Ushering in a Secular Society: C.S. Lewis

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warns us that we are "relapsing into Paganism." It might be rather fun if we were.  It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall.  But we shan't.  What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity 'by the same door as in she went' and find herself back where she was.  It is not what happens.  A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.  The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past. . . . Lastly, I play my trump card.  Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines.  This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered.  For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history.  This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.  It alters Man's place in nature.--C.S. Lewis, in 1955, who saw the real divide of the Old West from the New with the ushering in of a secular society.  

The God of Men—and of Elves: How C. S. Lewis became a Christian

by Martin Cothran

C.S. Lewis

The following article will appear in the spring issue of my Classical Teacher magazine:

From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it.

An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the Middle Ages until fairly recent times was a familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, a mastery of the history of these great civilizations, and an immersion in their literature. Medieval philosophers and theologians drank deeply from the well of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle in their quest to make intellectual sense of and to articulate Christian truths. And Christian thinkers since then have not only availed themselves liberally of the classical heritage in history and literature, but have been on the vanguard of classical learning.

The Christianity of Modernism by Cleanth Brooks

Though he came out of the Southern Agrarian school, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) is now mostly remembered as the father of the literary “New Criticism.” 

Brooks studied at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford (at the latter, with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), and he spent the majority of his teaching career at Louisiana State and Yale. 

In the fascinating article reprinted here, Brooks challenged the prevailing notions of liberalism and fundamentalism in Christianity, especially in the relationship of science and religion. 

His critique of modernist Protestantism as found in the pages of The Christian Century of the 1930s is especially interesting.

Brooks would have been 29 or 30 when he published this.
--Brad Birzer

 *****

THE AMERICAN REVIEW, V. 6 1935-1936

The Christianity of Modernism

Cleanth Brooks, Jr.

The war between science and religion is over. Perhaps it was an unnecessary war – perhaps it need never have been fought. In any case, the proponents of religion have been defeated; they have been worse than defeated; they have been converted.

In saying this, I am not underestimating the present strength of fundamentalism. It is still strong. But its strength is located predominantly in rural areas and is bound up with an older generation. The intellectual leaders of Protestantism, almost to a man, are not Fundamentalists; and Fundamentalism, deprived of leaders, it is safe to predict, will not be able to survive the present intellectual climate.

Teaching Religious History

by John C. Pinheiro

Why is the United States in 2011, according to a wide variety of measurements, the most religious country among Western nations? This is the starting point of my Senior Research Seminar in American Religious History this semester at Aquinas College (Michigan). To answer this question, students will survey the development of religious belief and practice in America from the time of the earliest permanent English colony through the advent of the Religious Right in the 1970s-1980s.

Every time I teach a seminar, besides engaging in a philological exercise on the word, "seminar," I introduce students to the topic's historiography. Preparing my comments on the state of the field of religious history got me to thinking about one of the popular textbooks in historiography courses when I was a doctoral candidate in the late 1990s: Eric Foner's The New American History, published in 1997. Divided into two parts, one section parceled up American history into eras, the other into "major themes." Notably missing from Foner's eight "major themes" was "religious history."

Why this oversight by Foner? Lack of space, perhaps. Yet it also is possible that like so many other historians who subscribe to Marxian analysis of the past, Foner could see no reason to study religion other than as the spiritual expression of more materialist concerns that might as well be labeled "economic," "ethnic," or "social." These categories subsume religion for the Marxian and secular humanist.

The secular humanist believes that the default position in reasoned thought is by all rights theirs, not realizing that secular humanism, as well as its militantly atheist offshoots, claims an orthodoxy all its own. As an ideology, or what Russell Kirk called an "inverted religion," secular humanism is decidedly un-neutral. It is a substitute for religion, not the absence of a worldview. The militant variety wants to scrub the public square free of all vestiges of religion, not understanding the connection between religion and culture; or, perhaps understanding it all too well. Yet this is contrary to all of human experience, though it is the result of historical forces even predating the Enlightenment that historians and their students can study.

