The Slide to Modernity

So I was prompted by John C. Wright's rather good post on the possession of the modern age to do an overview of the current situation.

The vision of Pope Leo XIII indicates the past century held the freest action of the devil out of any age in the history of humanity--or any age to come. When one looks at the means of obscuring the truth, blinding humans to reality, and the sheer extent of the turn from reason/nature/God & supernature/Lewis's tao accomplished and set in train, it is not hard to believe that this was the time of the Lord of the Lie.

I would argue that the dictatorship of relativism described by Pope Benedict XVI and the movements towards post-modern deconstruction in academia are strong contributors to obscuring the natural order and rendering humanity far more susceptible to their own fallen natures and the lie.

Dr. Scott Hahn has been doing a discussion of fundamental/natural theology based around Romans 1:20ff, tracing out the pattern of human sin. Once God is rejected for the natural and the natural (animals, plants, whatever) are worshiped, we are given over to our fallen nature. But the slide continues, straight on past the natural to the unnatural, and eventually to the anti-natural.

Well, God was rejected for the natural a long time ago. As I'm discovering while reading Joseph Pearce's excellent biography of Solzhenitsyn, the turn began with the Renaissance repudiation of a God/spiritually centered society (in reaction to purported excesses of the Middle Ages) to an embrace of an anthropocentric society, in which Man assumed the center stage. That right there is the turn to nature, away from supernature.

Since nature is fallen and a wrongful object for worship (which belongs to God alone), worship of nature will make the devotee like the object of devotion. Sin/fallenness increases, and the process of corruption goes forward. For one bit of evidence of this, I offer you the introduction of Machiavellian realpolitik. For another, look at the spectacle of the Borgias and the explosion of clerical corruption only taken care of with the Catholic Counter-Reformation. (I acknowledge the splendors of Renaissance art, the amazing cultural contributions, and the genius pouring out of Italy during that time period. Still, the turn to Man went too far.)

From the new emphasis on Man and in revulsion against the corruptions of society/Church in the course of the Renaissance, we get the Reformation, with the turn to the personal/subjective absolute power to interpret Scripture over against any institutional authority, even if such an authority could claim the apostolic succession. And from the rejection of one external authority, we get the Enlightenment rejection of Scripture as well, repudiating all external authority in favor of the common rule of reason, leading to the dictatorship of the supposedly smarter. Worship of nature grows stronger, perhaps even reaching its height, with the enthronement of the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in place of the Christian God. And, as Chesterton points out:

...when the dregs of Diderot's bitterness were reached; when they dragged the Goddess of Reason in triumph through Notre Dame, the smouldering Gothic images could look down on that orgy more serenely then than when Voltaire began to write; awaiting their hour. The age was ended when these men thought it was beginning. Their own mystical maenad frenzy was enough to prove it: the goddess of Reason was dead.

From the Enlightenment, we reach the very strange position of the high modern mind, teetering in the wind on the edge of a cliff. Predominantly, the venerators of the Enlightenment hold that Reason is the highest thing, the governing thing. This belief is dealt some serious blows with the world wars and is only toppled in the wild times of the 60s. Reason did not secure peace or end injustice, as promised--therefore, we must delve deep into emotion, into feeling, into sheer sentimentality. If it feels good, do it.

With the repudiation of reason comes the repudiation of even the God of the philosophers, the God accessible through natural reason, who ruled the world at the beginning, even if we hold that he's never taken a hand in things since. We repudiate the natural and in so doing open the way to choose the unnatural. We repudiate the existence of the God knowable by reason and thereby repudiate his law, written into nature, also knowable by reason.

We arrive at atheism--the repudiation of natural religion. We get the defiant challenge to the notion of any God at all, even one who does not reveal, does not claim any sort of interfering authority, and merely laid down laws at the beginning of all things which ought to be obeyed. One ends up with Nietzche--antiChristly and proud of it, rejecting the Jewish religion and heritage as enslavement, rejecting the rule of reason as an awful dominance of the mind over the strength and energy at the heart of vital life--and Marx--foul is fair and fair is foul because the system is oppressive, and all that it approves merely serves to enslave the individual human. We must therefore draw every circle counterclockwise, turn every crucifix upside down (ala Frost's "objectivity training" in Lewis's That Hideous Strength), because anything evil that is done by the oppressed is really the fault of the oppressor, because we wouldn't be in this war if it weren't for God, now, would we? Cause he made us this way. And it is now all his fault.


So--gender is a cultural construct. Heteronormativity is a cultural construct, as is any imposed system of ethics such as a belief in the right to life (which depends on rational acceptance on the nature of the human person, the existence of natural law, and a law-giver as outlined in the Declaration of Independence--this country and its remarkable understanding of human freedom was founded on natural law/theology/religion), anything factual/true to reality which does not follow the party line, and cultural constructs must each be an artifact of an oppressive patriarchal society, ultimately set in place at the dawn of all things by a Father who art in heaven in order to grind the fascist boot in the face of Lucifer...who is the first Marxist rebel in the history of...history.

The ideology is systematically applied to every aspect of life. Anything which we believe is oppressive becomes a legitimate target for anything and everything necessary to "fix" the problem. We get the spectacle of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed as well as the spectacle of "conservative" adoption of Saul Alinsky's tactics. Of course, ever since Machiavelli, the belief that the ends justify the means has dogged politics on both ends of the spectrum--the left focusing on "social justice", the right on "national defense/law and order/security/stability"--but it wasn't until the remarkably successful repudiation of natural law/natural theology/natural religion that the full force of the Machiavellian moves could be felt.

Solzhenitsyn chronicled what this looked like in Soviet Russia. Orwell predicted it in 1984 and Animal Farm. Chesterton warned of it and all the consequences of modernity throughout his works. Such moves were played out on the world stage by Hitler, and Lenin, and Stalin, and Mao, and on, and on, till the present day, the most recent political news.

So, in the name of human autonomy, liberation, and choice, we worship the anti-natural, seek to undo the natural by means of everything we have. Looking out upon the world, it is clear that we are plumbing the depths of the anti-natural as we speak. The biological engineering that promises to alter the very meaning of being human (ala Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), the refusal to see or accept the logic of the natural law, and all the revolt against even the Enlightenment faith in reason is the logical consequence of the initial revolt against revelation, against supernature, against the logic of the divine plan.

Fatima gives us the prediction that unless Russia is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Bishops of the world in communion with the Pope, there shall be the spread of the errors of Russia throughout the world and the destruction of many nations. John XXIII, the pope of 1960, did not do the consecration. He said that the third secret was not for the present time. John Paul II completed the consecration in the mid 80s--it appears to have served to mitigate matters, not to heal or reverse.

The possession of the world is well in hand. The powers and principalities of the heavens, the rulers of this present darkness, cling close to their kingdoms because their time is short. Fatima also predicted a triumph of the Immaculate Heart, which is not dependent on human cooperation--it will come in time. There is a limit to the destruction permitted to the devil, as Pope Benedict wrote in his collection of essays "Values in a Time of Upheaval," and we are called as Christians to live in hope.

Heck, there's a limit to the destruction God permits, period. Even the Apocalypse is full of portions, and times, and half a time, and so forth. So the Devil grasps what he can while he still can. But we have ways to fight him--always have, always will. For more on that, Father Gabriele Amorth's books are good, as well as Matt Baglio's The Rite. For more on what we can do to help turn things around, see Carl Anderson's Civilization of Love and Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ's Healing the Culture.