The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Bultmann took a crucially different attitude to the Bible. He was very aware that throughout the nineteenth century, and in the first decades of the twentieth, archaeologists and some theologians had sought evidence in the Holy Lands for the events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. (One high point in this campaign had been Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus, published in 1906.) Rather than express ‘caution’ about these matters, as Humani Generis had done, Bultmann argued that it was time to call a halt to this search. It had been futile from the start and could not hope to settle the matter one way or the other. He argued instead that the New Testament should be ‘demythologised,’ a term that became famous. Science had made much progress, he said, one effect of which was to suggest most strongly that the miracles of the Bible – the Resurrection, even the Crucifixion – may never have taken place as historical events. Bultmann knew that much of the information about Jesus in the Bible had been handed down from the Midrash, Jewish commentary and legend. He therefore concluded that the Bible could only be understood theologically. There may have been an historical Jesus, but the details of his life mattered less than that he was an example of kerygma, ‘the proclamation of the decisive act of God in Christ.’44 When people have faith, said Bultmann, they can enter a period of ‘grace,’ when they may receive ‘revelations’ from God. Bultmann also adapted several ideas from existentialism, but Heidegger’s variety, not Sartre’s (Bultmann was German). According to Heidegger, all understanding involves interpretation, and in order to be a Christian, one had to decide (an existential act) to follow that route (that’s what faith meant), using the Bible as a guide.45 Bultmann acknowledged that history posed a problem for this analysis: Why did the crucial events in Christianity take place where they did so long ago? His answer was that history should be looked upon less in a scientific way, or even in the cyclical way that some Eastern religions did, but existentially, with a meaning fashioned by each faithful individual for himself and herself. Bultmann was not advocating an ‘anything goes’ philosophy – a great deal of time and effort was spent with critics discussing what, in the New Testament, could and could not be demythologised.46 Faith, he was saying, cannot be achieved by studying the history of religion, or history per se, nor by scientific investigation. Religious experience was what counted, and kerygma could be achieved only by reading the Bible in the ‘demythologised’ way he suggested. His final contentious point was that Christianity was a special religion in the world. For him, Christianity, the existence of Christ as an act of God on earth, ‘has an inescapably definitive character.’ He thought that at the turn of the century, ‘when it seemed as if Western culture was on its way to becoming the first world-culture, it … seemed also that Christianity was on its way to attaining a definitive status for all men.’ But of course that didn’t happen, and by the 1950s it appeared ‘likely that for a long time yet different religions will need to live together on the earth.’47 This was close to saying that religions evolve, with Christianity being the most advanced.48

  If Bultmann was the most original and uncompromising theologian in his response to existentialism and historicism, Teilhard de Chardin fulfilled an equivalent role in regard to evolution. Marie-Joseph-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on 1 May 1881, the fourth of eleven children, seven of whom died. He went to a school run by Jesuits, where he proved himself very bright but besotted by rocks more than lessons. He became a Jesuit novitiate at Aix in 1890 and took his first vows in 1901.49 But his obsession with rocks turned into a passion for geology, palaeontology – and evolution. In his one person Teilhard de Chardin combined the great battle between religion and science, between Genesis and Darwin. His religious duties took him to China in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, where he excavated at Choukoutien. He met Davidson Black and Wen Chung-Pei, two of the discoverers of Peking Man and Peking Man culture. He became friendly with the Abbé Breuil, who introduced him to many of the caves and cave paintings of northern Spain, and with George Gaylord Simpson and Julian Huxley, two of the scholars who helped devise the evolutionary synthesis, and with Joseph Needham, whose seven-volume Science and Civilisation in China began publication in 1954. He knew and corresponded with Margaret Mead. This background was especially significant because Teilhard’s chosen field, the emergence of man, the birth of humanity, profoundly affected his theology. His gifts put him in the position of reconciling as no one else could the church and the sciences, especially the science of evolution.

  For Teilhard, the ideas of Darwin showed that the world had moved out of the static cosmos that applied in the days of Plato and the other Greeks, into a dynamic universe that was evolving. In consequence, religions evolved too, and man’s very discovery of evolution showed that, in unearthing the roots of his own humanity, he was making spiritual progress. The supreme event in the universe was the incarnation of Christ, which Teilhard accepted as a fact. The event of Christ, he said, as a self-evidently nonevolutionary event – the only one in the history of the universe – showed its importance; and Christ’s true nature, as revealed in the Scriptures, therefore served the purpose of showing what man was evolving toward.50 Evolution, he believed, was a divine matter because it not only pointed backward but, allied with the event of Christ, showed us the path to come. Although Teilhard himself did not make a great deal out of it, and claimed indignantly that he was not a racist, he said clearly that ‘there are some races that act as the spearhead of evolution, and others that have reached a dead end.’51