By "contrary," I mean that even today, only 2.5% of the world are atheists. In other words, 97.5% of humanity see meaning in life, believe in a god or Gods, and understand intuitively or through learning that there exists a metaphysical aspect to existence that is transcendent. This number would be even higher for much of the past. So, when 19 al Qaeda terrorists in the name of Muslim holy war killed 2,819 people on Sept. 11, 2001, a wake-up call came, and not just for policy makers, diplomats, and political leaders. This "wake up call" was for scholars, too, who said to themselves in history departments around the country: "just because we secular humanist professors and scholars working in European and American academe think that religion is for the childish or mentally ill; and just because we are filled with loathing for the very traditions that gave birth to the University system in which we work and the Western culture in which we live and thrive; and just because we believe in the Enlightenment narrative that religion is for children who can't explain things through reason and we are all grown up now as a human race; and just because we put our full faith in reason alone to explain everything…apparently some folks actually take this religion thing seriously. Very seriously.

Christian Discipleship and the 'End Times'

by John Barnes

I knew one of my Hillsdale professors didn’t take himself as seriously as he let on when he insisted that Monty Python is indispensable for looking at history. Amidst all the claptrap about prophecies of apocalypse and collapse, this clip from Life of Brian comes to mind:

Most folks leaning towards the conservative side of religion and/or politics know people with some degree of obsession about the “end times.”  I have seen this crop up in a few forms, from the stockpiling of food, the looming one-world government, the predictions of devastating earthquakes on [insert MM/DD/YYYY here], to the hoarding of precious metals. I couldn’t help but laugh (quietly) when, a few days after a friend purchased $3500 worth of silver, the silver price dropped significantly.

While we can thank the Left Behind® brand of Christianity for much of the modern-day fuss, the ideas are older than that and are by no means confined to the descendants of Luther, Calvin, et al.  On more than one occasion I’ve been forwarded an email or handed something from a fellow Catholic about the 5th part of the 3rd secret of Fatima, some prediction from Medjugorje, or somesuch, warning us the end draweth nigh.  Recently Mark Shea highlighted just this sort of hullabaloo from the website “Spirit Daily.”  Insanity is ecumenical.

Not to be deterred, some remind us they mocked Noah while he built the ark. True enough. But they scoffed because they didn’t believe an end would come. The Christian knows the days of his life and this world are numbered, and lives accordingly. How? Not by building an ark or, as one friend remarked, by “stockpiling all things Ted Nugent,” but by living today.

Christian Studies and the Liberal Arts College

by Gerhart Niemeyer

This paper was delivered at the launching of the Christian Studies Institute program at Hillsdale College on November 8, 1980.

What can a student today rightfully demand from a “liberal arts education”? A diploma that translates into a better-paid job? Such a certificate calls for vocational training. A smattering of a wide range of various disciplines? That would hardly make him a more useful citizen. “Liber” is the Latin word for “free.” A “liberal” education should itself be free and enable its students to become free human beings.
In the context of education, what does “freedom” mean? What educational gift is likely to lead a student toward freedom? Simply speaking, liberal education would offer the promotion of competence, sense of direction, and ability in all those aspects of life in which human beings are essentially free, meaning that they are in these aspects not subject to the necessities of matter and inescapable needs. What comes to mind is, first, the area of moral action; secondly, the faculty of judgment; and thirdly, the dimension of understanding.

Regardless of college catalogues and even of faculty intentions, a school of liberal education, as soon as it opens its doors, makes to the students an implicit promise, even though neither teachers nor students may be clearly conscious of it. But the promise is grasped by the student retrospectively, in his maturity, when he tries to sum up the advantages his education has given him. He will wonder what help his education has been in his endeavor to recognize the possibilities of life, along with the requirements for making good use of them. He will rummage through the residue of his education, looking for tools to help him discern the character of the time in which he lives. For instance, when confronted with something like the rise of the Nazis in Germany or of the Communists in Russia, he will wonder which of his studies has equipped him to judge such forces correctly, and also to assess the course the culture of his time is taking. Most often, though, mature alumni will reflect about the ways in which their college has opened for them visions about the meaning of the whole. A thinking person needs purpose and insight. If his liberal education has not prepared his mind for those ultimate questions, it has totally failed him.

This, I submit, is a rough sketch of the fundamental promise inherent in the nature of liberal education and in human nature. Now let us take a bold step forward and outline in a recognizable if somewhat fuzzy manner, the ways in which a liberal arts college can and must keep faith with its students regarding that implicit promise. It must a) undertake to come systematically to grips with the nature, function, and even the content of human beliefs; b) it must shoulder the responsibility for handing on the tradition of culture and history; and c) it must not neglect to inform the students about Christianity: its message, teachings, and institutions. These three constitute the core of liberal education faithful to its own mission.

