RITE AND REASON:Christian leaders are reassessing how to present the message of Christianity to an increasingly sceptical world, writes MARTIN HENRY
‘WHAT DOES it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Jesus asks in the Gospels (Mk 8: 36). “Here we have no abiding city,” we read in the Letter to the Hebrews (Heb 13: 14). “I want no more of what men call life,” wrote Ignatius of Antioch, one of early Christianity’s most reputable witnesses, in his Epistle to the Romans (§8).
The Middle Ages, for their part, are saturated with works on the theme of contempt for, or flight from, the world. Indeed the very notion of “worldliness” is suspect in traditionally Christian cultures.
And, last but not least, the idea of renouncing worldly joys, of abandoning house and home or the possibility of founding a family of one’s own “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (cf. Mt 19: 12, 29), has in the course of Christian history been seen as not merely compatible with, but as the most authentic expression of, Christian faith.
Faced with such a battery of evidence about the nature of Christianity, evidence that could be extended almost ad infinitum, those who would maintain the contrary would appear to have the burden of proof on their shoulders.
Yet the contrary is now in fact being asserted, and from the highest positions in the Catholic world. Christianity, we are now assured, is life-affirming.
Does this apparent volte-face on the part of church leaders represent a radically new interpretation of the Christian faith? Or does it signify that what for so long seemed to be a world-denying, resolutely ascetical faith is, when really understood, not world-denying at all?
The answers to these questions are not immediately obvious. But what does seem to be beyond doubt is that criticisms of Christianity made since the Enlightenment – which was itself, of course, no friend of asceticism – are beginning to bear fruit.
Moved, even stung, by the critique of a world-denying, flesh-tormenting religion mounted by thinkers like Feuerbach and, especially, Nietzsche, or by men of letters such as Rilke, Christian leaders have been reassessing how they should present Christianity to an increasingly sceptical world.
In this task, they undoubtedly have strong cards to play.
First and foremost, perhaps, there is Christianity’s own doctrine of creation (taken over from Judaism), which speaks of God finding his work of creation “good”, not, as the Gnostics were to claim, a catastrophe or a “fall”.
And the sacramental, anti-iconoclastic dimension of Catholic Christianity hardly needs to be laboured. Hence the view of a Catholic sceptic George Santayana may be closer to the truth of Christianity than any pessimistic account of its meaning.
In Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, Santayana wrote: “Christ loved the world, in an erotic sense in which Buddha did not love it: and the world has loved the cross as it can never love the Bo-tree.”
That, of course, still leaves unanswered the question of how Christianity came to be associated with a grim view of life to begin with.
This question may, in the long run, be of even more interest than the issue of how “life-affirming” or not Christianity may in fact be.
For a recurrent theme of human history, adverted to by Leszek Kolakowski, appears to be the way in which human beings have a knack of achieving the opposite of what they actually intend to achieve.
At the birth of the modern age, for instance, when belief in God was beginning to wobble, the Father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes, set out to make religious belief sturdier than ever, basing his philosophy on methodical doubt.
The result was a huge boost for deism and a huge blow against Christianity, which, we may charitably assume, Descartes was interested in supporting, and a not insignificant contribution to the emergence of atheism in the West, entirely contrary to Descartes’s own intentions.
While it would surely be perverse to suggest that the pursuit of evil, rather than good, intentions might, paradoxically, be more conducive to the promotion of human happiness, the frequent failure, or at least faltering, of good intentions should perhaps make us pause before asserting too boldly what we think Christianity intends to achieve or to promote.
Rev Dr Martin Henry is lecturer in dogmatic theology at St Patricks College, Maynooth. Another version of this piece appeared in Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2006): 348-349