  All his life, Teilhard planned a major work of religious and scientific synthesis, to be called The Phenomenon of Man. This was completed in the early 1940s, but as a Jesuit and a priest, he had first to submit the book to the Vatican. The book was never actually refused publication, but he was asked several times to revise it, and it remained unpublished at his death in 1955.52 When it finally did appear, it became clear that for Teilhard evolution is the source of sin, ‘for there can be no evolution without groping, without the intervention of chance; consequently, checks and mistakes are always possible.’53 The very fact that the Incarnation of Christ took place was evidence, he said, that man had reached a certain stage in evolution, so that he could properly appreciate what the event meant. Teilhard believed that there would be further evolution, religious as well as biological, that there would be a higher form of consciousness, a sort of group consciousness, and in this he acknowledged an affinity for Jung’s views about the racial unconscious (at the same time deriding Freud’s theories). Chardin was turned down for a professorship at the Collège de France (the Abbé Breuil’s old chair), but he was elected to the Institute of France.

  But the church was not only concerned with theology; it was a pastoral organisation as well. It was rethinking the church’s pastoral work that most concerned the other influential postwar religious thinker, Reinhald Niebuhr. Significantly, since pastoral work is essentially more practical, more pragmatic, than theological matters, Niebuhr was American. He came from the Midwest of America and did his early pastoral work in the capital of the motor trade, Detroit. In The Godly and the Ungodly (1958), he set out to rescue postwar America from what he saw as a fruitless pietism, redefining Christianity in the process, and to reaffirm the areas of life that science could never touch.54 The chapters in his book reveal Niebuhr’s anxieties: ‘Pious and Secular America,’ ‘Frustration in Mid-Century,’ ‘Higher Education in America,’ ‘Liberty and Equality,’ plus chapters on the Negro and on anti-Semitism. Niebuhr thought that America was still, in some ways, a naive country, sentimental even. He acknowledged that naïveté had certain strengths, but on the downside he also felt that America’s many sectarian churches still had a frontier mentality, a form of pietism that took them away from the world rather than toward it. He saw it as his job to lead by example, to mix religion with the social and political life of America. This was how Christians showed love, he said, how they could find meaning in the world. He thought higher education was partly to blame, that the courses
offered in American universities were too standardised, too inward-looking, to breed truly sophisticated students and were a cause of the intolerance that he explored in his chapters on blacks and Jews. He made it plain that pious Americans labelled everything they didn’t like ‘Godless,’ and this did no one any good.55

  He identified ‘three mysteries,’ which, he said, remained, and would always remain. These were the mysteries of creation, of freedom, and of sin. Science might push back the moment of creation further and further, he said, but there would always be a mystery beyond any point science could reach. Freedom and sin were linked. ‘The mystery of the evil in man does not easily yield to rational explanations because the evil is the corruption of a good, namely, man’s freedom.’56 He did not hold out the hope of revelation in regard to any of these mysteries. He thought that America’s obsession with business was actually a curtailment of freedom, and that true freedom, the true triumph over evil, came from social and political engagement with one’s fellow men, in a religious spirit. Niebuhr’s analysis was an early sign of the greater engagement with sociopolitical matters that would overtake the church in the following decades, though Niebuhr, as his calm prose demonstrated, was no radical.57

  Catholics were – in theory at least – moved by the same spirit. On II October 1962, 2,381 cardinals, bishops and abbots gathered in Rome for a huge conference designed to reinvigorate the Catholic Church, involve it in the great social issues of the day, and stimulate a religious revival. The conference, the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, had been called back in 1959 by the then-new pope, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who had taken the name John XXIII. Elected only on the eleventh ballot, when he was within a month of his seventy-seventh birthday, Roncalli was seen as a stopgap pope. But this short, dumpy man surprised everyone. His natural, down-to-earth manner was perfectly attuned to the mood of the times, and as the first pope of the television age, he quickly achieved a world-wide popularity no pope had had before.

  Great things were expected from Vatican II, as it was called, though in more traditional quarters there was surprise that the council had been called in the first place: Vatican I had been held ninety-two years before, when its most important decision was that the pope was infallible on theological matters – for such purists there was no need of another council. Questionnaires were sent out to all the bishops and abbots of the church, inviting them to Rome and soliciting their early views on a number of matters that it was proposed to discuss. By the time the council began, one thousand aides had been added, at least a hundred official observers from other religions, and several hundred press. It was by far the largest gathering of its kind in the twentieth century.58

  As part of the preparations, the pope’s staff in Rome prepared an agenda of sixty-nine items, later boiled down to nineteen, and then thirteen. For each of these a schema was drafted, a discussion document setting out the ideas of the pope and his immediate aides. Shortly before the council began, on 15 May 1961, the pope issued an encyclical, Mater et Magistra, outlining how the church could become more involved in the social problems facing mankind. As more than one observer noted, neither the encyclical nor the council came too soon; as the French Dominican Yves Congar wrote, in 1961 ‘one man out of every four is Chinese, two men out of every three are starving, one man out of every three lives under Communism, and one Christian out of every two is not Catholic.’59 In practice, the council was far from being an unqualified success. The first session, which began on II October 1962, lasted until 8 December the same year, the bishops spending two to three hours in discussion every morning. The pope issued a second encyclical, Pacem in Terris, the following April, which specifically addressed issues of peace in the Cold War. Sadly, Pope John died on 3 June that year, but his successor, Giovanni Battista Montini, Paul VI, kept to the same schedule, and three more sessions of the council took place in the autumn of 1963, 1964, and 1965.

