Beauty, Postmodernism, and Christianity

While the ground sought by modernity proved to be elusive, thereby yielding the postmodern critique of modernity, the Christian claim to reality welcomes the postmodern critique. Not so that our particular metanarrative can sit comfortably alongside other metanarratives and live in harmony with them, but because our metanarrative is comparatively so robust, so compelling, so sensible and necessary in the light of all relevant experiential and evidential data -- in other words so beautiful. Strict relativism is an illegitimate position to deduce from the premises of postmodernity; the fact that there exist a plethora of metanarratives -- none of which can be its own objectively justified grounding -- does not mean that all metanarratives are of equal value or quality, or that one can't be present which is the metanarrative that supersedes and subsumes all other metanarratives. Christian truth, properly understood, always has been a rhetoric which presents itself aesthetically, first and foremost. The truth of Christianity can't be divorced from its beauty.

None of this is a concession that the object of Christian worship, the Triune God of the Bible, is anything (or really Anyone) less than absolute Truth, only that He can't be conclusively shown to be such in the interaction between finite minds (some currently imbued with the Holy Spirit and some not). Instead it's to say that the vibrancy and beauty of the Christian metanarrative, and the relative impoverishment of all others, is a signpost that points to the probable Truth of the Christian claim. Or, more precisely, that its truth and beauty have a dialectic relationship which testifies to its supremacy over all other metanarratives. Claims that some other rhetoric has comparable or greater force I dismiss, not out of hand, but out of the knowledge obtained in my investigation of the matter. If there really is no Capital-T Truth, then beauty will ultimately only be in the eye of the beholder, of course, and then those alternate claims are just as valid as mine; but if Truth is out there, then that Truth will be Beauty itself, and it becomes possible for one rhetoric to rise above and absorb all others into itself. The postmodern turn in philosophy doesn't answer the question of whether Truth is out there, but only says that there is no dispassionate, objective position we can occupy to access this knowledge and demonstrate that we have done so. The latter postulate is what seems to be forgotten often.

Incidentally, even some highly influential non-theist thinkers such as Hegel -- and some contemporary Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek -- seem to accept the supremacy of Christian rhetoric. While they don't make the move that I do here -- claiming that the nonpareil beauty of the Christian rhetoric is an overwhelming testament to its Truth -- they do affirm its beauty and its potency as a means for understanding the world.

As I've hinted at, modernity need not remain entirely silent on this issue; the popularized version of the postmodern triumph in epistemology and philosophy is a catastrophist model, meaning that it envisions postmodernity counteracting modernity and overturning it; in reality the postmodern project was really inaugurated within modernity all along, and postmodernity is really just its consummation. With this in mind, the internal coherence of the Christian story can still be examined by traditionally modern methods, and how well (or poorly) it fairs under such scrutiny will testify for (or against) its Beauty, which in turn will comment on its claim to Truth. If it patently fails, for example, this would obviously severely cripple its aesthetic appeal; conversely, if it stands up as well as can be expected, this fact either acts as an element of the rhetoric of the Christian story itself, or at least something that acts as an adjacent support structure for it.

With this position laid out, the only task that remains is actually presenting the rhetoric in question. Though it's of course too large a task for this trifle of a post, or for any individual, I can at least point you to the location of the current development of that rhetoric, which is Christ's church on Earth, inhabited and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The church, the Body of Christ, is a furthering of the rhetoric which begins with the loving God of creation making Man in His image for His pleasure, and then reconciling the fallen world to Himself through Christ, the second person of the Trinity. This is, of course, a terribly inadequate thumbnail sketch of the totality of the staggering beauty of Christian rhetoric, which can only be fully appreciated by partaking in that rhetoric, but can also be seen (to some degree) from the outside, if approached humbly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully.

My (self-imposed) task here wasn't to demonstrate the beauty of the rhetoric itself -- though I do earnestly implore anyone reading to investigate the matter for themselves -- but only to make the case that, within a postmodern framework, Beauty becomes a primary concern which can present a more powerful and potent case for one metanarrative's supremacy over others, which in turn can become an argument for its Truth.

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This post was inspired entirely by David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite. I make no claims to originality, but my thoughts on this subject were flitting through my head and asking to be transcribed in my own words.

The End of an Era

For the last year or two Fridays have been my most anticipated day of the week, not because they signify the beginning of another weekend but because David Bentley Hart's web column always arrives on Friday (though it usually only does so bi-weekly). It was just announced that his most recent piece -- an excellent précis on the limits of Method as such, especially with regard to modern scientific method and those who refuse to acknowledge its limits -- will also be his final web column at First Things. 

