The Chestertonian Moment

If you want to understand the inner secret to modernity, here it is: "the State," communitarianism, the "secular" society, personal autonomy, scientism, progressivism, theories of race and gender, militarism, eugenics, agonizing nihilism, easy-going relativism ― all of it originates, in one way or another, from a deliberate rejection of the teachings of the Catholic Church. It was, perhaps, a good rejection, if you hold that point of view. And there may be some ideas that are more removed than others from the initial departure. But most of mainstream modernity is best understood when seen in light of its opposite from which it departed: the Rock of Peter.

No one understood this better than G.K. Chesterton. It was a critical time that he lived in, at the early part of the twentieth century. Here was an age where the biggest "new" ideas were on the table, waiting anxiously, as they were just about to be tried. These were no ordinary thoughts. In the early days of modernity, for example, one only had to see that we were motivated by "fear of violent death," and the the highest condition of life was to live in comfort and ease under a Leviathan state; or, to take another example, the "rights of man" had only to be understood and it would transform everyone into angelic beings. But through the nineteenth century, because of the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Darwinian revolution, it became clear that thoughts were not nearly as important as deeds ― that enlightenment was not meant to be thought about, but used. All of this required a more open defiance of the ancient tradition of the Church, who sought to remind society of the basic principles of human dignity and equality, and that the only meaningful progress was the sort that affirmed those precepts.

Worst of all, though, was our inability to even know where we had gone wrong. In the Enlightenment era, one could still distinguish between the modern innovation and the Catholic teaching. One also knew what "Catholic" really meant: it was the whole legacy of wisdom, spanning back to Socrates with his humble pursuit of the highest good ― questions that became legal, and whose answers became so much clearer, with the revelation of grace as the principle of salvation. But advanced modernity, particularly of the twentieth century, rendered us blind to this. Chesterton wrote:

Most men would return to the old ways in faith and morals if they could broaden their minds enough to do so. It is narrowness that chiefly keeps them in the rut of negation. But this enlargement is easily misunderstood, because the mind must be enlarged to see the simple things; or even to see self-evident things. (215)

"How could he say that our minds had been narrowed by modernism?" the sophisticate asks.

This opinion is because of a simple error. It comes from an absolute and unquestioned assumption, which says this: modern = open-minded. It is followed by all kinds of insistence, demands, and denunciations of anyone who says otherwise. It is so ― because it must be so, modern man says.

If you put the pressure on the modern mind to explain how modernity allows for greater open-mindedness, he cannot tell you. At best, he will invoke all kinds of references to "control" ― health, safety, technique, birth "control." But it should be easy to see how these all amount to social control. While this gives society tremendous amounts of power over itself and over nature, it does practically nothing for freedom, aside from freedom in a very narrow "do-your-own-thing" sense.

For Chesterton, nothing made this clearer than the modern sophistocate's denunciation of the Church. Even with the variety of modernisms that collided with each other ― Mill-style liberalism versus communitarianism, big-state progressivism versus small-state laissez-faire, or, in our day, feminism versus multiculturalism ― all are able to put their differences aside, and find unity in their a universal hatred of the Church. In Chesterton's time, it was a view

too narrow to see the house called the church against the background called the cosmos. For instance, the writer of whom I speak indulges in the mechanical repetition of the mechanical repetition. He says that we repeat prayers and other verbal forms without thinking about them. And doubtless there are many sympathizers who will repeat that denunciation after him, without thinking about it at all. (216)

I think this shows what is so easy to suspect about the modern project: it is itself a religion, or at least a pseudo-spiritual movement that informs the variety of "-isms" and systems and theories that flow out of it. For all their differences, they share a common prayer: "Deliver us from the Catholic Church."

They do not seek deliverance from its dominance; it cannot dominate. Instead, deliverance comes from an escape from its truth ― the most glaring truth being the one that human beings long for communion, and embarrassingly find it in other ways when they cannot reach the real thing. Chesterton writes:

It is the obvious fact that all human forms of speech tend to fossilize into formalism; and that the Church stands unique in history, not for taking a dead language among everlasting languages; but, on the contrary, as having preserved a living language in a world of dying languages. (Ibid.)

