Negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages
It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting:
for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. (Ecc 7)
This week, we move to the “pessimistic objections” to modernity that Charles Taylor provides in A Secular Age. I will argue that the Christian faith is harmed by superficial positivity that peaked in the latter half of the 20th century. To respond to this, the Church must once again emphasise inequality, suffering and death, in short, returning to some of what Bugnini characterised as the “negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages.”
This is the final week of a three-part essay series (Essay 1: Religion doesn’t resonate; Essay 2: Modernity disconnects us from God) inspired largely by Charles Taylor’s three “axes of objection” to the modern moral order, which can be found on pp. 311-21 of the 2018 Harvard University Press edition of A Secular Age. They explain mindsets that object to modernity, from which Taylor takes indirect steps towards a secularising world. I here use his objections directly to explain the malaise of the Christian faithful. If you’d like to receive a weekly essay similar to this one, please hit subscribe and pop in your e-mail address:
Inequality
Modern Western society holds equality as one of its most fundamental values. This is related to the democratisation of power. In a society where we have achieved such cooperation, the idea that one person would be “lower” than another seems to risk reversion to the power of the strong. This became especially important in the wake of the Holocaust and its repression of those the Nazis deemed subhuman. We ended up in a liberal consensus which naturally outed itself into a progressive consensus where any inequality (such as “one religion is less true than another,” “women are different to men”) comes to be seen certainly as politically incorrect, and perhaps even as self-evidently false.
Despite the value of the doctrine of equality, it is not an absolute end - “If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing?” (1 Cor 12) Some people are more capable than others of leadership and decision-making, some of intellect and discovering truth, some of virtue and heroism. In a world where we deny this, then, we also see a counter-reaction that reclaims inequality: hierarchical leadership is replaced by the idolisation of politicians; intellectual institutions are replaced by blind trust in people who claim authoritative knowledge; and the veneration of folk heroes and saints is replaced by obsession with superheroes and celebrities. Absolute equality is not sustainable because it fails to provide a place for leadership, for truth, and for heroism.
Christianity traditionally placed an excessive emphasis on hierarchy and inequality, but we have now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction and fail to provide places for leadership, truth, and heroism. We must find virtue in the mean. Let us discuss each point separately:
Leadership
Fearful of another Protestant Reformation, the Church remained highly hierarchical up until the 1960s, while the world had moved into democracy. It was the Pope, then your local bishop, then your parish priest, then you. At this point, however, the Church realised that it had missed the bandwagon and jumped too far into the ways of the world, with synods that aim to be inclusive but prevent clarity from being reached, with parish councils that prevent priests from acting as pastors, and with specific forms of lay participation in the Mass that desacralise the liturgy. It is a wonderful change that laypeople are able to make contributions - see theologians like Lewis, or missionaries like FOCUS. We cannot once again limit Christian work to those institutionally authorised. However, heaven is a kingdom, not a democracy. We must allow bishops to lead, authorities to rule, and pastors to shepherd. A recognition of the value of everyone’s contributions may not be allowed to exclude leadership. Critics might argue that democracy is the only way of ensuring that the laity defend their interests. The Christian perspective, however, asks us not to fight for our own interests, but instead for leaders to sacrifice for the interests of those whom they serve.
“Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account.” (Heb 13)
Truth
The unquestioned assumption of most Christians throughout time was that those who were not professed members of the earthly Church, baptised by water, were unable to be saved. This heresy fails to recognise that those who “seek God with sincere heart, and try, under the influence of grace, to carry out His will in practice, known to them through the dictate of conscience, can attain eternal salvation.” (Lumen Gentium) It was rightly condemned as Feeneyism in 1949. However, in the wake of WW2, our society started to overreact to what RR Reno has called the “strong gods,” which are powerful binding beliefs that are exclusionary of those who don’t share them - anything from Nazism (which triggered the reaction) to Orthodox Judaism. The Church fell in line, and often started to doubt whether her own traditions had any more value than those of other faiths. But “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,” (Acts 4) and we must continue to preach Jesus and the truth of the Christian faith. A respect for the valuable contributions others can make does not mean that we must stop respecting the truth.
Heroism
Many of the lay faithful have always seen sanctity as an unachievable goal except for the occasional pious soul in religious life. This has historically led to many otherwise faithful Christians despairing of their ability to follow moral law and a high calling to Christian virtue. The Lateran Council’s requirement for the faithful to receive Communion at least once a year was, for example, seen as a demanding requirement (this is mentioned in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, a book I’d highly recommend but don’t have on me, so cannot cite a page number for this point).
In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the Church rightly emphasised the universal call to holiness, but too often followed societal trends of equality and took this concept too far, “levelling down” to an everyday understanding of sanctity. For example, in the 12 years since Pope Francis’s coronation, he has led 74 canonisations for a total of 942 saints - Pope Leo XIII, in 25 years, led 12 canonisations for a total of 19 saints. Each canonisation remains a joyful occasion, but excessive frequency makes sanctity seem ordinary. Similarly, the pulpits fail to emphasise the heights of sanctity to which Jesus called us, the radically heroic demands that this universal call to holiness places on us.
