What's so bad about Modernity ?

Q) what is so bad about secularisation?



A) John Milbank :

"Secularisation is bad, because the death of man necessarily follows upon the death of God. Without reference to God, our sense of the reality of mind and of the ethical tends to atrophy.



Ordinary language is saturated with assumptions of the reality of the spiritual dimension - good, evil, intentionality, responsibility, forgiveness, grace, prayer, and so on. 

Yet we are increasingly governed by secular, scientific assumptions, which imply that this language is simply epiphenomenal "gossip". 



Consequently, the masters of an impersonal discourse concerning sheer material reality taken as the real truth increasingly assume command.

Such a denigration of the sense medium, in which the majority of people "swim", eventually renders democracy and respect for freedom impossible, even though these are the very values that secularity claims to respect most.”

Modernity is not a specific time. Or practical science. And there has always been technology. Modernity is a world view, a story. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it :

The project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. Such a story is called a story of freedom – institutionalized economically as capitalism and politically as democracy.

Fr Stephen Freeman notes :

"The so-called breakdown of morality in the modern world is not a moral problem. What has broken down is not morality, but any agreed notion about the nature of the world. Our perceptions of reality itself have shattered into disparate fragments. 

When we lose a common understanding of reality itself, all that is left is bald assertion.

.... In the baseless morality of modernity, those with whom we disagree are not simply wrong: they are evil. This is the only conclusion that can be reached when what is right is established solely through choice. If what is good is only good because I choose it, then choosing otherwise must be seen as evil and named as such.

Macintrye argues that we learn to behave in a way that others can perceive as intelligible only when everyone shares a narrative of acting toward a shared idea of the good. Also, this is gotten to by shared living practices, through, 

“constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved. 

Liberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinative conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception.”

MODERNITY is, I'd say, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. 



It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will.



The three legs of it during Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, is when, essentially the supernatural was replaced by 
an ideological, social, political, moral, and metaphysical inventions.

Metaphysically it involves nominalism over scholasticism, - the idea that the universe is composed of mere individuals as opposed to real relations and universals...Petrarch, the invention of the individual, Italian humanism etc

Michael Gillespie notes that,

“...it is vain to think that an alienated, atomized person can create in themselves a personality out of the muck of consumerism and mass media. Modernity tells us that we can form our own personality with tattoos, body modification, consumerist consumption, and status objects like automobiles.

Ultimately, what is created is not human, however, but subhuman: one’s personality is merely a combination of external signifiers devoid of inner content. Ironically.... the end result is a kind of perfect conformity.”

We must “free” (ie destroy) ourselves from all elements of ones-self which are “accidents of nature” to be “authentic.” Everything unchosen - our race, nationality, religion (unless self-chosen, no infant baptisms) ancestry, even sex - the State must step in to free the “individual” (which didn’t previously actually exist) from the contingencies of his birth and community.

Persons, as opposed to individuals, are essentially relational, existing in a web of thick mutually enforcing obligations and loyalties.

“The person differs from the individual by the fact that he does not hold his life as his own, he knows he is the bearer of values which transcend himself, so that he has worth only as their servant and to them he should be willing, if necessary, to sacrifice himself.”

To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

It matters not if the goals are noble or virtuous, what matters is that they are freely chosen by the individual.

John Safranek, in The Myth of Liberalism notes the difference between our modern notion of freedom, freedom from constant, with the ancient notion of freedom for something :

“Classic/medieval freedom was based on reason, logos, not desire, on what is, not on will. Freedom is based on reason, not desire. 

To understand what is being said here, two more points need to be recalled. The first is that, according to Plato, desire, by itself, is unlimited. This unlimitedness is a good thing in itself for that is what desire, as such, is. 

The second point is that, according to Aristotle, the purpose of virtue is to rule our desires and so achieve our end, not just our desires. 

Desires allow no “end,” only more desires. In themselves, desires are good things but they are to be ruled by reason. The difference between modern and classic/medieval thought, then, has to do with where we locate the center of our being: in desire, which is unlimited, or in reason, which limits or rules desire because it knows the end which desires serve.

Modern liberalism seeks, at every essential element of what-it-means-to-be-a-human-being, to substitute desire for reason to explain what a person is.

Once desires or pleasures are upheld as the fundamental good, morality (the self-rule of our desires) seems superfluous…. If morality is dispensable, then so are the political and legal precepts that it grounds.”

Patrick Deenan identifies Liberalism as the philosophy of modernity,

“Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility…contrary to the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

It dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices, and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centered calculation.

Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships…becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest....without broader considerations of the impact one’s choices have upon the community—present and future—and of one’s obligations to the created order and ultimately to God.”

It is a subject worthy of reflection that the common “culture” we share even now is largely the product of a culture industry,

“…insofar as liberal freedom is atomistic and precludes the claim of others on the property that is my person, the state tasked with securing this liberty will exist to protect me from God’s commandments, the demands of other persons, so-called intermediary institutions, and, ultimately, even nature itself. The liberal state then becomes the mediator of all human relations, charged with creating in reality the denatured individuals heretofore existing only at the theoretical foundations of liberalism.”

