Alastair's Adversaria

Willow Creek and a number of other megachurches are cancelling their Christmas Day services (Tim Bayly also reports on this).

This is just another instance of the idolatry of the natural family in action. Christ came in order to form the New Family. True celebration of Christmas will be centred upon the ‘personal time’ of the New Family. The personal times of our natural families ought to grow out of this if they are not to be idolatrous.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.

And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value – but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.

Money can do a lot of things – but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can’t make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.

And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money’s great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can’t make sense of your death.

It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.

The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we’re all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The “death of God”, or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church — from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn’t crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown’s book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: “No. I don’t believe in God. I believe in something greater.” Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren’t big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret “container” with his or her own fears and hopes.

The whole article can be read here. [HT: The Confessing Reader]

I finished reading Eco’s Serendipities: Language and Lunacy today (a big thank you to Cliff, who bought it for me from my wishlist). It follows on from Eco’s earlier work, The Search for the Perfect Language. Central themes from Baudolino and Foucault’s Pendulum are among those explored in this stimulating series of essays.

Eco observes the manner in which certain intellectual errors and mistaken beliefs have left their mark upon history. Here we find the Donation of Constantine, Prester John, the Rosicrucians and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The interesting side-effects of errors make for thought-provoking reading. For those accustomed to seeing history as a series of broad thoroughfares, the experience of being escorted by Eco down some of history’s cul-de-sacs, dingy alleyways and derelict streets is an eye-opening one.

Eco concludes his first chapter by speaking of the need for each generation to keep their minds open to the possibility that certain of our most familiar ideas (he takes the idea of the ‘universe’ as an example) may have been illusions and challenges us to always be prepared to ‘rewrite the encyclopedia’.

Eco devotes most of the book to chronicling some of the theories about the Edenic language and the manner in which this related to the post-Babelic languages and certain of the attempts made to construct perfect languages and more modern attempts to explain the origin of language and the preservation of meaning within it.

Eco also draws his reader’s attention to the manner in which a number of thinkers imposed preconceived conclusions upon the evidence that they encountered in their different fields and activities and failed to appreciate the manner in which the evidence actually undermine their familiar categories. For example, Marco Polo discovered the unicorn, but also discovered that it was black rather than white, had hooves like those of an elephant and a pelt like that of a buffalo. He was only able to speak of the unknown in terms of what he had expected to find. ‘He was a victim of his background books.’ It seems to me that this is a mistake that we have all made at some time or other. I am tempted to make a remark about certain theological debates at this point.

[I resisted]

Some very interesting thoughts here.

In his book, The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argues that shame is a crucial element of the civilizing process. He maintains that the printing press encouraged the development of a heightened sense of shame.

The reading of books demands quite a victory over our nature. To read a book you have to subordinate your body to your mind. You have to develop skills of self-restraint, suspension of criticism and delayed gratification. To learn to read children must learn to keep their bodies still and master the art of concentration and logical thought. They have to learn to gain control over their impulses. The psychology of book-learning has a powerful effect in teaching us the need to control and master our nature. The training of the mind and body in literacy had its social analogue in the inculcation of manners. Continue reading →

Woohoo! Now I can understand Berek.

After writing my previous post, I finished reading C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. This concluding paragraph was particularly striking, especially given some of the positions expressed in my earlier comments:—

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.