While Kant suggested that the Enlightenment ended human immaturity by allowing us to think and speak for ourselves, the German theologian Johann Baptist Metz suspects that the “enlightened” societies of the West have now succumbed to a second immaturity. We’re free to think for ourselves, yes, but have we anything to think about, and is any of our thinking done in keeping with the truth or is it merely a tool to attain our desires? We have the greatest tools of communication ever known, but do we speak together, do we reason together?
At a time in which the major newspapers are leading with reflections on the life and death of Nelson Mandela, we continue our devotion to the ephemera. On such a day, what might one expect to find in the “Arts” section of Canada’s newspaper of record? A serious reflection on art in the human drive for transcendence and dignity, or Noel Gallagher’s thoughts on Lady Gaga, and Amanda Bynes’s latest travails? And since we’re likely maxed out on painful, nasty thoughts about apartheid and jail cells and poverty, perhaps we best discover whether pot can result in “man boobs.” While we’re on that subject, what’s this bra that tells women when to stop eating? Will a male version soon arrive to tell the lads when to quit toking?
All innocent (enough) distractions, I suppose, with little harm done, some ad revenue banked, and the long Friday hours made just a little less awful in cubicles everywhere. And it’s never been any different, this desire to fixate on the silly in the midst of the grand drama of human existence. Fair enough.
And yet we train our tastes and desires at every moment and with every aspect of our attention. We train ourselves in unseriousness. I sometimes wonder if the Aristotelian ideal of the serious person (spoudaois) can appeal to the juvenile and immature, and if we have an immaturity of reason itself then we could anticipate a time of deformed and malformed reason which does not recognize the good of seriousness, but only a drag or a burden.
The theologian John Courtney Murray once warned that such barbarism could easily arise, and it need not entail the fur-wearing caveman but easily result from the elite, for barbarism was nothing other than the undermining of “standards of judgment…by creating a climate of doubt and bewilderment in which clarity about the larger aims of life is dimmed.”
A climate of bewilderment about the larger aims of life—that sounds oddly familiar—and is, if Murray is correct, a warning, especially since religion, one of the great and abiding sources of civilization, is held with such contempt. Or, worse, when religion sinks into a kind of pietism, an inner matter of the heart which provides some sense of comfort to its adherents, but has no positive contribution to offer to the maintenance and development of our common life.
In the end, I’ll admit that I’m not really that worried about the triviality of the newspapers and magazines, the vulgarity of our entertainments, the crassness of our discourse, or the impotence of our politicians. In the main, this is, I suspect, the same as it ever was, and ever will be. I will, however, admit my dis-ease with what Christopher Dawson called the “temptation” to ally religion with the bourgeois order of comfort, security, ease, entertainment, and safe order. In so doing, he suggests, the vital source of spiritual energy is enervated and stilled. Instead, he says, we are required to “choose the difficult and hazardous way of creative spiritual activity . . . the age of a limited, self-protective, bourgeois religion is over.” By this he means, it ought be over; it ought be rejected by Catholics.
Have we been serious, or have we been co-opted by our comforts? If any of our worries and unease with the current time is fair, then what is required is the “way of creative spiritual activity, which is the way of the saints.” Which is, in many ways, what I hear Pope Francis asking of us when he suggests that a Church which stays enclosed and involved only in its own business “sickens from the stale air of closed rooms,” and why he prefers “a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
Such clinging is the mark of the comfort and security seeking person, not the saint, and if we are to be serious we will need to try for something more, we will need to try to build an entire culture of life and civilization of love, but that won’t happen easily, and it will not happen at all if the Church is concerned for respectability and its schools concerned for social advance.
I recently heard a wise man suggest that there never actually were any culture wars, and that Christians lost anyway. By this he meant that most Christians accepted the basic categories and imaginations of the zeitgeist and merely wanted to preserve a kind of peaceful order. But we didn’t actually have in mind another kind of life, a different form of fidelity, and so we didn’t actually go to battle—and still we lost when the peaceful order disappeared from under us.
“Like” Truth and Charity Forum on Facebook!
And now? Now comes serious work. And the first task is to have the Church be the Church instead of a sanitized imitation of the broader culture. The time may be immature, but we’ve long supped at that table, and it is now time to take our nourishment from richer fare.
Our art, our music, our buildings, our homilies, our morals, our prayer, our families, our parish life must become richer. These must become richer if we are to gather our strength sufficiently to offer to an unserious people a vision of joy and depth capable of shaping the juvenile passions and forming great souls.
R. J. Snell is professor of philosophy and director of the philosophy program at Eastern University where he co-directs the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. His latest book (with Steve Cone) is Authentic Cosmopolitanism: Love, Sin, and Grace in the Christian University.