Quote of the Day: John Henry Newman

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his—if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.--John Henry Newman

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

By Julie Robison

Last Tuesday evening, I saw ‘Of Gods and Men’ at the only theater in Cincinnati showing the excellent French film, based on a 1995 true story. There were only three other people in the theater with me, and none of them cried like I did during the latter half of the movie. The monks’ triumphs over their own desires, and their overpowering love of God through darkness and desert, brought true grace to flow in a desperate situation.

"love is eternal hope" --five stars, see it.

‘Of Gods and Men’ is about a small group of Trappist monks who live in Algeria, serving a mostly Muslim village by providing health care and friendship. Their very familiarity with the people is what prompts more disruption in the community when radical Muslim terrorists begin inflicting terror and killing Croatians, Muslim women not wearing the burqa, and those who protested against their regime. The scene of Christmas night, the fateful night when the terrorists went to the monastery, showed the true caliber of the monks. In an effort to reach common ground, one monk referenced the Qu’ran to remind the leader that Christians and Muslims are brothers under one God, not enemies.

The monastery’s relationship with the government was significantly less cordial, and the “might makes right” attitude pervades the actions of the overly aggressive military force against the peaceful monks. When one monk prays over the body of one of the Muslim terrorists whom he is being forced to identify, the disrespect for the dead and human life is evident through the passive-aggressive anger of the government official. It cannot be surprising, then, that the monks’ lives were not respected either.

It is no coincidence, in my mind at least, that Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011. In the Roman Catholic Church, May 1 was Divine Mercy Sunday—and who can be more in need of God’s divine mercy than the mastermind behind the ruthless attack on September 11, 2001, affecting thousands of souls? The celebrations of the man’s death prompted P. Fredrico Lombardi, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, to release this statement:

Tolkien and the Hope of Christian Humanism

[Dear TIC Reader, below is an essay I wrote on Tolkien but never published.  It's deeply influenced by Stratford Caldecott, Winston Elliott, and Phil Nielsen.  I've decided to publish it now because Paul E. Kerry has just released an excellent edited collection on Christianity in THE LORD OF THE RINGS entitled THE RING AND THE CROSS (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2011).  A piece I wrote for Paul, "The 'Last Battle' as Johannine Ragnorak: Tolkien and the Universal," appears as the concluding piece of THE RING AND THE CROSS.  My chapter originated as a talk I gave in between performances of "The Ring" at the Seattle Opera in August 2005, comparing Tolkien's understanding of northern mythology with Richard Wagner's.  I hope you enjoy the following.]

*****

Myth connects us to those of the past and to those of the future. Through myth, we grasp the continuity of all of God’s Creations, of all of the soldiers in the Army of Christ: those who came before Him to prepare the way, those who fought beside Him during his 33 years on earth, and those who came and come after Him to do His Will against the Enemy, even unto death. “Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world,” Chesterton wrote in 1925 in the chapter on myth in The Everlasting Man. “To touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.” Myth then, leads us to beauty, which leads us to truth. Truth leads us to the Good of the One, the Creator of time, space, and all things, who sent His only Son to redeem the world.

“Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours,” Samwise says in The Lord of the Rings, as he and Frodo reluctantly follow Gollum to the stairs of Cirith Ungol, entering Mordor. Sam, looking at the light of the Phial from Galadriel, realizes that the quest to destroy the Ring is a continuation of the story of The Silmarillion, a story that took place thousands of years prior to his own War of the Ring. “You’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s still going.”

Manners in a Mob Mentality

by Julie Robison

The Wall Street Journal reported that "A frenzied mob incensed by a Quran-burning ceremony in Florida overran the United Nations office in northern Afghanistan's largest city on Friday, killing at least seven foreigners and several Afghans, U.N. and Afghan officials said. The attack was the most deadly for the U.N. in Afghanistan. Friday's death toll in Mazar-e-Sharif exceeded that of the October 2009 Taliban assault that killed eight people at a U.N. guest house in Kabul."

Gentle Readers, Miss Manners would like to pose a question: Do you think burning a Qu'ran in America is comparable to yelling "FIRE!" in a theater?

Terry Jones, a preacher in Florida, burned another religion's sacred book on March 20. He put the Qu'ran on trial (which, as an inanimate object, I am sure it did a stellar job defending itself) and then sentenced it to death by burning. Jones burned; Muslims learned... nothing. Cue the "Death to America" chants! Five days later, two Christians were killed; and that was only the beginning of the overseas retribution.