This terrible news was immediately softened by the happy news that he will now be a regular contributor to the print edition of the magazine, with an article on the last page of every edition, where he used to only be published in the magazine occasionally (seemingly about half the time). Presumably, and hopefully, the print column will be of greater length than his web column, given the greater infrequency of publishing.

In any case, the final piece really is quite fine work. Hart reminds us that the hard won precision and clarity of certain methods come at a price:

[M]ethod always remains only a perspective, however powerful it may be: a willful blindness to many things for the sake of seeing a few things with a special clarity.

He goes on to take the naïvely confident materialist -- who imagines that the triumph of modern science can discount, or even comment on, the existence of formal and final causes -- to task:

Even so, it would be worse than naïve to imagine that the sciences have thereby proved the nonexistence of final and formal causes. In fact, by bracketing such causes out of consideration, scientific method also rendered itself incapable of pronouncing upon any reality such causes might or might not explain. Now, of course, the typical reply to this observation (from the aforementioned Daniel Dennett, for instance) is to say, with some indignation, that modern science has in fact demonstrated the utter superfluity of final and formal causal explanations, because the sciences have shown that they do not need finality or formality to understand the processes they investigate.

That, however, is an empty tautology: Of course modern scientific method discovers the kind of reality it is specifically designed to discover; and even in cases where it finds its explanatory reserves overly taxed, it must presume that in future some sort of “mechanical” cause will be found to restore the balance, and so issue itself a promissory note to that effect. But, again, this may mean that it must also overlook realities that actually lie very near at hand, either quite open to investigation if another method could be found, or so obviously beyond investigation as to mark out the limits of scientific method with particular clarity.

After a long string of satirical or otherwise half-serious columns, Hart's final web column is a return to material that he is best known for, which I think is appropriate. I do hope, however, that the end of the web column is not the end of the satirical, whimsical, mercurial Hart, which his web column gave us access to. Much of that work is utterly brilliant in its own right and deserves the widest platform possible. 

Don Juan and David Bentley Hart

In the newest issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart examines the various incarnations of the literary Don Juan through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, as well as his subsequent fading in Western consciousness in the following centuries, and what these changes signify. The piece, titled A Splendid Wickedness, appears in First Things and requires a subscription to read, but Hart recently gave a lecture on this same topic that ended up on YouTube and covers much of the same material (though I still recommend a subscription to First Things).

One of my favorite flourishes in the piece discusses a few aberrant incarnations of the character, such as the 'Don John' of The Libertine:

The most arresting seventeenth-century version [of the Don Juan story], however, is certainly Thomas Shadwell’s lurid and demented extravaganza, The Libertine (1676), whose “Don John” is not merely a burlador or rake, but something like Satan’s less reputable twin brother. The antinomian monster at the center of this play is a prolific murderer and rapist, who has murdered his own father and is laying plans to rape several nuns; he is also a thief, a blasphemer, and—almost as bad—a philosopher. As he and three equally evil boon companions rampage across the stage, committing one atrocity after another with delirious gaiety, they also spin out elaborate but perfectly cogent rational justifications for their actions, of an almost proto-Nietzschean kind. And, even on the brink of damnation, amid a roiling phantasmagoria—ghosts of his victims, devils, the living statue, hell’s fire—he expresses neither fear nor remorse but goes to his perdition proudly affirming his unshakable loyalty to himself, with a courage so insane it almost deprives hell of any significance. When the curtain falls, one is left wondering whether the devil is ready to receive him, or might rather be too shocked at his morals. 

Hart argues that while Don Quixote is a more timeless figure, Don Juan belongs to -- and is only possible in --  a particular historical, epochal context. That the vibrancy of his moral indiscretion and rebellion is only really interesting or intelligible anchored in a particular, coherent moral universe. A universe that we moderns, or postmoderns, do not naturally inhabit. Given this fact, it's inevitable that the character had to fade from our collective consciousness. Even his hedonistic, sensualist sensibilities -- characteristics which seems prima facie to fit quite comfortably into our cultural context -- are ultimately out of sync with the late modern ethos:

Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late-modern capitalism: the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity’s defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable. 

Antiquity, Christianity and Modernity on The Sanctity of Human Life

A friend of mine recently posted a link to a video of a sermon by Mike Erre in which he highlights the strain of thought present in Greek antiquity which displays calloused disregard for human life that is 'defective'--meaning, primarily, the mentally or physically disabled--along with an intense glorification of all things triumphant, beautiful, and well-proportioned about humanity. He then asks whether this Hellenism is still alive today, pointing to our culture's obsession with body image, abortion of the disabled, and the practice of eugenics as evidence that it is, at least to some degree.