We see signs of hope for heroism in the results when groups do emphasise our high calling, like the thriving Franciscans of the Renewal. They call their members to an extremely high standard and, attracted by that, many young men have joined, leading to rapid growth in numbers. Equality may not be absolute, levelling us all down to a Christianity without space for heroism.
While equality is valuable, it may not become absolute, and therefore fail to leave space for leadership, truth, or heroism. Christianity must re-emphasise inequality and ensure we have space for these three goods.
Suffering and death
Modernity has greatly reduced suffering and death. Using medicine, we have managed to bring unexpected mortality to a near-negligible chance. What a wonder it is that, unlike in the mediaeval days, we no longer need to fear that a cold will kill us. Similarly, law and politics have significantly decreased human-based suffering - in the 9th century, there was any chance that Vikings would show up and torture and murder your whole village. Violent crime is a rare exception in the modern world. To a great extent, this has meant that suffering and death have become distant, and that society is often able to ignore them.
Unfortunately, death and suffering do still exist, and ignoring them is only a bottling-up that eventually leads to the cork popping. People have often responded to modernity by questioning the point of it all, with the most influential modern philosophers focussing on the absurdity of life, the existential anxiety of meaninglessness, and the fundamental position of death (Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger respectively). Schopenhauer, who argues for the centrality of suffering in life, would likely agree with St Paul’s statement that “we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience.” (Rom 5) Reactionary modern political movements almost invariably focus, too, on suffering, even when they need to imagine a fictive group of victims, like Marianne Budde’s reference at Trump’s inauguration to “transgender children … who fear for their lives.” Even when death and suffering are in the distance, they will find ways back into the popular imagination.
In the second half of the 20th century, the Church reduced her emphasis on suffering. This came from the top down: the 1966 apostolic constitution Paenitemini “intend[ed] to reorganize penitential discipline with practices more suited to our times,” and the 1967 apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina turned the emphasis of indulgences from expiation for sin to a growth in charity. These changes are also reflected in modern spiritual books, which tend to focus less on mortification and more on charitable works, less on Judgment and more on Divine Mercy
Simultaneously, the Church, in line with society, radically de-emphasised death. This can be seen clearly in the liturgy, where black vestments for funerals and All Souls’ Day were made optional and the emphasis of the Requiem Mass was significantly changed (as Francis Phillips summarises well for the Catholic Herald.) Empirically, too, we see that Memento Mori designs went out of fashion, and that the Four Last Things are rarely preached. In a world where death is able to be pushed into the distance, these more difficult aspects of Christianity drew less emphasis.
They got rid of texts that smacked of a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages. Thus they removed such familiar and even beloved texts as "Libera me, Domine", "Dies irae", and others that overemphasized judgment, fear, and despair. These they replaced with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection. (“Reform of the Liturgy: 1948-1975,” Bugnini, Annibale Cardinal. Liturgical Press 1990, p. 773)
This emphasis reduction leads to the same counter-reaction. A Christianity that fails to correctly identify suffering, just like a society where suffering has become less visible, starts to find suffering in places where it isn’t, and immature Christians develop a victim complex that outs itself in films like God’s not Dead. A Church that fails to emphasise death and eternal life leads to philosophical movements that question the point of the faith. In an article for the Catholic Herald, an attendee of the old rite of the Requiem (funeral) Mass, writes the following: “Possibly in the past, there was too much of hellfire. Today there is surely too little of it. Being human, we never quite get the balance right.”
Our society is at a point where suffering and death have often become distant or even invisible. A Church that falls prey to the temptation to ignore these twin difficulties will fall prey to counter-reactions that ignore Christianity.
This re-emphasis on suffering and death does not need to rebel against the Church. Paenetimini made Ember Days and Friday abstinence optional - but encouraged them and emphasised that its reorganisation was for the sake of “recall[ing] and urg[ing] all the faithful to the observance of the divine precept of penitence.” Votive Requiem Masses are still an option, as they always have been, and praying for the souls of the faithful departed still helps them to be cleansed from their sins and come to heaven. I mentioned earlier that Divine Mercy has been a key element of the Church’s focus over the 20th Century. Faustina Kowalska’s revelations here are a wonderful example of this balance between a trust in God’s mercy, without ignoring the realities of suffering, sin, and death.
Negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages
As Taylor discusses in A Secular Age, unbelief often emerges as a response to religious frameworks proving inadequate in the face of modernity. In the latter half of the 20th century, the Church correctly adjusted its excessive emphasis on inequality, suffering, and death. We can be grateful for our developed understandings of the call to holiness and for an increasing understanding of God’s mercy. However, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, and we are not providing an adequate tension to society’s veneration of equality or to its superficial positivity that keeps suffering and death at a distance.
We must not let an overemphasis on equality exclude the virtues of leadership, truth, and heroism. We must also not let the distance of suffering and death allow the Church to get complacent, failing to address difficult topics. Only a Christianity that embraces both the Cross and the Resurrection will provide an adequate framework for faith in the modern world.
“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mt 16)
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth … And [there] God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” (Rev 21)