We are passing through a difficult time in the Church (for Agnosticism is always difficult). It all began with one of the greatest obstacles to human freedom in the modern world; that is, the denial of the Christian affirmation that each individual is created and sustained by God.
The removal of God from the human mind, and the replacement by a “god of humanity,” was perhaps the most successful propaganda stunt of the Enlightenment. This is the belief in a god which we, men, can manufacture.
Yet the Enlightenment propaganda had some effect. We were convinced that we will be liberated by this maneuver, when in fact we were only destroyed by it. For soon we discover that there was no “god of humanity;” not because we could eliminate him, but because such god never was. The One who created the human, was not up to the human to create.
The pre-Socratic Anaxagoras suggested the existence of something like the Big Bang, the rotations of celestial objects, the progression of living things and their “panspermia” – or tendency to distribute. All of it supervised by the NOUS –a cosmic ordering MIND– which wisely separated what is like from what is unlike, then recombines them in likeness. Anaxagoras gave even good accounts of eclipses, meteors, the sun, irradiations, shadows, and rainbows.
The NOUS stood in the world, and supervised it, and made it more alive by his attentions. But what is this “standing in the world”?
In agreement with advanced quantum physics, I would call this “the stability of things.” Call this the essence of Realism.
It does not go away. Only we can go away.
Here I like to quote the late Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, in the fight against Enlightenment propaganda:
“The true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness; the huge comfort of thinking that we are not going to be judged for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders."
We were promised a nothingness after death that the god we had created cannot deliver.
But what will we get when we shake off our “enlightened” desolation, the false god we can cancel?
Something quite marvelous takes its place immediately, for we begin to see a non-human way, a supernatural way forward.
We begin to see that, the fear we have been avoiding, has been cancelled.
There is still time to fill in our stolid, material lives, and these could be filled wisely with prayer, and with an important adjunct of prayer, which I should call formation.
For just as the “Enlightenment” could not make God disappear, but tried to conceal him behind an imaginary “god of humanity,” the reverse process may necessarily follow. We will replace this false god with the real One.
This is also the way into the Holy Mass. The real God is there, “standing in the world", dying for us, to set us free, to show us the way, to accompany us.
[Adapted from David Warren]
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