Exactly when Medieval times or the Middle Ages ended and the
Modern Age began has long been a subject of discussion and debate. It will continue to be so, since the
transition was not instantaneous but took place over an extended period that
included any number of events which, depending the criteria being taken into
consideration, could be identified as the turning point. The question must, therefore, remain open,
and for several decades now has taken the backseat to the questions of whether
the Modern Age has ended, if so when, and what comes next. Despite the temptation created by so many
of the events of the current year having been presented to us in an apocalyptic
framework, it is not my intention to address the latter set of questions here,
other than to refer my readers to the interesting and persuasive discussion of
such matters by the late John Lukacs in The
Passing of the Modern Age (1970), The
End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993), and At The
End of an Age (2002). It is the
transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization, a matter that touches
on the questions pertaining to both the beginning and the end of the Modern Age
that I shall be talking about here. Or,
to be more precise, I shall be discussing one aspect of that transformation.
Was the transformation of Christendom into Western
Civilization the start of the Modern Age (one of the possible answers to the
first question), the end of the Modern Age in both the sense of the purpose
towards which that Age was directed and moving and in the sense that when it
was accomplished the Age came to an end (if so this touches on the answer to
all of the questions pertaining to the end of the Age), or was it simply one
and the same with the Modern Age?
Christendom is a word that can be used in a narrower or a
wider sense. Let us take it here in its
fullest sense of civilization that takes the Christian faith as its foundation
and organizational principle. It is
essentially the generic version of what American Russian Orthodox hieromonk,
Fr. Seraphim Rose, described in its Eastern Orthodox form when he wrote “that
the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the
Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and
authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure”
(Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of
the Modern Age, 1994, 2018, p. 28).
Obviously, by the end of the
Second World War, one of the time-markers for possible ends of the Modern Age,
this had been replaced by liberal, secular, democratic, Western Civilization,
in all but the most outward, nominal, sense.
At the deepest level, of course, the transformation had been
accomplished much earlier than this.
What this suggests, of course, is that, paradoxically, all
three options in the complex question in our second paragraph can be answered
in the affirmative.
While the question of when exactly the transformation of
Christendom into Western Civilization began must remain open, like the related
question of when the transition into the Modern Age began, it is certain that
the radical epistemic revolution belongs to the earliest stages of the
transformation. By radical epistemic
revolution, I mean the fundamental shift in how we conceive of what we know and
how we know it that involved a repudiation of both tradition and divine
revelation as evidentiary paths to knowledge and which introduced so drastic a
change in the meaning of both reason and science as to constitute a break from
what these things had been since classical antiquity. The consequence of this revolution for
Christian Truth was that it was removed from the realm of knowledge and
reassigned to the realm of a “faith” which had itself been radically redefined
so as to bear no resemblance to St. Paul’s “the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) but to be almost the very
opposite of this. Clearly this was a
most significant event in the breaking of the union between civilization and
Christian Truth.
In my last essay, in which I talked about the increasing
confusion with regards to basic logical concepts that has occurred in a period
that has also seen dogmatic authority increasingly assigned to “science”
despite this contradicting the non-authoritarian nature of science in both
pre-Modern and Modern meanings, I mentioned the paradox of the fact that the
removal of tradition and divine revelation from the realm of evidence which
thus emptied that realm of all but the kind of evidence which historians and
courts rely upon and the kind which scientists rely upon should have tipped the
balance in favour of reason in the ancient debate about the priority of reason
versus evidence but has seemingly had the opposite effect of elevating one
particular form of evidence over reason and the other remaining form of
evidence. It also needs to be observed,
with regards to the dogmatic, authoritative, voice now ascribed to “science”,
that in the most obvious cases of this, actual empirical evidence has itself
been trumped by something else. In the
anthropogenic global warming/climate change “crisis” of recent decades and the
Wuhan bat flu “crisis” of this year, in both of which we have been told that we
must accept a drastic reduction in human freedom and submit to totalitarian
measures and group-think in order to avert a catastrophe, dissenters have been
told to “shut up and listen to the science”, but the “science” in question has
largely consisted of computer model projections, which have been granted a
bizarre precedence not only over reason, such as the questioning which provokes
the “shut up and listen to the science” response, and non-empirical evidence,
such as the historical record on the world’s ever-changing climate which
directly contradicts the entire alarmist narrative on this subject, but even
empirical evidence as this has until recently been understood, observations and
measurements made in either the real world or the laboratory. Since plenty of this sort of empirical
evidence joins non-empirical evidence in supporting reason against these
narratives, we are in effect being told that we must set both reason and
evidence aside and mindlessly obey orders backed only by the fictional
speculations of an artificial “intelligence”.
