Everything that has occurred in the twentieth century, and continues today, is proof of the fact that Christianity in the world is suffering a serious religious crisis. Massive swathes of the population have lost their living faith and have left the Christian church. But, having left it, many have not remained indifferent to it. Many have become antagonistic, judgmental, and estranged from it. For some, the antagonism is passive and cold. But others organize a willful battle against it, though still adhering to the rules of war. Still others have a fanatical hatred toward Christianity, and sometimes this spills over into outright persecution.
However, the difference between all three is not profound, nor is it foundational. Taken together, they are a unified font of mutual agreement, empathy, and even support, whether open or secret.
Thus, within the limits of what was formerly Christendom (we leave aside other religions such as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.), there is a wide anti-Christian front that has tried to create an un-Christian and anti-Christian culture. This phenomenon is not a new one. The twentieth century, following in the footsteps of the nineteenth, only manifests a process that has been dormant, but developing, for centuries. The process of separation of culture from faith, religion, and the Church began a long time ago. It has been going on for several centuries. In Europe and America, âsecular cultureâ and secularization itself can trace their beginnings all the way to the Renaissance.
During the first thousand and a half years after the birth of Christ, the situation was radically different. There could be many reasons for this. Possibly, people in general were more trusting, their spiritual makeup less complex and variegated, more instinctive, even irrational; therefore, more modest and spiritually careful. Perhaps the divine origin of the revelation of the Gospel was more immediately apparent, more vividly and profoundly experienced. Perhaps man did not yet feel himself to be a master of nature, but one subjected to its whims. Or maybe life on earth was more chaotic and more fraught. However it may be, it was during this time period that people in general (in Christendom, I repeat) considered religion to be the center of their life, its most important, or possibly even exclusive, source of existence and meaning.
For the last four centuries, and especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all this radically changed. I am not at liberty to follow the complete historical process hereâthat is a difficult and detailed endeavor worthy of its own proper treatment. Even the end of the Middle Ages contained within itself the forerunners and the beginnings of these changes. And we are the ones having to reap what they sowed.
European culture of the 19th century was in essence already secular and de-sacralized. Science, art, law, agriculture, worldview, cosmologyâall of these were thoroughly secularized. The culture of our own time continues this separation from Christianity, but not only from Christianity. Contemporary culture is losing its religious spirit, its meaning, and its beauty. It has not turned to any ânew religion,â nor has it even started to seek anything of the sort.1 Having separated from Christianity, it has gone into an a-religious, godless wasteland. Mankind has not only ceased to contemplate, develop, and preserve the experience of the Christian church, but it has brought fruit to no other religious experience at all. It has left Christianity, but wanders the wasteland aimlessly.
Beginning with the French Enlightenment (and the Revolution it spawned), the history of the nineteenth century is one of many attempts to build a spiritually rich culture outside âreligious prejudicesâ and without any unnecessary hypotheses concerning metaphysics and the soul. Slowly, a faithless culture arose, one devoid of faith, God, Christ, and the Gospels. And the Church gradually found itself in the position of having to grapple with this âindependentâ new culture.
What ended up happening was a formation of a world-vision that was completely separate from a vision of God. Positive science made huge leaps; those leaps led to ever increasing practical and technical improvements, leading even to social revolutions. All this, taken together, has so changed the makeup, striving, taste, and needs of the human soul, that the Christian church with its natural conservatism in teaching (dogmas!), organization (canon law!), and prayer (ritualism!) did not find enough creative initiative and flexibility within itself to preserve its previous authoritative position in questions of human knowledge and activity, in questions of cultural theory and practice.
As a result, modern man has continued to travel ever further away from the eternal truth of Christianity. We have lost our ability to contemplate these truths, we have habituated ourselves to live without them. And so, we have degenerated intellectually and morally, plunging ever closer to a complete culture crisis, unheard-of in the history of mankind.
This is what modern man seeks:
1) First, materialist science. This science bases its success on how much it furthers its âtruthsâ from the âhypothesis of God,â breaking nearly all links with any kind of religion. Positive naturalism, with its âproofsâ immediately provides utility with every new finding. Too often, scientific breakthroughs lead to more effective and cruel methods of waging war. This is not science, but âtechnical knowledgeâ that has no interest in exalted goals or the meaning of life.There are constant revelations or breakthroughs, but science exists in a vacuum of a-morality. It has no reference to any objective standard or any revelation from on high.
2) Second, secular, a-religious politics. Modern man doesnât understand that politics has been cut off from its highest goal, which is (and always has been and always will be) to prepare people for the âbeautiful lifeâ (Aristotle), for life âin Godâ (Augustine). Godless governments are like the blind leading the blind into a pit. They do not value the eternal, noble, Christian roots of legal consciousness. Modern governments donât serve quality of life or perfection of life. They serve private interests, whether class interests or individual interests. Politics knows nothing about measuring spiritual depths. Even in the best cases, modern politics creates a chaotic balance of competing desires. This is all it can do to combat enmity and envy.
3) Third, modern man is governed by an instinct to obtain and consume. The laws of the market rule over him, and he has no power over these laws, because he has lost the sense of the presence of the Living God in his heart.
We have reached an absolute dead end of capitalist production and have found only one way out of itâsocialism and communism. We have not understood that it isnât capitalism itself thatâs horrifying. Itâs a godless capitalist regime that is horrifying, because is it upheld by people who have dead souls. But godless communism is endlessly more horrifying than godless capitalism. And so, having lost both God and Christ, the soul of modern man, religiously chaotic and morally degenerate as it is becoming, cannot help but become a victim of the instinct to buy and buy and buy some more.
4) Fourth, modern man has abandoned himself to a-religious and godless art that is becoming nothing more than vain entertainment, an enervating and depressing spectacle. In all times and places, there has been a call for âbread and circuses.â But bread and circuses have never pretended to be high art. But now, so-called modern art, which has âfreedâ itself from religious feeling and nuance, dances hand in hand with the desires of the masses. There is no longer a distinction between high and low art. Itâs as though art has become two-dimensional, losing its artistry, sacredness, objectiveness. The two-dimensional soul can only produce two-dimensional art, remarkable only for its triteness, its lack of depth.
Is there a creative way out of this situation? How can we find it? Is a renewal of culture even possible? And how can we help bring it about?