Modernity, Secularism, and the Struggle for a Christian Civilization

Jean Daniélou. Prayer as a Political Problem. Cluny Media, 2020 (reprint edition). $19.95. 130 pp.

To produce a spark of historical thinking in my church history students’ minds, sometimes I ask them to imagine what it might have been like to live in northern France in, say, AD 1200. Acknowledging the risk of oversimplification, it is possible to imagine vividly some details of life in that place and time. We would likely have all been commoners, tied to the land, and thus tied to a feudal contract with the lord of the manor. Generation after generation, our family would have tended the land to produce enough to provide for our obligations to the lord and to the church. Our society would have been strictly hierarchical. Finally, our lives would have been monotonous in labor, dirty in ordinary living, communal and not individual, and brightened by the celebration of the Mass, which would have pointed us beyond our temporal existence to another world of eternal life and light.

Religion animated the Medieval period of Western European history like no other feature of human endeavor. Medieval Europe represents the apogee of Christendom, a civilization that was Christian in every respect. When I describe it as “Christian,” I am speaking historically more than theologically. In other words, Medieval Europe was Christian in the way that people in Western Europe would have understood the term at the time. Thus it was a civilization infused with sacramental understanding of the cosmos as informed by church tradition, the Great Chain of Being, and the sacral nature of contract between lord and vassal. The culture was thoroughly Augustinian—meaning, people understood authority to be beyond question and saw the world of the eternal as superior to the world of the temporal.

Such was pre-modernity. Modernity emerged slowly from the soil of Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Christian theology with the philosophy of Aristotle, the nominalism of William of Occam and his via moderna, the humanism of the Renaissance, the discovery and colonization of the Americas, and the biblio-centrism of the Reformation. It also came about through the rise of cities and trade, the appearance of a middle class, and an awakening of nationalistic consciousness over and against the temporal dominance of the Catholic Church. Technology played a decisive role in these dynamics. Advancements such as the printing press, the lateen sail, the stirrup, the longbow, the compass, and gunpowder, developed in the late Middle Ages and served as midwives to the birth of the modern world. Modernity was, in fundamental ways, a reaction against the premodern conception of civilization. It was a rejection of the old order, dominated as it was by a pope at the head of a unified Christendom. Modernity had prevailed over premodernity by 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. Modernity sought to crush premodernity through the deployment of Enlightenment philosophy. In Romanticism, modernity sought a revival of premodernity, but on its own terms. By the twentieth century, modernity annihilated premodernity in the World Wars. 

As modernity was a reaction against premodernity, so postmodernity was a reaction against modernity. Metanarratives would now be shattered through deconstruction. Authority would be reckoned as oppressive. Politics would be seen not as the means for a government to provide conditions for a society to flourish, but only as a means of one group exercising power over another. The individual person would be the only test for truth that could matter, and individual identity defined through sexual, gender, and racial matrices would form the basis for a new social hierarchy. 

In the premodern West, religion was dominant, and worldview started with metaphysics. Modernity shifted religion to be the servant of the State, while epistemology replaced metaphysics as the starting point for worldview formulation. Late modernity witnessed the subjectivization of religion, and ethics replaced epistemology as the basis for worldview. And in postmodernity, religion has lost all meaning outside of experience and individual preference. Politics—a branch of ethics but seen as a means of power—has become the starting point for how reality gets ordered. I am speaking in general terms, of course. We can quibble over the details, but I think we can recognize the historical trend of the past 500 years that historian Jacques Barzun aptly described in the main title of his magisterial history of modern Western culture: From Dawn to Decadence. 

In 1965, Jean Daniélou, a French Jesuit and cardinal, reflected on the meaning of civilization, particularly Christian civilization. He wrote his short book, L’Oraison problème politique (Prayer as a Political Problem), in the context of great cultural change occurring in the West. Liberation theology was gaining acceptance in the Catholic churches of Latin America and the Philippines. Jacques Derrida was inaugurating postmodernity with his book, Of Grammatology. France had been recently driven out of Indochina by the Viet Minh, and the Americans were confidently committing hundreds of thousands of troops to secure South Vietnam from a Communist takeover. The Catholic Church just instituted sweeping reforms after the Second Vatican Council, representing a departure from the traditional sixteenth-century Tridentine program, known by Protestants as the Counter-Reformation. Prayer and Bible reading were outlawed in public schools in the US in 1962 and 1963. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but race relations in America were more fraught than ever. The sexual revolution would advance to incorporate the Gay Rights movement in 1969, and abortion would be legalized in the United States in 1973. Advanced communication and transportation technologies were becoming normative, with the exploration of space and the development of computers. 

Put simply, Daniélou wrote about Christian civilization during a time when such an idea may have seemed quaint to many of his readers.