Anyone still open to the evidence of tradition and divine revelation,
will find in Scriptural descriptions of the effects of idolatry upon the minds
of those who practice it, an ample explanation of this phenomenon.
That tradition and divine revelation became vulnerable to
being forced out of the realm of evidence can in part by attributed to their
having been set against each other in the period that produced the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation. Both sides
share the blame here. The papacy and
its adherents at their worst placed such an emphasis on tradition that they
sometimes gave the impression that they had elevated it over divine revelation and
thus were inviting a response similar to that given to the scribes and
Pharisees by the Lord in Matthew 15:1-2, emphasis on verses three and six,
whereas the more radical elements of the Protestant Reformation went so far in
the opposite direction as to contradict such New Testament affirmations of
tradition as I Corinthians 11:2 and II Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:16. It is beyond the scope of this essay, of
course, to offer a full resolution of this conflict. I shall simply point out that by divine
revelation I mean what theologians call “special revelation”, which is distinct
from “general revelation” such as that described by St. Paul in Romans 1:19-20.
General revelation or natural revelation, is God’s revelation of Himself
in the natural order of His Creation, and is the source of such truth as can be
found in all human tradition. Special
revelation, is God’s salvific revelation of Himself in His Covenants, His
written Word, and ultimately in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. When Christianity makes claims of
exclusivity, such as “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man cometh to
the Father but through Me”, these rest upon special revelation. When Christianity acknowledges truth in
other religions, this is on the basis of the general revelation that informs
all traditions. See the essays by C.
S. Lewis in the first section of God in
the Dock (1970), and the book Christianity
and Pluralism (1998, 2019), by Ron Dart and J. I. Packer for a more
extended discussion of these matters.
Special revelation, because of its role in the ordu salutis, comes with promises of divine protection against
corruption (Matthew 5:17-18, for example) that are obviously not extended to general
revelation (see the larger context of the Romans passage cited above), which
would seem obviously to place the primacy on special divine revelation, without
eliminating the epistemic value of either human tradition in general or the
particular Apostolic tradition affirmed in Scripture in the aforementioned
Pauline references.
The turning of divine (special) revelation and tradition
against each other facilitated the rise of rationalism which attacked their now
divided house and excluded them both from the realm of reason, evidence, and
knowledge. That this having ultimately led to
evidence taking primacy over reason in an ongoing discussion/debate which began
prior to Socrates seems counterintuitive is due to the reasons mentioned above,
however, it seems more inevitable when we consider what is asserted about Jesus
Christ in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.”
The word rendered Word in the English of this verse is Logos, the word
from which logic is derived. It does
indeed mean “word” in the sense of the unit of speech that is the basic
building block of sentences, although it can also mean “sentence” in certain
contexts, or even “speech” in general.
It also, however, can mean thought, in the sense of calculation,
judgement, evaluation, and basically everything suggested by the word “reason”. This personification of reason and ascription
to it of divine status would have been familiar territory to the Greek thinkers
of the day, as just such a thought had long been a dominant theme in Greek
philosophy.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is otherwise best known for his
view that constant change is the defining characteristic of the world – “you
never step in the same river twice” – introduced the concept of the Logos into
Greek thought. Logos, to Heraclitus, was
a divine, rational principle that governs the world of flux and brings order
and meaning to what otherwise would be chaos. In the first century, the Hellenizing
Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, had famously equated the Logos of
Greek thought with the personified Wisdom in Jewish Wisdom literature. The
eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is the canonical
example of this personification of Wisdom, and the Wisdom of Solomon, one of
the disputed books of the Septuagint, is a book long example of the same,
possibly originally written as expansion of or commentary on the chapter in
Proverbs. Even prior to Philo there had
been a tradition in Jewish thought somewhat parallel to the Greek Logos,
represented primarily in the Targum (a translation, or more accurately number
of translations, of the Old Testament into Aramaic, along with midrash or
exegetical commentary on the same, also in Aramaic), in which the personified
Memra acts as the messenger or agent of God.
