52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
67. Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies.
First things first: Hart himself does a great job summing up the crux of his argument:
“The ethical presuppositions intrinsic to modernity… are palliated fragments and haunting echoes of Christian moral theology. Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible.” (pp. 32-33)
That’s his main suggestion: that Christian thought was a revolution across all levels of society the likes of which had never been seen before and hasn’t been seen since, and that the modernist conception of itself as “an ‘age of reason’ emerging from and overthrowing an ‘age of faith’” (p. 33) is a fable, having more in common with folklore or myth than with history or truth. He sees this age as ‘post-Christian,’ and as benefiting from an ethical foundation it inherited from Christianity but has since attributed to itself. Hart purposes, through most of the book, to correct this popular, common, and totally incorrect view of the historical record, and he does a thorough and only slightly smug job of it. This is the first time I’d ever heard a challenge to the common perception of Galileo as a scientific martyr to the Church’s dogmatic blindness.
Hart warns that the logical terminus of the modernist concept of freedom — liberty from anything that constrains the will — is nihilism (that is, literally, “nothing”), and that what humanity might become, when freed from the ethical constraints necessitated by the Christian view of human life as intrinsically valuable, is unknowable and probably unlikeable. The Christian view of freedom — that one is truly free when one is at liberty to assume the highest and fullest expression of one’s nature — is self-validating; we’ve left that concept behind, Hart says, partly because we do not acknowledge that man has a nature beyond the mere expression the will.
Hart believes that the ethical outworking — charity, empathy, altruism, responsibility to the other — of the radical Christian idea — that man is valuable because God created him and inheres in him — will slowly disappear from civilization (he doesn’t hold any hope that it will do otherwise). He suggests that as this happens, those who have been or are being truly transformed by that idea, still, may retreat into the modern equivalent of the desert to seek the kind of freedom noted above, just as the first desert fathers (and mothers) did as the Empire subsumed Christianity in the early centuries A.D.
This book is chiefly welcome as a corrective to the modernist fable about itself (as I’ve said), and I’d like to get my hands on a copy permanently, to keep for future reference. It’s also probably Hart’s most accessible work; a quick look at The Beauty of the Infinite reveals very, very technical theology, which is almost impossible for me to parse. Glad I started with this.
Meta comment: Your Abe pictures change according to category. Nice touch, and how did I miss that before?
Sethro. October 6th. 2009. 6:35 am.