The stirring video reminded me of David B. Hart's phenomenal essay on John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Where the message from Erre focused primarily on antiquity and whether the Hellenistic aspect of it persists, Hart turns his attention to the ethos of modernity and finds a similar, but distinct, strain of anti-humanism--or at least anti-'defective'-humanism-in-service-of-a-greater-humanism, as a proponent of this point of view might prefer to have it.

Hart also draws our attention to eugenicists but makes a very bold claim; while most bioengineers, abortion advocates or proponents of unfettered embryonic stem cell research would likely claim to abhor eugenics and other 'extreme' manifestations of their discipline or belief system, Hart argues that eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilization, selective breeding, infanticide, and genocide all follow logically and properly from the post-Christian, 'rationalist', Darwinian ethos of modernity, and that the moderate moderns just aren't as steadfast in their convictions as the eugenicists. Which is a fancy way of stating the rather obvious; that a rejection of Christ--the creator, sustainer and redeemer of all human life--is a rejection of the inherent beauty and sanctity of all human life.

Hart, visa-vis John Paul II, rejects outright the notion that bioengineering, bioethics, eugenics, stem-cell research or any of these distinctly modern issues require any nuance or subtlety on the part of a Christian engaging with this cultural phenomenon.

To one who holds to John Paul’s Christian understanding of the body, and so believes that each human being, from the very first moment of existence, emerges from and is called towards eternity, there are no negotiable or even very perplexing issues regarding our moral obligations before the mystery of life. Not only is every abortion performed an act of murder, but so is the destruction of every “superfluous” embryo created in fertility clinics or every embryo produced for the purposes of embryonic stem cell research ... Even if, say, research on embryonic stem cells could produce therapies that would heal the lame, or reverse senility, or repair a damaged brain, or prolong life, this would in no measure alter the moral calculus of the situation: human life is an infinite good, never an instrumental resource; human life is possessed of an absolute sanctity, and no benefit (real or supposed) can justify its destruction.

For the Christian there seems there should be very little grey area. For many in Antiquity there was not much grey area (either you were a defective or you weren't). For the fully dedicated post-Christian Modern there shouldn't be any grey area either. Either human life (all of it quite defective in one sense, as Mike Erre rightly points out) is disposable or it isn't. Which is it?

Playing With Statistics - Humans, Violence and the 20th Century

I recently watched a presentation by Steven Pinker on the history of violence on YouTube. He makes the case that over the course of history, human beings have been steadily becoming less and less violent, contrary to popular claims that the opposite is true. He presents evidence to support his case and, on a macro-scale, I didn't find his presentation to be very controversial. It syncs with most people's intuitive sense of people from earlier times being uncivilized savages and steadily becoming more civilized over time. And the evidence supports this conclusion on large time scales, specifically on the millennial scale. In order to illustrate this fact he produces a graph that compares the likelihood of a man being killed by another man's hand in Europe or the United States in the 20th century--a notoriously violent century--with other 'societies' from earlier times.


And while I agree with his conclusion that on the millennial scale we have become much less violent, there is an inherent fallacy in this chart; he is not comparing apples to apples. Selecting the most violent enclaves of humanity at certain times in the past to compare to the entirety of Western Civilization--which spans nearly half the globe--is a comparison that tells us nothing about the relative levels of violence between time periods because you're comparing unalike entities in their respective periods. An interesting, relevant comparison might be between the most violent enclaves within 20th Century Europe and the United States--like maybe Compton and Auschwitz--with those earlier enclaves of humanity. The earlier savage 'societies' might still prove to be more brutal, but it would be a more honest and illustrative comparison at least.

None of which is to contest his general conclusion on the millennial-scale, but this illegitimate comparison bleeds over into his case for the century scale, which is much less convincing. In his presentation on the century scale he notes the gradual, consistent decrease over time in socially sanctioned forms of violence. And while this is certainly true, it is immediately glaring that he should choose to focus on one type of violence while omitting other types on the century scale. Why would he do this? Because on the century scale, if we start at the Enlightenment like he chooses to do (bizarrely), we see the decrease in all types of violence until the 20th century. Where only 'socially sanctioned' forms of violence and 'one-on-one murder' continued to decrease, but an unprecedented level of mass murder occurred, creating what could rightly be considered a whole new category of violence, representing a quick and drastic reversal of the general downward trend of total violence. But if you omit this monstrosity of the 20th century, then yes, you can make it seem as if the downward trend in violence continues uninterrupted on the century scale.

