empirical universe were conspicuous among these, but even as fundamentalist a Judaeo-Christian doctrine as the command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature found modern affirmation, often explicit as in Bacon and Descartes, in the advances of science and technology.15 So too did the Judaeo-Christian high regard for the individual soul, endowed with “sacred” inalienable rights and intrinsic dignity, continue in the secular humanist ideals of modern liberalism—as did other themes such as the moral self-responsibility of the individual, the tension between the ethical and the political, the imperative to care for the helpless and less fortunate, and the ultimate unity of mankind. The West’s belief in itself as the most historically significant and favored culture echoed the Judaeo-Christian theme of the Chosen People. The global expansion of Western culture as the best and most appropriate for all mankind represented a secular continuation of the Roman Catholic Church’s self-concept as the one universal Church for all humanity. Modern civilization now replaced Christianity as the cultural norm and ideal with which all other societies were to be compared, and to which they were to be converted. Just as Christianity had, in the process of overcoming and succeeding the Roman Empire, become Roman itself in the centralized, hierarchical, and politically motivated Roman Catholic Church, so too did the modern secular West, in the process of overcoming and succeeding Christianity and the Catholic Church, incorporate and unconsciously continue many of the latter’s characteristic approaches to the world.
But perhaps the most pervasive and specifically Judaeo-Christian component tacitly retained in the modern world view was the belief in man’s linear historical progress toward ultimate fulfillment. Modern man’s self-understanding was emphatically teleological, with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a darker past characterized by ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression, and toward a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom. The faith in that movement was based largely on an underlying trust in the salvational effect of expanding human knowledge: Humanity’s future fulfillment would be achieved in a world reconstructed by science. The original Judaeo-Christian eschatological expectation had here been transformed into a secular faith. The religious faith in God’s eventual salvation of mankind—whether Israel’s arrival in the Promised Land, the Church’s arrival at the millennium, the Holy Spirit’s progressive perfecting of humanity, or the Second Coming of Christ—now became an evolutionary confidence, or revolutionary belief, in an eventual this-worldly utopia whose realization would be expedited by the expert application of human reason to nature and society.
Even in the course of Christianity’s own development of the end time expectation, the waiting and hoping for divine action to initiate the world’s transfiguration had gradually shifted during the early modern period to a sense that man’s own activity and initiative were required to prepare for a Christian social utopia appropriate to the Second Coming. In the Renaissance, Erasmus had suggested a new understanding of Christian eschatology whereby humanity might move toward perfection in this world, with history realizing its goal of the Kingdom of God in a peaceful earthly society—not through apocalypse, divine intervention, and otherworldly escape, but through a divine immanence working within man’s historical evolution. In a similar spirit during the Scientific Revolution, Bacon had heralded the coming scientific civilization as a movement toward material redemption coincident with the Christian millennium. As secularization advanced during the modern era, the Christian element in and rationale for the coming utopia dwindled and disappeared, though the expectation and striving remained. In time, the focus on a social utopia merged into futurology, which replaced earlier eras’ visions and anticipations of the Kingdom of Heaven. “Planning” replaced “hoping” as human reason and technology demonstrated their miraculous efficacy.
Confidence in human progress, akin to the biblical faith in humanity’s spiritual evolution and future consummation, was so central to the modern world view that it notably increased with the decline of Christianity. Expectations of mankind’s coming fulfillment found vivid expression even as the modern mind reached its most determinedly secular stages in Condorcet, Comte, and Marx. Indeed, the ultimate statement of belief in evolutionary human deification was found in Christianity’s most fervent a
ntagonist, Nietzsche, whose Superman would be born out of the death of God and the overcoming of the old limited man.
But regardless of what attitude was maintained toward Christianity, the conviction that man was steadily and inevitably approaching entrance into a better world, that man himself was being progressively improved and perfected through his own efforts, constituted one of the most characteristic, deep-seated, and consequential principles of the modern sensibility. Christianity no longer seemed to be the driving force of the human enterprise. For the robust civilization of the West at the high noon of modernity, it was science and reason, not religion and belief, which propelled that progress. Man’s will, not God’s, was the acknowledged source of the world’s betterment and humanity’s advancing liberation.
VI
The Transformation of the Modern Era
We now approach the last stages of our narrative. What remains for us is to scan the trajectory taken by the modern mind as it developed from the foundations and premises of the modern world view just examined. For perhaps the most momentous paradox concerning the character of the modern era was the curious manner in which its progress during the centuries following the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment brought Western man unprecedented freedom, power, expansion, breadth of knowledge, depth of insight, and concrete success, and yet simultaneously served—first subtly and later critically—to undermine the human being’s existential situation on virtually every front: metaphysical and cosmological, epistemological, psychological, and finally even biological. A relentless balance, an inextricable intertwining of positive and negative, seemed to mark the evolution of the modern age, and our task here is to attempt to understand the nature of that intricate dialectic.
The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through Freud
The peculiar phenomenon of contradictory consequences ensuing from the same intellectual advance was visible from the start of the modern era with Copernicus’s dethroning of the Earth as the center of creation. In the same instant that man liberated himself from the geocentric illusion of virtually all previous generations of mankind, he also effected for himself an unprecedentedly fundamental cosmic displacement. The universe no longer centered on man; his cosmic position was neither fixed nor absolute. And each succeeding step in the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath added new dimensions to the Copernican effect, further propelling that liberation while intensifying that displacement.
With Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the new science was forged, a new cosmology defined, a new world opened to man within which his powerful intelligence could act with new freedom and effectiveness. Yet simultaneously, that new world was disenchanted of all those personal and spiritual qualities that for millennia had given human beings their sense of cosmic meaning. The new universe was a machine, a self-contained mechanism of force and matter, devoid of goals or purpose, bereft of intelligence or consciousness, its character fundamentally alien to that of man. The premodern world had been permeated with spiritual, mythic, theistic, and other humanly meaningful categories, but all these were regarded by the modern perception as anthropomorphic projections. Mind and matter, psyche and world, were separate realities. The scientific liberation from theological dogma and animistic superstition was thus accompanied by a new sense of human alienation from a world that no longer responded to human values, nor offered a redeeming context within which could be understood the larger issues of human existence. Similarly, with science’s quantitative analysis of the world, the methodological liberation from subjective distortions was accompanied by the ontological diminution of all those qualities—emotional, aesthetic, ethical, sensory, imaginative, intentional—that seemed most constitutive of human experience. These losses and gains were noted, but the paradox seemed inescapable if man was to be faithful to his own intellectual rigor. Science may have revealed a cold, impersonal world, but it was the true one nonetheless. Despite any nostalgia for the venerable but now disproved cosmic womb, one could not go backward.
With Darwin, these consequences were further affirmed and amplified. Any remaining theological assumptions concerning the world’s divine government and man’s special spiritual status were severely controverted by the new theory and evidence: Man was a highly successful animal. He was not God’s noble creation with a divine destiny, but nature’s experiment with an uncertain destiny. Consciousness, once believed to rule the universe and permeate it, was now understood to have arisen accidentally in the course of matter’s evolution, to have been in existence a relatively brief time, and to be characteristic of a limited and relatively insignificant part of the cosmos—Homo sapiens—for which there was no guarantee its ultimate evolutionary fate would be any different from that of thousands of other now extinct species.
With the world no longer a divine creation, a certain spiritual nobility seemed to have departed from it, an impoverishment that also necessarily touched man, its erstwhile crown. While Christian theology had maintained that natural history existed for the sake of human history, and that humanity was essentially at home in a universe designed for its spiritual unfoldment, the new understanding of evolution refuted both claims as anthropocentric delusions. All was in flux. Man was not an absolute, and his cherished values had no foundation outside of himself. Man’s character, his mind and will, came from below, not above. The structures not only of religion but of society, of culture, of reason itself now seemed to be relatively arbitrary expressions of the struggle for biological success. Thus too was Darwin liberating and diminishing. Man could now recognize that he rode forth at the crest of evolution’s advance, nature’s most complex and dazzling achievement; but he was also just an animal of no “higher” purpose. The universe provided no assurance of indefinite success for the species, and certain assurance of individual demise at physical death. Indeed, on the longer-term macroscopic scale, the growing modern sense of life’s contingency was further enforced by nineteenth-century physics’ formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, which portrayed the universe as moving spontaneously and irreversibly from order to disorder toward a final condition of maximum entropy, or “heat death.” The chief facts of human history until the present were fortuitously supportive biophysical circumstances and brute survival, with no apparent larger meaning or context, and with no cosmic security supplied by any providential design from above.
Freud dramatically forwarded these developments as he brought the Darwinian perspective to bear more fully on the human psyche, presenting persuasive evidence for the existence of unconscious forces determining man’s behavior and conscious awareness. In so doing, he seemingly both freed the modern mind from its naive unconsciousness (or rather from being altogether unconscious of its unconsciousness), giving it a new profundity of self-understanding, yet also confronted that mind with a dark, deflating vision of its true character. For on the one hand, psychoanalysis served as a virtual epiphany for the early twentieth-century mind as it brought to light the archaeological depths of the psyche, disclosed the intelligibility of dreams, fantasy, and psychopathological symptoms, illuminated the sexual etiology of neurosis, demonstrated the importance of infantile experience in conditioning adult life, discovered the Oedipus complex, unveiled the psychological relevance of mythology and symbolism, recognized the psychic structural components of the ego, superego, and id, revealed the mechanisms of resistance, repression, and projection, and brought forth a host of other insights laying open the mind’s character and internal dynamics. Freud thereby represented a brilliant culmination of the Enlightenment project, bringing even the human unconscious under the light of rational investigation.
Yet on the other hand, Freud radically undermined the entire Enlightenment project by his revelation that below or beyond the rational mind existed an overwhelmingly potent repository of nonrational forces which did not readily submit either to rational analysis or to conscious manipulation, and in comparison with which man’s conscious ego was a frail and fragile epiphenomen
on. Freud thereby furthered the cumulative modern process of casting man out of that privileged cosmic status his modem rational self-image had retained from the Christian world view. Man could no longer doubt that it was not only his body but his psyche as well for which powerful biological instincts—amoral, aggressive, erotic, “polymorphous perverse”—were the most significant motivating factors, and that in the face of these the proud human virtues of rationality, moral conscience, and religious feelings were conceivably no more than reaction-formations and delusions of the civilized self-concept. Given the existence of such unconscious determinants, man’s sense of personal freedom could well be spurious. The psychologically aware individual now knew himself to be, like all members of modern civilization, condemned to internal division, repression, neurosis, and alienation.
With Freud, the Darwinian struggle with nature took on new dimensions, as man was now constrained to live in eternal struggle with his own nature. Not only was God exposed as a primitive infantile projection, but the conscious human ego itself with its prize virtue the human reason—man’s last bastion separating him from nature—was now dethroned, it too recognized as nothing more exalted than a recent and precarious development out of the primordial id. The true wellspring of human motivations was a seething caldron of irrational, bestial impulses—and contemporary historical events began to provide distressing evidence for just such a thesis. Not just man’s divinity but his humanity was coming into question. As the scientific mind emancipated modern man from his illusions, he seemed increasingly swallowed up by nature, deprived of his ancient dignities, unmasked as a creature of base instinct.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 42