Auguste Comte knew this well enough: When mankind finally enters the "positive phase" of history, where fact (rather than value) is the highest truth, and science is the only way, we must simply make a religion out of science ― complete with a baptismal ritual (which America's own Herbert Croly received), a sacrament, a confessional (for intellectual dishonesty), and a liturgy that would worship the goddess of reason. And he was dead serious: science had to become a religion in order to fulfill mankind's deepest spiritual needs.

But for all his thoughtfulness on this issue, Comte did not succeed in convincing anyone. The modern world went right on formulating their very un-deliberate conventions, often adopting those of the previous generation of moderns without ever even questioning where they came from, or what they mean.

I always think of our attitude toward the State ― the taxing, spending, regulating, socially omnipotent force that is the most natural and ordinary thing in our lives ― in light of Thomas Hobbes teaching in the Leviathan. There, he proposes that we should change our understanding of man and society: we should accept that we live for nothing more than the sake of comfort and ease, and that we become comfortable with the idea that human life means nothing, and that we are not destined for anything more than what we can make of ourselves here, in this world.

Perhaps that is all true. But it is my suspicion that most Americans (including myself) don't believe it for a second. "No, no," the modern sophisticates say, "we are meant for Heaven, for what God wants us to be, to be good and public-spirited citizens." And yet the state is a given in their lives ― a thing whose existence is never questioned.

The modern sophisticate tirades against the Church: "Children are baptized into that institution and indoctrinated and raised in a way that they may never question" ― a horrible thing. But Chesterton asks us to contrast it with the currently accepted view of the state in his time, showing he had no home-front delusions at all about the First World War:

What are we to say to those who would pit patriotism or pagan citizenship against the Church on that issue? They conscript by violence boys of eighteen, they applaud volunteers of sixteen for saying they are eighteen, they throw them by thousands into a huge furnace and torture-chamber, of which their imaginations can have conceived nothing and from which their honor forbids them to escape; they keep them in those horrors years after year without any knowledge even of the possibility of victory; and kill them like flies by the millions before they have begun to live. That is what the State does; that is what the World does; that is what their Protestant, practical, sensible, secular society does. (218)

Much like Comte's liturgy, the State commands this sort of allegiance ― a bloody perversion, really, of the spiritual disciplines, which are held with far greater seriousness than the Church itself holds hers. And, as we know, World War I was only the beginning.

It is not a rejection of the Church per se that causes modernity. There were always people in Christendom who left, despised it, and even abused. And there were always people who had been abused by it; the Church was, after all, an institution filled with human beings. Far more hateful for those who hold the modernist is what the Church means: the coming together of revelation and reason ― of Athens and Jerusalem, as Leo Strauss put it ― into a single whole called the Western intellectual tradition.

It is, of course, a teaching that all can accept without being fully Catholic. (Consider Strauss, who came to this conclusion though he was an orthodox-leaning Jew). Embedded within is the truth that there really are certain self-evident truths, which we cannot accept without leaping into a perfectly moral void, where there is no more reason to prefer one value over another, and all are to be enslaved to the most powerful. (Consider Abraham Lincoln, whose Christian faith was very much in doubt, compared to the devout piety of the Southern slave-owning elite.) Indeed, far more than a monolithic set of laws, the Church's teaching is a light that fills the whole world. Hence, it is not St. Peter's Basilica that the purely modern man so despises, but the illuminated condition of his own conscience.

With this in mind, Chesterton writes:

Catholic abuses can be reformed, because there is the admission of a form. Catholic sins can be expiated, because there is a test and a principle of expiation. But where else in the world today is any such test or standard found; or anything except a changing mood, which makes patriotism the fashion ten years ago and pacifism the fashion ten years afterwards? (219)

Changing moods ― what do we have left if not the coin-toss of "values," dressed up in the garb of the righteous cause?