The graph he presented for his millennial case could also be adapted for the century scale, and made to be interesting and relevant by comparing 20th century Europe and the U.S. to 19th, 18th, 17th et. al. century Europe and the U.S. This would tell us something about the 20th century specifically and whether or not it was an anomoly in the general downward trend of violence, or whether it too was actually a century of decreased violence. The latter seems to be an utterly incredible, indefensible claim, and that is likely why Pinker chooses not to make it. And I suspect that such a graph would hardly congeal well with his thesis, with levels of violence not changing much for a few centuries after the Enlightenment, or trending slightly downward, and then jumping sharply upward.

His presentation seems to suggest that he believes not only that humanity trends--generally, over the long run--towards less violence, but that there are no blips along the way in this downward trend. That the trend downward is steady and virtually unceasing, without interruption. But the evidence of the 20th century defies this suggestion, and his misconstrual and avoidance of the pertinent comparisons and data speaks as loudly as the data he actually does present.

Dostoevsky, Prophecy and the 20th Century

In his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky explores the consequences of the atheism of the modern scientific age. He famously deduced that "without immortality, all things are permissible." Around the same time as Nietszche, Dostoevsky concluded that, if this was to be the paradigm that shaped the modern world then, taken to its logical ends, the modern world was a rudderless ship headed inexorably into an absolute abyss of despair previously unknown to humankind. Any modern scientific-minded man reading Dostoevsky's work at the time -- or Nietszche's for that matter -- might have taken this to be absurd alarmism. Fantastical melodrama by a passionate artist. The product of the overly active imagination of a devout religious person. Surely humanity need not cling to ancient superstitions in order to maintain moral order and fashion a just, tolerant, free society. Right?

The Brothers Karamazov was written in 1880, just before the start of the 20th century which was the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. Death camps, gulags, communist killing fields, the unleashing of the atomic bomb. The 20th century saw modernity reaching its logical conclusions at an astonishing rate. The rise and reign of various brutal regimes fueled by various fundamentally anti-human ideologies was not an incidental occurrence (and neither was the fact that the opponents of such regimes were, primarily, Western Christian nations). It was not simply an unfortunate coincidence that a bunch of brutal dictators happened to rise to power as technological advances made mass killing more efficient--though that certainly played a significant role. The stunning thing about the 20th century is not the insanity of it, but that there was no insanity to it. It was the direct outworking of the cold scientific rationalism of modernity. It wasn't modernity run amok, but it was modernity taken to its proper logical ends. It's this fact that separates the horrors of the 20th century from those of the rest of human history. That and the sheer scale of those horrors. And it was precisely this inevitable conclusion that Dostoevsky foretold with such insight and precision.



Modern man -- perhaps subconsciously recognizing that the 20th century was not an accidental by-product of 'modernity', but in fact was a direct outworking of its fundamental premises -- was quick to search for a new paradigm. That new paradigm was to be 'postmodernity'. Epistemologically the postmodern paradigm says that traditional canons of truth and knowledge no longer hold sway, as those canons themselves are not subject to verification but rest upon various unfalsifiable presuppositions. It says that all metanarratives of 'truth' are suspect, including the scientific foundationalism of modernity. Postmodernity rejects traditional metaphysics.

As I have written elsewhere the postmodern critique of modernity isn't exactly something that modernity itself was not already aware of. Foundationalism always rested on various presuppositions, and was never assumed to be an avenue to absolute truth. However, the postmodern critique does serve to bring this fact to the surface and expose it, where many modernists would prefer that it remain hidden from view. As such the postmodern critique is not without value, but I'm hesitant to say that it really constitutes the large paradigm shift that many claim that it does. As David Hart says, "perhaps postmodernity is simply modernity made fully self-aware." Indeed.

All of which is to say that the postmodern man hasn't successfully evaded modernity. We are still very much a modern world, and especially a modern society. The only true way to avoid the undesirable consequences of modernity is to recognize what was wrong with modernity -- as practiced -- in the first place. And it wasn't its epistemology. It was its incidental -- not contingent -- rejection of the Christian God. Of course modernity would claim that such a rejection is merely an outworking of its scientific rationalism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing about the modern epistemological paradigm was ever incompatible with the Christian claims of truth, once that paradigm is properly understood and its own inherent limits and boundaries are clearly delineated.