- Micheal Hanby.

Ultimately the State is the final arbitrater of reality. It can define marriage, redefine what sorts of things a “man” and “woman” are, or even if such things exist.

Stanley Huawras questions just what sort of freedom this has brought :

“The left and the right are joined by the common project of increasing personal freedoms, even if the result is the atomization of our lives which makes impossible any account of our lives as having a narrative unity. Ironically, societies committed to securing the freedom of the individual end up making that same individual subject to impersonal bureaucratic procedures."

Colegro studied Giambattista Vico and found that he identifies three customs of all nations:

All have some religion

All contract solemn marriages

All bury the dead

These, therefore, are the basis of the first three principles of his New Science. He points out that they are reinforced by their religious practices. The consequences of not doing so are, according to Vico:

Otherwise, the world would return to a brutish state and again become a wilderness. Now the facts of human societies can be reformulated as principles:

Divine Providence

The moderation of passions through marriage

The immortality of human souls attested by burial

Just to be clear, Vico again emphasizes:
"These are the boundaries of human reason and transgressing them means abandoning our humanity."

Of course, modernity in its fullness is the exact opposite:

Man to be fully human requires freedom from God, the free expression of passions, and, especially, sexuality, is for the modern man human liberation.

Faith. What is it ?

"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.” 

 - Olivier Clement 

Faith. What is it ? There’s the perspective from Biblical theology, Matt Bates puts it like this :

“saving allegiance includes three basic dimensions: mental affirmation that the gospel is true, professed fealty to Jesus alone as the cosmic Lord, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus as the king”

And I can see that, faith being basically loyalty, as Paul says, “I have been true to the vision” - and indeed, when wracked by doubt, I think, this is such a beautiful vision, that there is a God madly in love with us, desperate to embrace us and make us whole that, even if it turns out to be false in the end, it is a vision worthy of being true to.

One must, little by little, believe God, trust His word, rely upon his presence, depend securely on his promises.

But, if I had to recommend one book, it’d be Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust :

“[Knowing God]... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. 

That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth..” 

“At the heart of the desperate suffering there is in the world, suffering we can do nothing to resolve or remove for good, there is an indestructible energy making for love. If we have grasped what Jesus is about, we can trust that this is what lies at the foundation of everything.”

Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust

It’s a great risk of love, but no relationship can start, and then deepen, until we put more and more trust in the other…

It’s also to take refuge in God, not idols, food, books, idea’s, dogmas, Priests…

And it’s also to anchor the meaning of our lives in Christ - if we get sick, or fall in love, are we interpreting these things through the person of Christ ?

In this short article Rowan Williams says, 

“Faith is not about what public opinion decides, and it is not about how we happen to be feeling about ourselves. It is the response people make to what presents itself as a reality - a reality which makes claims on you. Here is something so extraordinary that it interrupts our world; here is something that makes you "turn aside to see," that stops you short. Faith begins in the moment of stopping, you could say: the moment when you can't just walk on as you did before.

But even more challengingly, it is something whose claims involve change and even loss. If this is really what it seems to be, ideas, habits, hopes all change, and it is a change that is going to be painful…

When people respond to outrageous cruelty and violence, with a hard-won readiness to understand and be reconciled, few if any can bring themselves to say that all this is an illusion.

The parents who have lost a child to gang violence; the wife who has seen her husband killed in front of her by an anti-Christian mob in India; the woman who has struggled for years to comprehend and accept the rape and murder of her sister….in their willingness to explore the new humanity of forgiveness and rebuilding relations - without for a moment making light of their own or other people's nightmare suffering, or trying to explain it away - these are the ones who make us see, who oblige us to turn aside and look at Jesus, who asks of us initially just to stop and reflect, to stay for a moment in the light that allows us to see ourselves honestly and to see the world differently.

That is the heart of it: seeing ourselves honestly; seeing the world differently. That is where faith begins, beyond the answers of a system, or the disciplines of a ritual, or the requirements of a moral code. These have their place; and those who spend time in the company of Jesus will find themselves working out all these things in the light of the scriptural witness to the new life. But it all starts with that turning aside to see.”

Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be
connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues. 

In a chapter entitled “Why Theologians Must Pray for Release from Exile,” the theologian Dr. D’Costa suggests that “prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”

Dru Johnson says :

“our knowing is connected to what we do with our bodies. We don’t know as disembodied minds; without bodies and the tools by which we extend our bodies, we couldn’t know at all. Further, we don’t come to know in isolation but in community—specifically, in communal rites. We practice rites to know.”


James K.A.Smith has asks the important question :

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart? 

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.”

Which is why I had to go to an Orthodox Church with “thick practices” to shape me, to orient me towards knowing God, in a community. I had to preform faith. It’s relational knowledge, you have to act your way into this knowledge, live it.