{"id":3053,"date":"2017-10-30T02:16:51","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T23:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aeneas.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=43"},"modified":"2017-10-30T02:16:51","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T23:16:51","slug":"the-god-who-did-not-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3053\/the-god-who-did-not-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"The God who did not Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

The modern west is currently engaged in a deeply incoherent and, in multiple ways, dangerous experiment. On the one hand, some sectors of our society have chosen to push the old Christian insight about human freedom to absurd lengths. In this view, human beings are radically free–from God, from history, from nature, even from ‘human nature,’ which is now often believed to be an ideological ‘construct’ that is involved for repressive purposes. But what is this radical autonomy if not a modern dogma, conceived in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? […]
\nOn the other hand, many of us now believe that all previous arguments about human uniqueness and and non-natural or supernatural dimensions to the human person have been exploded by scientific advances. All our vaunted independence of mind and spirit, oiur free political and economic institutions, our ‘lifestyle choices,’ and our pride in our artistic creativity in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture are an illusion. [… But] can any society continue to believe in freedom as its foundation when it smost distinguished scientists argue that human behavior is roughly 60 percent the result of genes and the remainder ‘a complex algorithm of genes and environment?'” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These words make the introduction of Robert Royal’s book The God that did not Fail<\/em>, in which he expresses his views on the situation of religion in the West. <\/p>\n

Royal’s thesis is clear and simple, yet not so obvious for many of us: the secularist movement, especially that of the Enlightenments, has failed to completely supress religion, more accurately Christianity, from the Western mind. In a series of nine chapters, the author retraces the development of secularism and religiosity, and the interplay between both, in Western history from ancient Greece through Rome and the medieval period, to the modern era, and explores how religious faith shaped our world. Royal is not, in fact, the only or the first author to develop such thesis: Paul Veyne and Maurice Sartre also have argued for a similar idea. For example, such discernably Western tenets, such as tolerance, were the result of the bloody wars of religions and the Thirty-year war that bled Europe in the 16-17th centuries. Other central events, such as the French and English revolutions, owed more to the infuence of reformist Christian groups, the Calvinists and Jansenists, than to strictly speaking secularist advocates. Despite the fact that secularization has touched all aspects of Western society, traditional religion (Christianity) continues–albeit in a diminished form–to sustain Western civilization, especially in two of its most important legacies: the belief in human dignity and the rightness of ordered liberty. The question we may ask is how long, even if we continue to sincerely believe in these two concepts, will our culture survive if we deny precisely their ultimate origins in the Gospels. But current trends rather point to a future revival of traditional religion, outside Europe at first and, perhaps, in the longer term, in Europe itself as well. What will happen only history will tell. <\/p>\n

The book, however, suffers from a weakness that becomes apparent when we consider European history in its entirety: it sees Christianity only in its Western form, in the form that it took in the former Latin Christendom, overlooking the different course that it took elsewhere–a course which may disprove certain of the author’s arguments–and thus conceptualizes Christianity’s strengths and weaknesses, and therfore Europe’s strengths and weaknesses, only within a purely Western shell. Royal cites the case of Pope Benedict XVI who once presented the following options: <\/p>\n

When we consider the immensity of others’ needs, we can, on the one hand, be driven toward an ideology that would aim at doing what God’s governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem. Or we can be tempted to give in to inertia, since it would seem that in any event nothing can be accomplished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To this the pope replied that we had to keep hope within the framework of the ancient wisdom that we are limited beings, and therefore fail quickly if we only trust ourselves, thus reaffirming the Augustinian conception of the City of Men as separate from the City of God. In Augustine’s view, the City of God cannot be reproduced in human society, who are therefore forced to find devices to organize themselves into society. But it is precisely this very concept <\/em> that is the basis for modern Western secularism, the separation of Church and State. Because the Heavenly City cannot possibly exist on earth, we are therefore ‘forced’ to organize ourselves in the best way possible, even if with the help of God, a path which may eventually end up in totalitarianism or all forms of compulsion. It is the Augustinian concept of the two cities that account for much of the exactions committed by the papcy and, later, the kings and states of Western Europe. The Augustinian concept of the two cities was absent in the other half of Christendom, the Byzantine Roman Empire, where the Platonic view that the earthly polis<\/em> is the reflect of the divine pattern, and must be organized accordingly. from the start, there was no true separation of Church and State in the Byzantine Empire, as Justinian’s ‘symphony’ explicitely refers to. <\/p>\n

Because we must apply our own devices to govern our affairs, we can easily become the victims of any form of extremism, and, also, innovations and change are necessary when the previous model has failed. This is the second mistake of the book, which sees in change and innovations one of the characterisitics of the West’s success. Charlemagne’s empire, for instance, never achieved the stability of the Eastern Roman Empire, which, according to Royal, “was providential because otherwise the West might have settled into a static sacred order of the Oriental or Byzantine type. Instead, the very instability and division of the West forced both church and state into constant dynamic negotiations<\/em> (emphasis mine). This is precisely the problem: where the others, Byzantines or others, see stability, Westerners see a static order. But it is this instability that is the source of the Revolutions and the violent reaction against Christianity in the West. When the medieval Church had failed and started to crumble after the high point of the 13th century, in which the Pope was virtually both spiritual and secular ruler of Western Europe, the kings appropriated for themselves what belonged to the Church, and the latter became subservient to the State’s desire. Any revolution against the monarch’s tyranny would also necessarily target the Church which supported it. Here, we see how a government in the Byzantine style provided a more stable order. <\/p>\n

It seems that, by taking pride in our own instability, the very source of our success, we are in fact glorifying our own act of death. Do we prefer success over social and political stability? If the answer is positive, the West may continue to struggle for long. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The modern west is currently engaged in a deeply incoherent and, in multiple ways, dangerous experiment. On the one hand, some sectors of our society have chosen to push the old Christian insight about human freedom to absurd lengths. In this view, human beings are radically free–from God, from history, from nature, even from ‘human […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6595,46,6,6602],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity-general","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}