  During that time, for close observers (and the world was watching), the Catholic Church attempted to modernise itself. But although Catholicism emerged stronger in many ways, Rome revealed itself as virtually incapable of change. Depending on the observer, the church had dragged itself out of the Middle Ages and moved ahead either to the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century. But no one thought it had modernised itself. One problem was the style of debate.60 On most issues there was a ‘progressive’ wing and a ‘reactionary’ wing. This was only to be expected, but too often open discussion, and dissension, was cut short by papal fiat, with matters referred to a small papal commission that would meet later, behind closed doors. Teaching was kept firmly in the hands of the bishops, with the laity specifically excluded, and in discussions of ecumenism with Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity, it was made clear that Catholicism was primary. The liturgy was allowed to shift from Latin to the vernacular, and some historical mistakes were admitted, but against that the church’s implacable opposition to birth control was, in the words of Paul Blanshard, who attended all four sessions of the council as an observer, ‘the greatest single defeat for intelligence.’61 On such matters as biblical scholarship, the status of Mary, and women within the church, Catholicism showed itself as unwilling to change and as driven by Rome. Perhaps expectations had been raised too high by calling a council in the first place: in itself that seemed to promise greater democracy. America was now a much greater power in the world, and in the church, and Rome’s way of conducting itself did not sit well with attitudes on the other side of the Atlantic.62 Quite what effect Vatican II had on the numbers of Catholics around the world is unclear; but in the years that followed the rates for divorce continued to rise, even in Catholic countries, and women took their own decisions, in private, so far as birth control was concerned. In that sense, Vatican II was a missed opportunity.

  For many people, the most beautiful image of the twentieth century was not produced by Picasso, or Jackson Pollock, or the architects of the Bauhaus, or the cameramen of Hollywood. It was a photograph, a simple piece of reportage, but one that was nevertheless wholly original. It was a photograph of Earth itself, taken from space. This picture, showing the planet to be slightly blue, owing to the amount of water in the atmosphere, was affecting because it showed the world as others might see us – as one place, relatively small and, above all, finite. It was that latter fact that so many found moving. Our arrival on the Moon marked the point when we realised that the world’s population could not go on expanding for ever, that Earth’s resources are limited. It was no accident that the ecology movement developed in parallel with the space race, or that it culminated at the time when space travel became a fact.

  The ecological movement began in the middle of the nineteenth century. The original word, oekologie, was coined by the German Ernst Haeckel, and was deliberately related to oekonomie, using as a root the Greek oekos, ‘household unit.’ There has always been a close link between ecology and economy, and much of the enthusiasm for ecology was shown by German economic thinkers in the early part of the century (it formed a plank of National Socialist thinking).63 But whether that thinking was in Germany, Britain, or the United States (the three countries where it received most attention), before the 1960s it was more a branch of thought that set the countryside – nature, peasant life – against urbanity. This was reflected in the writings of not only Haeckel but the British planners (Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities and the Fabians), the Woodcraft Folk, and such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Williamson, and J. R. Tolkien.64 In Germany Heinrich Himmler experimented, grotesquely, with organic farms, but it was not until the 1960s that the modern worries came together, and when they did, they had three roots. One was the population boom stimulated by World War II and only now becoming visible; a second was the wasteful and inhuman planning processes created in many instances by the welfare state, which involved the wholesale destruction of towns and cities; and third, the space race, after which it became common to refer to the planet as ‘spaceship Earth.’
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  When President Johnson made his Great Society speech in Michigan in the spring of 1964, he referred to the impoverished environment as one of his reasons for acting. Partly, he had in mind the destruction of the cities, and the ‘Great Blight of Dullness’ that Jane Jacobs had railed against. But he was also provoked by the writings of another woman who did much to stir the world’s conscience with a passionate exposé of the pesticide industry and the damage commercial greed was doing to the countryside – plants, animals, and humans. The exposé was called Silent Spring, and its author was Rachel Carson.65

  Rachel Carson was not unknown to the American public in 1962, when her book appeared. A biologist by training, she had worked for many years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had been created in 1940. As early as 1951 she published The Sea Around Us, which had been serialised in the New Yorker, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternative choice and top of the New York Times best-seller list for months. But that book was not so much a polemic as a straightforward account of the oceans, showing how one form of life was dependent on others, to produce a balance in nature that was all-important to both its continued existence and its beauty.66