The myth of modernity coheres the seemingly disparate threads of reality into some semblance of a systematic whole. It propels the modern imaginary into the unknown, to boldly go where no man has gone before.1 The desire to solve the unifying theory of the universe, or to reach back in time as far back as human reason will allow and determine what things were like just prior to the big bang, or to peregrinate towards the edges of the universe.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age 2
These words of H.P. Lovecraft are a caveat to the human race, do not voyage too far into the unknown because you may find something horrific, you may go insane. Lovecraft’s fiction is rife with despair and fear, although a materialist himself, he warned about scientific progress. For him, mankind is not capable of peering into the abyss of space and time, or the even the great abyss of cosmic meaning. This stands in stark contract to the levity of St. Sophrony’s oft-quoted line: “Stand on the edge of the abyss of despair and when you feel that it is beyond your strength, break off and have a cup of tea.” Modernity promised great things: progress, enlightenment, unbridled knowledge, yet for all that, it was incapable of fulfilling its promises and it left us with despair. One can see this with the optimism of the early modern philosophers, however, by the time one gets to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, they are all overcome with anxiety and despair, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre just to name a few. Although these are broad strokes, there was a proclivity towards pessimism in some of the earlier thinkers, just read Voltaire, especially Candide, which was a narrative attack on Leibniz’s optimism. Or read Schopenhauer, whose philosophy exemplifies the pessimism of that age.
The question then: Why is it that modernity was unable to deliver on its promises?
The Origins of Reform
To understand why revolution is often the offspring of modernity, one must look back to before the modern conception of revolution to “reform”, and reform has its origin in the Judeo-Christian understanding of time. This is important for understanding how secularity and modernity came to be.
In the ancient, pagan cultures time was experienced as cyclical. We still have a remnant of this today–or maybe residue is a better term. We have recurring months and seasons and holidays, however, time is still best understood and experienced as linear. It is important to remember though that time in antiquity was experienced cyclically: ages come and go, the gods destroy humanity, there is a great cataclysm, like the Norse Ragnarok. In contrast, the Jewish understanding of time, which Christianity inherited, was linear. The people of God waited with pregnant expectation for the “Day of the Lord,” which for Christians was fulfilled in the Resurrection (and is still coming in fullness). Sunday is symbolic of both the first and eighth day, the eighth symbolizing the transcendence of time, eternity here and now. This is exemplified in Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s reflections on Hebraic time, apocalypse, and the symbolism of the eighth day:
No matter what may have been the original content and genesis of Hebrew Messianism and the apocalyiticism connected with it, the important thing for us is that the time of the manifestation of Christianity coincided with the ultimate limit of intensity of these expectations, with their growth into a universal eschatological outlook. It was precisely in connection with or as a result of this eschatology that there arose the idea of the Lord’s Day, the day of the Messianic fulfillment, as the Eighty Day, “overcoming” the week and leading outside of its boundaries [….] The Eighth Day is the day beyond the limits of the cycle outlined by the week and punctuated by the sabbath–this is the first day of the New Aeon, the figure of the time of the Messiah.3
During the early years of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the Hellenic cyclical time began to overlay the linear. The mysteriological religious experience was baptized into the Church: we see this in the recurring fasts and feast, yet it lost its fatalistic edge because we are all still moving forward in time to Christ’s return.
In the Middle Ages, in the Latin half of the empire, the conception of time began to evolve. The distinction between eternal and temporal/secular time became more pronounced. There was higher order time, similar to Platonic time, which is the fullness, unchanging Time, like the Platonic Idea. This higher time gathers and orders secular time. And people live in this saeculum: this secular, temporal time.4 Time which is closer to God’s eternity is more ordered, farther away it is more disordered and chaotic. This is the basis for Boethius’ understanding of the relationship of God’s providence to fate and chance; the further one is away from the center the more one is subject to fate and chance, yet it is still all within the created cosmos, ergo, within God’s will, of which Tolkien’s Ainulindalë is an analog (which we will come back to soon).
From Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy:
The engendering of all things, the whole advance of all changing natures, and every motion and progress in the world, draw their causes, their order, and their forms from the allotment of the unchanging mind of God, which lays manifold restrictions on all action from the calm fortress of its own directness Such restrictions are called Providence when they can be seen to lie in the very simplicity of divine understanding; but they were called Fate in old times when they were viewed with reference to the objects which they moved or arranged. It will easily be understood that these two are very different if the mind examines the force of each. For Providence is the very divine reason which arranges all things, and rests with the supreme disposer of all; while Fate is that ordering which is a part of all changeable things, and by means of which Providence binds all things together in their own order.
Boethius is reconciling the pagan notion of fate (and later he does this with chance as well) with the Christian idea that God orders all things, that He is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, He is Providence. This idea of the relational movement of time and God’s sovereign will and human free will is fundamental in Western philosophical and theological thought. This is Plato’s higher time ordering and structuring lower, temporal time.
He continues:
Wherefore everything which is subject to Fate is also subject to Providence, to which Fate is itself subject. But there are things which, though beneath Providence, are above the course of Fate. Those things are they which are immovably set nearest the primary divinity, and are there beyond the course of the movement of Fate. As in the case of spheres moving round the same axis, that which is nearest the centre approaches most nearly the simple motion of the centre, and is itself, as it were, an axis around which turn those which are set outside it. That sphere which is outside all turns through a greater circuit, and fulfils a longer course in proportion as it is farther from the central axis; and if it be joined or connect itself with that centre, it is drawn into the direct motion thereof, and no longer strays or strives to turn away. In like manner, that which goes farther from the primary intelligence, is bound the more by the ties of Fate, and the nearer it approaches the axis of all, the more free it is from Fate. But that which clings without movement to the firm intellect above, surpasses altogether the bond of Fate.5
Tolkien echoes this in his creation narrative. If you are unfamiliar with Tolkien, Ilúvatar is God and Melkor is the devil/satan:
Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.6
But something changed in the Renaissance period and early Modern Age, the higher order time was extirpated and replaced with purely secular time. And this time was understood and experienced as linear. Science and Enlightenment principles reconceptualized this linearality as a movement of progress, an evolution of society, culture, religion, and humanity with history. Furthermore, history was relegated to the temporal world.
Reform
In its nascent form, Reform is relatively benign. It’s often about order and correction. St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great guided their flocks and raised standards of living by admonishing people to alter their behavior for purposes of salvation. The precedent was set by St. Paul, and, one can argue, the prophets of old did the very same thing. The paragon of reform in the West–as we understand reform–was St. Boniface. He sought to reeducate the laity and root out corruption in the clerical ranks. However, later ideas of reform were often a total restructuring of church teaching and practice. Martin Luther is credited, for better or worse, with igniting the Reformation. In the beginning, Luther was attempting reform much like Boniface; however, the first domino had fallen, and reform as a conflagratory movement ensued. The Reformation did not stop at simple moral and liturgical reform, it sought to rid Christianity of anything that was Romish, papist, and catholic.
One of the unfortunate outcomes of this period in history was the flattening of hierarchies, this also caused the leveling of being and, therefore, conceptions of time. Hierarchies of reality were compressed, and the inevitable consequence of this was disenchantment and materialism. Time became strictly linear, and later, because of the Enlightenment and scientific theories such as Darwinism, it would be defined in terms of progress.7 As I written previously, nominalism had already dispelled notions of universals, also having an affect on teleology. Now history is not a ‘movement’ towards telos so much as it is a progressive march forward. And, thanks to Hegel and Marx, this march is dialectical. There is a movement towards something but it is not a telos which has it’s origin in Providence. It is either of our own choosing or it’s purely deterministic in the sense of survival of the fittest.
Revolution emerges from this context. And as we shall see, revolution is an implacable force.
- Yes, I made a Star Trek reference
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
- Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Yonkers, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), 77
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 54-55, 61, 91
- See Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, book IV for excerpts and further reading
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (New York, Houghton Mifflin), 17
- Taylor, see Part I: The Origins of Reform