(photo credit: don’t remember)
In this series, I am evaluating the shift between the premodern world and the modern world that would not only explain why God died at a societal level, but also illuminate why the church has failed at their attempts to stop the spread of secularism.
In my last post, I described a bit about the premodern world, in which we derive meaning from the gods, and thus in return, we owe the gods our life. Of course, we know that a huge shift happened somehow. Regardless of whether one is an atheist or theist, today it is the people, not the gods, who make the laws of society, safeguard society, and create the future.
We don’t hesitate to use technology to transform disease, to transform nature, or to transform education. And here is the key– we are not apologetic for transforming nature. If anything, we are boastful of it. “Look what we have done,” we proclaim.
Once upon a time, controlling nature was considered almost unthinkable. Even something as simple as using a shovel to transform the land for a garden, or lighting fire to transform darkness was a gift from the gods in which we owed their permission, and owed our gratitude. One gets the sense that people were once apologetic for something as simple as making a fire to control the night. Thus, the Greek myth of how fire was given to men:
“If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to himself, “they could at least warm themselves and cook their food; and after a while they could learn to make tools and build themselves houses. Without fire, they are worse off than the beasts.”
Then he went boldly to Jupiter and begged him to give fire to men, that so they might have a little comfort through the long, dreary months of winter.
“Not a spark will I give,” said Jupiter. “No, indeed! Why, if men had fire they might become strong and wise like ourselves, and after a while they would drive us out of our kingdom. Let them shiver with cold, and let them live like the beasts. It is best for them to be poor and ignorant, that so we Mighty Ones may thrive and be happy.”
Prometheus made no answer; but he had set his heart on helping mankind, and he did not give up. He turned away, and left Jupiter and his mighty company forever.
As he was walking by the shore of the sea he found a reed, or, as some say, a tall stalk of fennel, growing; and when he had broken it off he saw that its hollow center was filled with a dry, soft pith which would burn slowly and keep on fire a long time. He took the long stalk in his hands, and started with it towards the dwelling of the sun in the far east.
“Mankind shall have fire in spite of the tyrant who sits on the mountain top,” he said.
He reached the place of the sun in the early morning just as the glowing, golden orb was rising from the earth and beginning his daily journey through the sky. He touched the end of the long reed to the flames, and the dry pith caught on fire and burned slowly. Then he turned and hastened back to his own land, carrying with him the precious spark hidden in the hollow center of the plant.
He called some of the shivering men from their caves and built a fire for them, and showed them how to warm themselves by it and how to build other fires from the coals. Soon there was a cheerful blaze in every rude home in the land, and men and women gathered round it and were warm and happy, and thankful to Prometheus for the wonderful gift which he had brought to them from the sun.
In this story, the myth demonstrates that the Greeks knew that they had some agency, but the Greeks immediately attribute their agency to another source. In contrast, in modern western society, our agency is taken for granted. We are free beings, and we know it. We no longer just make a bridge; we build a dame and carve off part of the mountain to build our road. We take minerals from the earth with no prayer of thanks. We create human life without sex. How did we get from being apologetic for using fire to the understanding that we write our own lives?
Please understand, this idea that we self-legislate, make laws, and transform society ourselves is only 300-400 years old. Before that, people saw themselves as interpreting laws; not making them. God is a private affair in our society today. We — the people – make the laws of the land, implement the laws, and create society. We live in a human, socially constructed world, where God is reduced to a private affair. Whether you think that is insanely good, or insanely bad, or whether you are just indifferent towards the death of God, I think the fact that the western world is written by the human hand is indisputable.
What Happened For Modernity to Rise to Power?
Usually, when asked what created the shift between premodernity and modernity, people have two answers, (1) science, and (2) education and mass information. While not at all denying that science and information have spread the news that we do not owe the gods our life, or perhaps more accurately, spread the news that we are free beings who are endowed with equal rights, I think we are missing something fundamental if we never stop to ask ourselves why it is that we thought it was exciting to develop massive scientific technologies in the first place. It’s not like we are smarter today than the ancient Greeks, so I think it’s false to assume that modern science and information is what initially “enlightened” the western world to the death of God and awoke us to the realization that we write our own stories.