Renewing America’s Soul: Part IV of Faith and Civil Society

By Barbara J. Elliott                              

         When did the conversation of conservatives in America shift predominantly to the realm of politics, to the exclusion of virtually everything else?  What was once a rich philosophy of ideas imbedded in imaginative literature, philosophy, history and theology has thinned out to a one-note samba played on a political tin drum. Both political parties have reduced their vision to the material realm, where the only disagreement is over whether the government should be vast and bankrupt now or large and bankrupt soon. The assumption is that the government must provide all significant solutions. Is politics really the main engine that drives history? 

        

Seeking Secular Salvation

        

Deep beneath this shift toward the political realm was a philosophical drift that began in an undercurrent early in the 13^th century.  Eric Voegelin, one of the most astute critics of modernity, argued that the modern age has been characterized by the emergence of politics as a secular means of salvation.  He traces the unraveling of order back to Joachim of Flora, a medieval mystic who depicted man’s history in three ascending ages, which would bring about the final age of perfection.  According to Voegelin, Fiore “and his successors replaced faith in God with faith in man’s ability to build heaven on earth.  The new earthly faith depended upon the fallacious notion that history itself has a purpose:  the achievement of human perfection.  Salvation was to be sought in this world, through the pursuit of temporal achievements aimed at making material the transcendent world of God.” [1]  Hobbes and Rousseau took the next steps, claiming that the political order could provide the means to rescue man from his fallen state and remake his image.

They're Not Going to Catch Us. We're on a Mission from God.

by Julie Robison

It was a cold night. My good friend Karen and I were driving back to campus after a quick trip to Ann Arbor for a special viewing of "The Human Experience," the first full-length film of Grassroots Films, the Brooklyn-based company which also produced the phenomenal “God in the Streets of New York City” and “Fishers of Men.” It was a school night. We both had class early the next morning. We were both so on fire.

I told Karen about my family and our love of home, but how I had been discerning becoming a missionary after college in Belfast, Ireland, to help foster peace and ecumenism between warring Roman Catholics and Protestants. Then Karen spoke: she was thinking about becoming a nun.*

I was surprised, and then I wasn’t. I pressed her for more information, ecstatic for my friend. I was the first person she told. She was worried about her family, especially her sister Anna, who is one of her best friends. They had often talked about living close once they were married, so they could raise their kids together. But when Karen talked about realizing her vocation, her whole face lit up. Her love of the Lord is apparent to all who know Karen; the joy she was finding and the peace she experienced in accepting God’s will can be unsettling to those unversed in complete surrender.

It almost goes without saying the level of bemusement Catholics experience when some non-Catholics talk about nuns tends to be high and in the laughable region. Apparently all nuns go around in their habits and whack people with rulers they have hidden in their sleeves. They look like Penguins (cue the ‘Blues Brothers’). They are all sexually repressed and mean.

Last week, however, those misconceptions were beautifully dispelled when NPR published a story on the Nashville Dominicans. One read of “For These Young Nuns, Habits Are The New Radical” was cause for a shout of "Te Deum!";  multiple reads was known to cause Catholics to hum "Sanctus" for the rest of the day. This article is possibly one of the first non-scathing articles about the Catholic Church from the mainstream news arena in years, and could even be seen as a deep nod to the success of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI's efforts for the New Evangelization via public radio.

Pondering the Humility of God

by John Barnes

The mystery chose to enter the history of man through a life story identical to that of any other man.  Thus, it made its entrance imperceptibly.  No one was there to record it.  At a certain point, the mystery presented itself.  And this event marked the greatest moment in the lives of those who encountered it, the greatest moment in all of history. –Msgr. Luigi Giussani

“Ponder, brothers, the humility of God,” a wise friar once told us in novitiate.  I carried this instruction with me even after I laid the Dominican habit aside.  It tends to reside at the forefront of my meditations in the Advent and Christmas seasons.

“Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand,” reads Proverbs 30:18.  

I count among such things the profound, incomprehensible event of the Incarnation.  I’m suspicious of any man who claims to understand fully how and why the God who created the universe ex nihilo humbled Himself to become a man, born in a stable and eventually suffering a torturous death at the hands of His creation.  It is, in its essence, a mystery—the mystery—and it must be approached as such.

It is not a mystery we can seek to understand, but rather an event we must embrace and carry with us as we toil through even the most mundane aspects of daily life.  The soul must never cease chasing it.  As St. Gregory of Nyssa said, “Those who run toward the Lord will never lack space… One who is climbing never stops; he moves from beginning to beginning, according to beginnings that never end.”