Florets | Secularity & Apocalypse

Five readings on secularisation

☩I: TOTALLY DIFFERENT, NEW, FREE

Charles Péguy, from Clio I:

“But when we talk of de-Christianisation,when one says there is a modern world, and that it is completely de-Christianised, that simply means that it has given up the whole system altogether, that it moves and has its being outside the system; it means that everybody has renounced the whole of Christianity. It implies the constitution of a totally different, new, free, entirely independent system. Were it only bad Christianity, my child, it would not (yet) be very interesting; it would no longer be interesting. You understand, my poor, dear friend, what I am driving at.

What is interesting, what is new, is that there is no longer any Christianity left.”

II: ONLY TO BECOME A PRISON

Henri De Lubac, from The Drama of Atheist Humanism:

“It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism. Moreover, it is not the purpose of faith in God, that faith which instills Christianity in us in an ever-present and ever-demanding transcendence, to install us comfortably in our earthly life that we may go to sleep in it-however feverish our sleep might be. On the contrary, faith disturbs us and continually upsets the too beautiful balance ofour mental conceptions and our social structures. Bursting into a world that perpetually tends to close in upon itself, God brings it the possibility of a harmony that is certainly superior but is to be attained only at the cost of a series of cleavages and struggles coextensive with time itself.

“I came, not to bring peace, but a sword." Christ is, first and foremost, the great disturber. That certainly does not mean that the Church lacks a social doctrine, derived from the Gospel. Still less does it tend to deter Christians, who, like their brothers, are men and members of the city, from seeking to solve the city's problems in accordance with the principles of their faith; on the contrary, it is one more necessity impelling them to do so. But they know at the same time that, the destiny of man being eternal, he is not meant to find ultimate repose here below. The earth, which without God could cease being a chaos only to become a prison, is in reality the magnificent and painful field where our eternal being is worked out. Thus faith in God, which nothing can tear from the heart of man, is the sole flame in which our hope, human and divine, is kept alive.”

III: THE HONOR OF JOY

Servant of God Madeleine Delbrêl, from God In The City:

If, in my city and other cities, people say “God is dead,” and if, knowingly or not, Christians have been responsible, then I am responsible, because I am the one living today. Christians of all times are one, and I am not the only Christian to live. Myself and the others, what are we to do?

Place these dispossessed brothers and sisters at the center of our lives? Devote ourselves to their suffering, the suffering of the proletariat? Yes, because that is where they are. But if there hadn’t been this break with God they wouldn’t be there. What might we have learned of love, if we had realized that it suffices to suffer as they suffer? When will we get it through our heads that it was not resignation that Christ purchased with his death? To love is not to be resigned: not to oneself, nor to others. To love is to have the honor of joy—because it is to have the honor of God. Sometimes we ask ourselves whether our books are in good standing, whether we have suffered what we must. I ask myself whether we haven’t suffered too much, whether we haven’t suffered what we didn’t have to—sufferings which, if we were just a little less lazy, could have been transformed into joy.

IV: EXPECTING THE RESURRECTION

Ivan Illich, from The Rivers North of the Future:

I do not live in a post-Christian world. I live in an apocalyptic world. I live in the kairos in which the mystical body of Christ, through its own fault, is constantly being crucified, as his physical body was crucified and rose again on Easter day. I am therefore expecting the resurrection of the Church from the humiliation, for which the Church itself must be blamed, of having gestated and brought forth the world of modernity.”

The resurrection lies behind us. What we now have to expect is not the resurrection of the Lord, nor the bodily ascension to heaven of our lady Mary, this strange girl whom I have not been able to help having as my ideal since I was a boy. It’s the resurrection of the Church; and, when I say I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life everlasting, the resurrection of the dead for me stands for the resurrection of the Church.”

V: THE LAST AGE

Romano Guardini, from The End of The Modern World:

“If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding "Christian" culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said, "it will, if possible, deceive even the elect" (Matt 24:24).

Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matt 23:12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? Perhaps love will achieve an intimacy and harmony never known to this day. Perhaps it will gain what lies hidden in the key words of Jesus’s message: that things are transformed for the man who makes God's will for His Kingdom his first concern (Matt 6:33).

These eschatological conditions will show themselves, it seems to me, in the religious temper of the future. With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here, for Christ Himself has declared that only the Father knows the day and the hour (Matt 24:36). If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man's existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potential and the most extreme danger.” 

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I’ve not been as active on here as I should have over the last month; the pre-Christmas rush turned into a holiday that turned into an unpleasant, lingering illness. I’m better now, or getting there.

My essay on Lucien Goldmann for Verso, published this week, is online here. Some of my recent reviews are online here and here; my interview with Chris Arnaude is here; a feature on Christmas social outreach is here.

It’s dark outside. Much more, very soon.

Wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end.☩