Before I state what I believe created modernity, I want the reader to think about their atheist or agnostic friends who deconverted from a monotheistic religion. Or if you are an atheist or agnostic, think about why you deconverted. As an example, here is what Darcy wrote on her blog:
A few friends posted a quote on Facebook last week:
We have a God who sees hearts like we see faces, a God who hears ache like we hear voices, and we have a God who touches & holds & heals our wounds like we long to be held. ~Ann Voskamp
[. . . [I used to believe this. With all my heart. It was comforting. No matter what happened, from the time I was about 14 until 8 years ago, I held on to this “promise” with my life. It got me through some very difficult things.
Until the god I thought saw me and cared for me, stopped. Or maybe I just stopped being able to bullshit myself.
I can look back and see that the beginning of the end was when we lost our home to a fire 8 years ago, on October 22nd. God didn’t save what little we had worked so hard for. [ . . . ]I praised him when our church got together and donated enough money for me to replace household goods and when they came with hammers to help us turn our garage into a home.
But god didn’t do those things, people did. Good people, who probably would’ve done it even without god (some of them weren’t even Christians, just neighbors, good human beings).
While not at all denying that Darcy also had intellectual reasons for her deconversion, I also think what Darcy describes here is profound, and profoundly philosophical. Listen to what she is saying: she quit believing that someone else was writing her story because people are actually the one’s writing her story. It’s simple. In a snapshot, Darcy is describing what I believe happened between premodernity and modernity. Slowly, people realized that all along they were the one’s writing their stories.
The question is, why were we able to wake up one day and articulate that we were the one’s writing our stories? According to Marcel Gauchet in Disenchantment of the World, we slowly and surely realized that we are the one’s writing our stories because monotheism gave us the space to write our stories in the first place. Monotheism slowly released us from the gods who controlled our every move, thus gifting us with agency. Gauchet describes it this way:
the greater the gods, the greater the freedom.
Remember from my last post that the gods of the past were overbearing, so much so that people constantly were indebted to the gods. If you’ve ever lived in a truly animist tribe, you know what I mean. In SE Asia, I lived in an animist tribe. Our every actions were indebted to the gods or spirits. Every movement in the trees was attributed to the gods. I killed a snake, and had to go back into the woods, pull out the snake (already dead), and pound it on the head five times so that the snake wouldn’t come back to life as a tiger,, because this is what the spirits teach. We lived in a beautiful rain forest, but no one would hike with me because the trees were full of spirits. I was told to never play peak-a-boo or scare a child because the parents would fret that the child’s spirit had fled their body. When there was a snake in front of our house when a visitor left, they thought their relationship was ruined. Our next door neighbors claimed that he couldn’t have children by one of his wives because his third wife had cursed the other wife. If someone played music at the wrong time, it was thought that the sound would be mistaken by the spirits as the sound of a funeral, thus summoning someone in the household to the afterlife.
The people had very little meat due to poverty, yet every year they would sacrifice their animals to the spirits. Often the people tried lying to the spirits, telling the spirits that the small pig was their largest pig. Every day I lived there, I heard new stories about what the spirits were demanding.
I do not intend to come across as harsh or judgmental towards this religion, as I personally appreciate this tribal cultural and community. Their life is not as bad as it sounds; listening to the spirits is as natural to them as listening to science is for us. But I do want to emphasis Gauchet’s point that the gods in polytheism are typically overbearing in a way that monotheism is not, for the following reasons:
(1) The God* of monotheism is far more silent than the spirits of animism. The Bible, for example, depicts a God who often goes centuries without speaking to the people at all. There seemed to be hope when Jesus was incarnated and actually walked in our midst, but then Jesus left. He claimed that he would come back again. But now it’s been 2000 years since we’ve heard from him at all. The God of the Bible is overall very, very silent.
Sure, people claim to hear from God in prayer, but our prayers are for the most part very personal. Other than the commands he left with us in the Bible, the Christian God isn’t speaking from the sky, telling people how to live their lives. My friend Darcy is right. God is silent.
And that is very different than animism where the spirits give advice to the corporate society, down to how the people build their houses and where they build their houses. For example, in the village where I lived in Asia, the people have no windows in their houses, so that the spirits cannot get inside; everything about their houses is built certain ways and is structured around the spirits. Additionally, the layout of the village is built in certain ways. Our village is built on a mountain, and the Christian church is intentionally built at the bottom of the village, so that the spirits won’t get mad.