There was one huge difference between Philo’s synthesis of
Greek and Hebrew thought on this matter and St. John’s. For Philo the Logos was not God, per se, but
a divine intermediary between God and Creation, roughly the equivalent of the
Demiurge, albeit the benevolent Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus not the malevolent Demiurge of the Gnostic heretics. For St. John, the Logos was both with God,
and was identical to God. The lack of
a definite article preceding Theos in the final clause of the first verse of
the Gospel does not mean that a diminutive or lesser divinity is intended. Since the clause joins two nouns of the same
case (nominative) with the copula, and Theos is the noun that precedes the
copula, its anarthrous condition indicates that it functions grammatically as
the predicate rather than the subject (E. C. Colwell, “A Definite Rule for the
Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament”, Journal of Biblical Literature 52, 1933). Even if this were not a recognized
grammatical rule, St. John’s intention could hardly be clearer, as his Logos,
identified in the fourteenth verse as Jesus Christ, repeatedly makes statements
employing the Greek equivalent of YHWH in such a way as to unmistakably
identify Himself as God. Indeed, this
makes St. John’s use of the Greek philosophical term for the divine principle
of reason that makes reality orderly in a way that evokes the first chapter of
Genesis with its repeated “and God said…and it was so”, transforming what had
been “without form and void” into that which “was very good”, a much more
powerful embrace of reason than Philo’s.
See Calvinist philosopher Gordon
H. Clark’s The Johannine Logos (1972) for a fuller discussion of this. This is why the rejection of Christian
epistemology, which affirms both special revelation and tradition, and embrace
of a rationalist epistemology that removes both from the realm of evidence –
although done in the name of reason and hence the term “rationalist” – must
inevitably assign reason a much lower place than it had occupied in a worldview
that acknowledges the Divine Logos.
The elevation of empirical evidence over historical evidence
was also an inevitable consequence of the same epistemological revolution. The reason for this is that the special
revelation and tradition which were banished from the realm of evidence, each
have a unique relationship with one of the two evidences allowed to remain. When special revelation and tradition were
sent into exile, the hierarchical relationship between the two was also
rejected, leading to the inversion of this hierarchy for the corresponding two
evidences.
Empirical evidence or science – real empirical evidence,
mind you, not the computer generated, pseudoscientific, fiction masquerading under
its name today – corresponds with tradition.
Here, I mean tradition in the generic sense of “that which has been
passed down” (tradition comes from the passive perfect participle of the Latin
trado, the verb for handing over or passing on) rather than the content of any
particular tradition. Tradition’s chief
epistemic value is that it is the means whereby that which has been observed,
deduced, and otherwise learned and known in the past is made available to those
living in the present so that each generation does not have to re-invent the
wheel so to speak and discover everything afresh for itself. Apart from this, human knowledge could not
significantly accumulate and grow. As mentioned
briefly above, with regards to Romans 1, the truths of general or natural
revelation which are passed down in tradition are susceptible to corruption,
but it is also the case that living traditions are flexible and
self-correcting. That this, and not the
rigid inflexibility that rationalists falsely attribute to it, is the nature of
tradition, was an insight that was well articulated by Michael Oakeshott (see the
title essay and “The Tower of Babel”, in Rationalism
in Politics and Other Essays, 1962).
While true science’s value is primarily utilitarian rather than epistemic
– “science is always false, but it is often useful” as Gordon H. Clark put it –
the merits of tradition as described in this paragraph overlap to a large
degree those which scientists would ascribe to their vocation and methodology. In the best sense of the word, science is
itself a particular tradition, which has been accumulating natural knowledge
and correcting itself since Thales of Miletus.
Special revelation, on the other hand, is connected to
historical evidence. This can clearly
be seen in both Testaments. The Old
Testament is primarily the record of God’s revelation of Himself through a
Covenant relationship established with a particular people, Israel, in a
particular place, the Promised Land, over a specific era of time stretching
from the period of the Patriarchs, from whom the people were descended, to the
partial return from their exile in Babylon at the beginning of the Second
Temple period. Even the portions of it which are not strictly
historical narrative in literary genre fit in to that history. This is most obviously the case with the
prophetic writings, which contain divine warnings given to Israel and sometimes
the surrounding nations, in connection with events described in the historical
record, but even in the case of the Psalms of David, many of these can be tied
to specific events in that historical king’s life, as they collectively are
tied to his life as a whole.