But that is not to say that a previous acceptance of the Christian God always resulted in a culture free of violence or iniquity. Certainly not. It is to say that the degree to which Christ is truly declared, proclaimed and followed has a direct correlation to the upward moral mobility of society. The 20th century, being the culmination of a widespread European rejection of the Christian narrative of truth, revealed the consequences of that rejection. And while much of Europe, probably recoiling from the horrors of the 20th century, has embraced a brand of 'moralism' or 'humanism' -- which is essentially a co-opting of Christianity, sans Christ -- and in so doing has tempered some of the more egregious manifestations of modernity, ultimately only a return to Christ himself, full and in total, is the only way to put to bed at last the ugly specter of modernity. So it is up to us to show that what they have decided to call 'humanism', is really a stripped down, neutered version of Christianity, and that it is actually this shadow of Christianity that is granting them some degree of respite from their otherwise doomed existence.

I have the dubious 'privilege' of viewing the events of the 20th century in hindsight, and making what I feel is a somewhat insightful analysis of their significance. The amazing thing about the work of Dostoevsky's, beyond the obvious force of the art itself, is that it was utterly prophetic in its moral vision. He was able to see what I see with even greater clarity and without the benefit of hindsight. Through a glass clearly.

In Defense of Modern Epistemology

Let me begin by clarifying that I don't intend this defense of modernity to extend to every ideal, precept, or especially consequence of modernity. Indeed, many of those I find deplorable, inane or undesirable in various respects. This particular defense is only of the epistemological sort. My assertion is that, contrary to the movement in epistemology toward postmodernism, there is nothing wrong with modernity's scientific rationalism and verificationism, such as it is.

The perceived flaw in modernity's epistemology is largely just that; a (mis)perception. The central 'revolutionary' contribution of postmodernism to epistemology, which is supposed to wholly undercut modernity, is essentially the idea that modernity's scientific rationalism itself is built upon various unverifiable (and unfalsifiable) presuppositions and contingencies. Therefore, if the most 'objective' and 'rational' system of verification is itself not inherently rational or subject to verification, then verificationism as a whole must be without merit or import.

Presented in this way this argument reads very much like a modern rejection of modernity itself. Which is to say that postmodernism seeks to undercut modern epistemology using modern epistemology. Or, put another way: "There's no way to truly know anything, but we know modernity is wrong." Thereby reducing the contributions of postmodernism to nonsense.

Ignoring this irony for a moment, there is a problem with the argument itself. The premises are indeed all quite true, but the conclusion does not follow from those premises. Which is to say that modernity already understood the epistemological qualifications that postmodernism supposedly brought to light, and modernity had already fully accounted for and integrated these qualifications into it's systems of verification. At no point did modernity operate under the pretense that scientific rationalism necessarily revealed absolute truth (although many modern men may have), rather only that it could verify or falsify particular truths given a specific set of presuppositions, and operating within a particular framework. Thus postmodernism has contributed nothing to epistemology that modernity, properly understood, didn't already adequately incorporate within itself.

That doesn't mean that all conclusions of modernity are absolutely valid. On the contrary, modernism recognizes it's inherent limits. Limits that the postmodern movement arrogantly, and errantly, believes that it's exposing. Certainly any who took the advances of modernity and interpreted them in such a way to conclude, for example, that individual will is the utmost virtue, or that the only virtue is the annihilation of virtue, have taken the valid findings of modernity and misunderstood their implications. These conclusions do not flow inexorably from modern epistemology or it's findings. Granted, such misinterpretations are fairly widespread, but this fact does not undermine the validity of modern epistemology itself. It only goes to demonstrate that many modern peoples don't comprehend modernity or it's consequences.

Apart from the actual validity of postmodern epistemology, I also find the idea that there has been a massive epistemological shift in American culture, or in the "collective conscious", toward the postmodern to be a specious claim. People who tend to make this argument do so when looking at humanity from a broad perspective, as a collective, rather than as a sum of individuals. From the former perspective it's understandable how one could reach such a conclusion, as there are macro-scale changes in society that might suggest that this is the case (the explosion of the internet and all of it's epistemological consequences, for example). From the latter perspective, however, the claim seems to lack any support. While the culture itself might be experiencing a particular shift that does not necessarily mean that the individuals within that culture are shifting in the same direction. Or, if they are, not necessarily in direct proportion to the massive cultural shifts (that is; there may have been a minor, not major, shift). Culture is not merely an equitably weighted sum of all the perspectives contained therein, and even if it were that, our society and culture would remain decidedly modern. If postmodernism was as pervasive a cultural influence as some claim, people would live their lives very differently than they actually do live them.

To conclude I want to reiterate the disclaimer at the opening of this piece: my defense of modern epistemology is not a defense of modernity in total. There are many aspects of modernity worthy of decrying, epistemology just isn't one of those things.