The quaint quality of Christian civilization was precisely the issue Daniélou sought to address. He stated in the preface of the book that “there is no true civilization that is not religious; nor, on the other hand, can there be a religion of the masses that is not supported by civilization. It would appear that today there are too many Christians who see no incongruity in the juxtaposition of a private religion and an irreligious society, not perceiving how ruinous this is for both society and religion. But how are society and religion to be joined without either making religion a tool of the secular power or a tool of religion?” Such was, for Daniélou, the primary problem for Christian civilization in an age of change and the dehumanization attending over-trust in technology, secularization of the state, the decline of cultural Christianity, and the privatization of religion.

Daniélou argued that the church was best expressed in the Christendom of premodernity, “when everybody was baptized, and it is this state of affairs that is much to be desired.” He did not advocate for a Christendom dominated by the papacy or by a state church. But he did insist that the role of the state is to create the conditions for persons to reach the highest state of their potential, both physical and spiritual. Because of this, the state needs the church and the church needs the state. The state needs the church to sustain a vision of reality ordered by the God who revealed himself to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. The church needs the state to foster the conditions for it to conserve its tradition, communicate its message, and facilitate its growth. 

Daniélou is at his best when he argues against an atomized society of individuals in favor of a society marked by local and familial societies. In this way, Daniélou is a conservative, not a libertarian. His words also ring of traditionalist conservatism, as he defines religious freedom as “a right that belongs to communities as well as to individuals. It implies not only that people should be able to practice a religion publicly, but also that they should have the scope and mutual support necessary to order their lives in accordance with the demands of that religion. Hence, a religion has the right to set up at the family, educational, cultural, and social levels those institutions which it has need to ensure its continuance and development.” The church can reasonably expect the state to acknowledge and support such freedom.

In his discussion of art and technology, Daniélou is also persuasive and eloquent. Technology is not an evil, but it comes with the temptation of overreliance. Even with this temptation, technology has a way of forcing us to consider those things that make us truly human, and those things that cannot replace personality and community. And while science, the mother of technology, does tell us something about the universe, it cannot tell us how it is ordered, nor can we find meaning for life in a universe that seems cold and indifferent to our existence. Art augments the ability of science to uncover knowledge about the universe through creativity. Human creativity derives from God, the Creator of all things, and is a reflection of God’s character and activity. Through art, the universe becomes a cosmos that is ordered and meaningful, with an aesthetic quality as well as a physical one. 

In all this, the most significant and useful observation Daniélou makes is that Christ came to redeem every feature of humanity, including religion and politics. We are bound to take the world as it is, and even to love the world as it is. Daniélou sounds much like Augustine here. The world God made is good, because God proclaims it to be good, and because God endowed the world with an essence. That which is evil is so because of the influence of sin—but evil has no essence. So, we can love the world as a good creation without embarrassment or regret. Still, we see evil in the world and can hate it and turn our powers against it in the name of the good. “To be truly a man of one’s own time, one must know how to love all that the world offers that is positive and at the same time hate all that is by human malice compromised and destroyed—and this because one loves one’s world and all who live in it.” We must therefore take care not to put inordinate trust in technical progress, because technology sings the siren song of self-exaltation. Technology also fosters the erasure of particular cultures in the name of uniformity. “There is undoubtedly all too great a danger today of bringing everything to one level. How dreadfully monotonous and wearisome would be a culture of homo technicus that was exactly the same in Peking as in Buenos Aires or London or Dakar!”

The building of an earthly city wherein persons may have “a full material, fraternal, and spiritual life” is the task of politics and the task of the church. To be a Christian is to work to build such a city, even though that city is temporal. It is of this world. The earthly city the Christian is building is to represent the heavenly city to the extent possible in a fallen world, governed as it is by limitations. Building the earthly city is the steady work of doing ordinary, forgettable, hardly noticeable acts of redemption, like giving a glass of cold water to a thirsty brother or sister. That glass of cold water can take many forms, and the giving can occur in a range of different contexts. The point is that while we may not be able to change the world into a utopia, we do have the ability to shape our world into something redemptive by the grace of God through ordinary means.

Prayer as a Political Problem remains, after sixty years, deeply relevant. Daniélou’s project stands as a rebuttal to self-indulgent religion as well as a Marxist socio-political agenda. Its warning against a mindless submission to technology is particularly pertinent as we witness the dizzying developments in AI. It is a defense of civilization in a postmodern culture that decries civilization as overly “centric”—Euro-centric, Ameri-centric, White-centric, etc. As a defense of tradition, religious freedom, localism, imagination, politics for the temporal good, and Christianity as revealed truth, Daniélou’s book is thoroughly humanistic. A return to premodernity is not possible, nor even desirable. But a rejection of all things premodern is not found in Daniélou’s book, and for that reason, it continues to deserve a serious hearing in our postmodern culture.