This is all the more the case with the New Testament. The New Testament presents us with God’s
ultimate revelation of Himself, both to the people with whom He had established
the Old Covenant and promised a New, and to all the peoples of the world, in
the Incarnation of His Son “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. The story of God’s Incarnational revelation
is told in the form of history – events about specific people, in identifiable
places, at identifiable times, attested to by witnesses. We are told that the Virgin Birth, the event
shortly to be commemorated at Christmas, occurred in the reign of Augustus
Caesar, when Herod the Great was king of Judea, and Cyrenius was governor of
Syria, and that it took place in the city of David, Bethlehem. The baptism of Jesus by His cousin John the
Baptist is the event that signaled the beginning of His public ministry. We are told that John the Baptist’s own
ministry began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when
Pontius Pilate was governor of Judeau, Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee,
and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests. The locations of Jesus' most significant
miracles are identified, and the events of the final week of His public ministry
are related in great historical detail – His dramatic entry into Jerusalem, His
teaching in the Second Temple, His betrayal by Judas for thirty pieces of silver,
His Last Passover Supper with His Apostles, His arrest in the Garden of
Gethsemane, His first, illegal, trial before the aforementioned high priests
and the Sanhedrin, His second, official, trial before the aforementioned Roman
governor, the mob turning against Him, His torture by the Roman soldiers, His
crucifixion between two thieves at the hill of Calvary, and His burial in the tomb
of Joseph of Arimathea. Real places, real people, real events. As St. Paul would say to Festus a few years
later, “the king (Agrippa) knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely,
for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this
thing was not done in a corner.” The
same St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, would set forth the evidence for the
crowning event of God’s Incarnational revelation of Himself in history, the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, citing eyewitness after eyewitness. The Resurrection is not something to which
evidence of the empirical sort can speak, but the historical evidence for it is
overwhelming. (1)
In the Christian epistemic hierarchy special revelation
which takes place in and through history ranks higher than tradition of which
science at its best is a particular example.
The abandonment of Christian epistemology early in the transformation of
Christendom into Western Civilization involved a repudiation of both special
revelation and tradition as well as the ranking between the two. Even though considered in themselves, a
strong case could be made for the superiority of historical evidence over
empirical evidence – the latter consists of observations made in artificially controlled
situations to test hypotheses and so cannot be counted upon to have epistemic
value, to speak truth about reality, things as they are in themselves, even
when they have the utilitarian value of helping us to manipulate things to our
own use, and so when it comes to determining truth about reality, the empirical
must count as merely one form of testimony among the many that make up
historical/legal evidence, as it is in standard courtroom practice, and is therefore
logically subordinate to the larger whole of which it is a part – this has
resulted in science being elevated over other forms of evidence, over tradition
of which it is a particular example and thus logically subordinate to the
general form, and over reason.
Science, which belongs at the bottom of the epistemic totem pole and is
essentially magic that works (see C. S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”, the
third lecture/essay in the book of the same title), has been raised to the very
top of the pole.
This elevation of science over all other evidence, all other
traditions, and reason itself goes a long way to explaining how people who are
scientists only in the sense that they speak the technical language of some
branch of science or another have managed to substitute baseless predictions
spat out by some machine for actual empirical evidence and ascribe to these the
kind of authority that properly belongs to special revelation. They have put this false science to the use
of frightening people into giving up their basic rights and freedoms in exchange
for protection against one Bogeyman or another and are thus laying waste to
what little remains of the civilization that was once Christendom. This demonstrates just how fundamental to civilization
is its account of reality and truth.
(1) In
his essay “Myth Became Fact”, C. S. Lewis spoke of this historicity of the
Christian story as the distinguishing point between it and pagan myths with
similar elements, and thus described the significance of the Incarnation in
this way:
Now
as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of
Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god,
without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and
imagination to the earth of history. It happens ‐ at a particular date, in a
particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a
Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person
crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does
not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes
derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the
religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical
fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same
imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more
necessary than the other.
It was precisely this consideration, that the
Christian message was a “true myth”, as put to him by J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo
Dyson, which had brought Lewis to Christian faith. His interpretation here, of the Incarnation
transcending myth by presenting us with a “myth which is also a fact” comes
after, of course, his explanation of the meaning and value of myth qua myth, for which explanation I refer
you to the essay as a whole which can be found in God in the Dock.
