After this crisis Christian thinkers must come out fighting
During the current crisis people across the developed world are being exposed to two unfamiliar phenomena: silence and the time to think. Although both would have been regarded as amenities by most generations past, contemporary man is poorly equipped to face life without the myriad electronic distractions that relieve him of the necessity of thinking as an individual, divorced from the collective process of pseudo-thought known as “groupthink”.
In fact, the transformation in lifestyle is relatively minor. Music piped through headphones, films viewed on a variety of devices, the inanities of social media, the lure of the computer or television screen – all these can import the manic distractions of the outside world into the solitude of self-isolation. Some elements can even be beneficial, providing a link to friends and family, furnishing information about the evolving situation, sometimes facilitating the running of a business or the earning of a livelihood.
Yet in the interludes between such constructive activities there looms the threat of claustral silence and the prospect of unaccustomed reflection. A surprising number of people may be discovering that they have engaged in more mental activity than usual over the past week; an unsurprising and larger number will have failed to realise that they have not. Beyond reflections on personal circumstances, some may have found themselves considering wider issues relating to the pestilence that has confined them, its significance for humanity and, by extension, the whole panorama of the human condition. In such ruminations, millennia ago, was philosophy born.
This time last year the narcissism of contemporary society was at its zenith. Modern civilisation (a term employed without a trace of irony or historical self-awareness) was engaged in an ever-accelerating march towards exponentially expanding scientific and technological knowledge. True, there were questions to which we did not yet know the answer but assuredly we soon would. In a world of large hadron colliders, proliferating life sciences, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and genetically modified foods, homo sapiens was at last master of his own destiny.
Plagues were mediaeval: if something untoward temporarily disrupted our solipsistic existence, a cure would quickly be found, a vaccine, or some even more radical solution. Nothing was beyond the ingenuity of the postmodern superman. We were all Nietzscheans a month ago. Today the relentless death toll of the pestilence confronts us with the reality of our relative impotence.
Eventually, a vaccine and drugs will be developed and postmodern man will resume his hubristic course towards imagined Utopia – the delusion termed “progress”. But at least in the short term the complacent assumptions of the acolytes of modernity have been discredited. An infinitesimally tiny organism has paralysed the world. Scientists, the new white-garbed priesthood, have been reduced to prescribing “herd immunity” – in 2020 – the response involuntarily relied on when confronting the Black Death in 1350.
Thanks to the stupidity of the political class, governments have committed trillions to combating the minor effects of routine climate change while remaining criminally unprepared to counter a pandemic of which ample warning was given. The difference was that the Grande Peur over global warming was promoted by powerful lobby groups while pandemic precaution had few advocates. People who laughed at the superstition of the Children’s Crusade applauded as world leaders sycophantically hung on the words of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and vied to translate the majestic mendicancy of her demands into fiscal masochism.
Apart, however, from an intensification of devotion to Gaia and other revived pagan earth cults, comparatively few have sought relief in authentic religion. When death becomes omnipresent it is instinctive to human nature to muse on the meaning of this universal destination – a concept normally regarded as morbid in modern society which has sanitised this reality out of public discourse. Despite that, this crisis has brought to a head a schism that has been dividing society at least since the eighteenth century: the contradiction between faith and unbelief.
In that context, the most interesting commentary on the crisis has been provided by Professor Roberto de Mattei, an eminent Italian Catholic academic in the Thomist tradition, in a lecture entitled: “New Scenarios in the Coronavirus Era: Is Coronavirus a Divine Punishment?” The lecture is not restricted to metaphysical considerations, since Mattei addresses the issue of the present crisis from three points of view: that of a scholar of the political and social sciences, that of an historian and that of a philosopher of history.
His conclusions as a political and social scientist are hardly controversial. He believes the pandemic may signal the end of globalisation as well as causing the collapse of Italy’s supply chains that drive the national economy, with the central banks unable to prevent the resultant financial disaster.
“Globalisation actually destroys space and pulverises distances; today the key to escaping the epidemic is social distance, the isolation of the individual,” he writes. “The quarantine is diametrically opposed to the ‘open society’ hoped for by George Soros. The conception of man as a relationship, typical of a certain school of philosophical personalism, declines.”
In historical terms, Professor de Mattei draws the obvious parallel between today and the 14th century when acute religious crisis was accompanied by famine, plague and war in Europe and cites the various saints “who warned how throughout history natural disasters have always accompanied the infidelities and apostasy of nations. It happened at the end of the Christian Middle Ages, and it seems to be happening today.”
In the third section of his lecture, viewed from the perspective of the philosophy of history, Mattei uncompromisingly rejects secular interpretations of the crisis: “The theology of history tells us that God rewards and punishes not only men but also collectivities and social groups: families, nations, civilisations.” Referring to a bishop who told his flock that the epidemic is only “an effect of nature”, he counters by saying: “God is the author of nature with its forces and its laws, and He has the power to arrange the mechanism of the forces and laws of nature in such a way as to produce a phenomenon according to the needs of His justice or His mercy.”
In other words, divine punishment is less likely to take the form of an angel with a flaming sword than a catastrophic plague or the eruption of a super-volcano. Mattei’s thesis is unlikely to find favour with secularists: if someone does not believe in the existence of God, then he can hardly believe in divine punishment. But Mattei’s reproach is more directed against churchmen who, instead of contributing a theological interpretation to the debate on the crisis, try to find common ground with secularism.
In that context, the epidemic may bring to an end more than one kind of globalisation. It is time Christians found the courage and inspiration to cut loose from the ambiguities that have engulfed them for generations in the realm of philosophy. The Christian thesis is straightforward: humanity was redeemed two millennia ago and given the knowledge to attain salvation through Divine Revelation, completed at Pentecost. The light of Christianity that illumined the world from that time was dimmed by the so-called Enlightenment. Speculative philosophers relying on nothing more than their own immanent thoughts sought to discredit revealed faith.
The post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition is therefore a revolution, a violent break with past philosophy, notably Thomism, and therefore intellectually deracinated. Christian thinkers should denounce it as such: no more compliments to the “intellects” of Descartes and other narcissists, displacing revelation in favour of speculation. Christian thinkers should continue to read them, but in the clear recognition that every strand of their reasoning is wrong since it is ultimately based on the rejection of God, at least in the form He has revealed himself.
It is time for Christianity to become intellectually intolerant, in order to be intellectually consistent: if revelation makes it clear that the heirs of the Pseudo-Enlightenment – existentialists, positivists, dialectical materialists of every strain and a host of others – are peddling atheistic nihilism, then no credit should be accorded them, any more than they would respect the divinely based principles of Aquinas. Nothing is more starkly revealed by an epidemic with a heavy death toll than the incompatibility of the philosophies of those who believe that death is the end and those who see it as a beginning.