In a marathon reading session yesterday, thanks to feeling too lousy to go anywhere or do anything, I finished David Bentley Hart's fascinating book, The Atheist Delusions. This is much more than an examination of modern atheist ideology. The book title itself is more of a playful swat at Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) and his New Atheist cohorts, and in fact Hart, through his customary clarity of intelligence and grasp of the sweep of philosophy and history, dispenses with them rather perfunctorily in order to delve into the meat of his examination of the pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian eras.
Most of us no longer have any concept of how the pre-Christian era looked. We are so used to the patterns of life and society that arose from the Christian movement that we kind of assume things had always been more or less this way. Not so. We do not remember, for instance, that it was once common for newborn babies to simply be put out to die through exposure to the elements and wild beasts. We do not remember that huge groups of people were not considered "persons" at all, in a legal or practical sense, and enjoyed no "rights" whatsoever.
Into this world, then, there suddenly came people who took in the babies, to nurture and care for them with the conviction that these lives, and that each individual life, were precious members of the Creator Himself. Here were these strange new people who devoted themselves to caring for the weak and the poor, the orphans and the widows, lepers and blind and crippled, and for each other. This was a revolutionary, world-changing alteration in the way things worked.
These new behaviors did not arise as a natural progression of mankind, as some sort of next step on the evolutionary ladder, but rather from a Savior, from transcendent love. Of course, the usual evils of power and greed and prejudice attended the new system along the way as it became admixed with old structures of dominance and violence; but, here, Hart is looking at the big picture, at the sea-change that transformed the ancient world to the new world. It is not too much to say that much of what we now ascribe to ourselves as being human, of having individual identity and worth, describes a condition that did not before the Christian era exist.
As we see in our time the power of the mythology that made us begin slide into the realm of forgetfulness, replaced by the supremacy of the individual will, without need of reason or restraint, one cannot help but wonder whether the goods we take so for granted can be sustained, and if so, by what? Hart ends his book, therefore, on somewhat of a gloomy note.
“A civilization, it seems obvious, is only as great or as wonderful as the spiritual ideals that animate it; and Christian ideals have shown themselves to be almost boundless in cultural fertility and dynamism. And yet, as the history of modernity shows, the creativity of these ideals can, in certain times and places, be exhausted, or at least subdued, if social and material circumstances cease to be propitious for them. I cannot help but wonder, then, what remains behind when Christianity’s power over culture recedes? How long can our gentler ethical prejudices—many of which seem to me to be melting away with fair rapidity—persist once the faith that gave them their rationale and meaning has withered away? Love endures all things perhaps, as the apostle says, and is eternal; but, as a cultural reality, even love requires a reason for its preeminence among the virtues, and the mere habit of solicitude for others will not necessarily long survive when that reason is no longer found. If, as I have argued in these pages, the “human” as we now understand it is the positive invention of Christianity, might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become posthuman?”
Good question.
Most of us no longer have any concept of how the pre-Christian era looked. We are so used to the patterns of life and society that arose from the Christian movement that we kind of assume things had always been more or less this way. Not so. We do not remember, for instance, that it was once common for newborn babies to simply be put out to die through exposure to the elements and wild beasts. We do not remember that huge groups of people were not considered "persons" at all, in a legal or practical sense, and enjoyed no "rights" whatsoever.
Into this world, then, there suddenly came people who took in the babies, to nurture and care for them with the conviction that these lives, and that each individual life, were precious members of the Creator Himself. Here were these strange new people who devoted themselves to caring for the weak and the poor, the orphans and the widows, lepers and blind and crippled, and for each other. This was a revolutionary, world-changing alteration in the way things worked.
These new behaviors did not arise as a natural progression of mankind, as some sort of next step on the evolutionary ladder, but rather from a Savior, from transcendent love. Of course, the usual evils of power and greed and prejudice attended the new system along the way as it became admixed with old structures of dominance and violence; but, here, Hart is looking at the big picture, at the sea-change that transformed the ancient world to the new world. It is not too much to say that much of what we now ascribe to ourselves as being human, of having individual identity and worth, describes a condition that did not before the Christian era exist.
As we see in our time the power of the mythology that made us begin slide into the realm of forgetfulness, replaced by the supremacy of the individual will, without need of reason or restraint, one cannot help but wonder whether the goods we take so for granted can be sustained, and if so, by what? Hart ends his book, therefore, on somewhat of a gloomy note.
“A civilization, it seems obvious, is only as great or as wonderful as the spiritual ideals that animate it; and Christian ideals have shown themselves to be almost boundless in cultural fertility and dynamism. And yet, as the history of modernity shows, the creativity of these ideals can, in certain times and places, be exhausted, or at least subdued, if social and material circumstances cease to be propitious for them. I cannot help but wonder, then, what remains behind when Christianity’s power over culture recedes? How long can our gentler ethical prejudices—many of which seem to me to be melting away with fair rapidity—persist once the faith that gave them their rationale and meaning has withered away? Love endures all things perhaps, as the apostle says, and is eternal; but, as a cultural reality, even love requires a reason for its preeminence among the virtues, and the mere habit of solicitude for others will not necessarily long survive when that reason is no longer found. If, as I have argued in these pages, the “human” as we now understand it is the positive invention of Christianity, might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become posthuman?”
Good question.
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