(2) The God of the Bible is so transcendent that he cannot be really described. For example, in the Bible, God comes to Moses, in a burning bush of all places, and claims to be the I am. Just I am. The God who presents himself to Moses is the God that cannot be presented. God in the Old Testament is the name that is unspeakable and unpronounceable.
It would seem that the bigger the God, the more we are enslaved and constrained to that great God. But that isn’t really true. According to Gauchet, the bigger the God, the easier easier it is to slip from his grip because God is transcendent, wholly other to use a phrase that Karl Barth always uses. This distinction between the earth and the heaven allows us to create a space of our own. We are left alone on earth, and we begin to have some autonomy. Often Christians complain about young people just “sleeping around,” “playing” and “doing what they want.” But they forget another side of the coin. Because God is silent we often are forced to take the reigns. This brings me to my next point.
(3) The God of the Bible puts us in charge of interpreting and implementing the laws of the land. A God that is absent meant that we constantly had to decipher what we needed to do – we were forced to take the reigns. The human now stood in humanity searching, pleading, to find out the will of God. God left us to impose order for ourselves. He gave us the law, and then disappeared. This is Gauchet’s thesis: the more the gods are absent, the more we are left wondering how we should impose the law and thus interpret the laws.
Interpretation is a key word because those who interpret always must make a choice for themselves. Ask anyone who has interpreted a text from one language to the other; those choices that we make in translation require agency and power from us.
As a result of our need to interpret the law, we had the birth of the state (which belonged to the church during the Christian era). The human institution was in charge of mediating between the transcendent God and our immanent necessities. The Pope, bishops, leaders, all of these people were those who interpreted and implemented God’s laws; they were our mediators because God is a silent God.
The God of the Bible is not like the spirits in the village where we lived; the God of the Bible asks us to pray, wait, and believe that he is still there listening, even when we cannot see him or hear his voice. The God of the Bible came to earth and gave us so much hope, but then he vanished, asking us to believe that some day he will return. And so here we are, for the last 2,000 years; we wait, pray, listen, plead, and try to believe. But meanwhile, we develop agency in the midst of the ashes. Darcy describes this in her post – she articulates the long struggle of seeking God, trying to believe that he is involved in the affairs of man, all the while, because God was in the sky and not in the physical here and now, she developed more empathy, more agency, and a stronger spirit to pick herself up.
There is no deity out there who sees my heart or heals my wounds or cares about me personally. You know who does that? People. People like my husband, who has walked this road with me for 13 years now; people like many of you who read here, who though we’ve most of us never met, you still care about others on the other side of the computer screen; people like the new friend I’m making who hates religion and likes me; people like the various therapists who have shows empathy and understanding.
While the Christian era may seem “backwards” to many “progressives” today, Gauchet’s point is the institutions during the Christian era gave us autonomy not fully realized in previous millennials. Slowly, people found themselves actually living in the present, instead of just indebted to an overbearing past. Suddenly, people were interpreters of the law, and gained autonomy and power from it. Sure, those somebodies that were important men, not women, not slaves (although Jesus paid some attention to those), but the somebodies still were human. The human, not the gods, were in practicality in charge of the earth.
This living in between the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, may have gone for centuries, until society decided to absolve and forsake with the transcendent and sacred altogether. But Gauchet’s point is that without monotheism, people never would have woke up to realize that they were actually the one’s writing their stories.
As Darcy wrote, there is that moment when you wake up and realize, hey, all those things I attributed to God are actually things that we did. We did it.
I alone am responsible for taking that shit and slinging it back at the universe. For forging meaning and making love and being resilient and rising from the ashes. That’s on me. I am not at the mercy of the whims of a god I’ve never met that I’m supposed to just trust cares about me, even when everything in my life says otherwise. I can take control and make my own way and not look for someone to blame or someone to trust when life doesn’t work.
I write my story. I decide where to go from here. That is, perhaps, the most comforting and freeing thing I’ve discovered so far.
But it first took having a space to “do,” and what Christianity did was forge a place to begin working and creating a society independent of the overbearing gods, until the church worked itself out of a job altogether.
Is Gauchet right? how should we respond? I’ll discuss this in a wrap up post next.
For now, I close with a quote from Nietzsche, the man who understood silence like none other:
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed, and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun and spoke to it.
*I should say God of many monotheistic religions, as I know there are many monotheistic religions. I simply talk about Christianity here since it’s the religion I’m familiar with.
