It is often argued nowadays, if not simply assumed, that the modern Western world, in its higher intellectual and cultural reaches at any rate, is post-Christian. What is usually implied by this judgment is that people no longer believe in God, and hence don’t look to God anymore as the guarantor of meaning in life or as a welcome guide through life’s more intractable dilemmas.
The logic of this position is hard to fault. For how can there be belief in any divine help or guidance from a divinity no longer thought to exist? Would it not be more honest, for someone who has moved beyond Christian faith, who is “post-Christian”, to acknowledge this candidly and seek to make sense of an entirely “secular” world? Is it not more admirable to try to deal with the “real” life we undoubtedly have by first renouncing all “wishful thinking” about God or any possible “other life” or “other world”?
Maybe so, even if no compelling reason can finally be found for trying to deal with ultimate questions in a world emptied of ultimate meaning. In what sense, however, a modern secularist approach to life can justifiably be called post-Christian, is itself a question that should perhaps be given some attention. For it would appear that the very notion of the secular realm was first introduced into Western thought by the very Christianity now widely rejected by secular thought.
But Oisín prefers the former songs of the birds to the alien sound of church bells
While the Latin term saeculum originally referred to a period of time that eventually came to be regarded as what we call a “century” — a notion still retained, for example, in the derivative terms siècle (in French) or siglo (in Spanish) — it ultimately came to refer to the world of creation or the created order itself, as contrasted with the transcendent world of the divine, the sphere of the creator.
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The new sense of the perceived independence of the natural world, almost as opposed to any supernatural source, was no doubt an unwitting consequence of the early Church’s desire to combat “paganism’s” divinised view of nature in order to promote its own sense — inherited from Judaism — of the otherness of God. How successful the first Christians were in this endeavour can be recognised very early on in the striking “nature” poetry of the first recorded Irish poets.
One such example of this early literature builds on the conceit of a poet, the legendary Oisín, disappearing, like a Rip Van Winkle avant la lettre, during the “old order” and returning, after spending many centuries in the Land of the Young, to Ireland during the “new order”, ie after the arrival of Christianity, with St Patrick firmly in charge.
But Oisín prefers the former songs of the birds to the alien sound of church bells. Ironically, the authors of such poetry were in all probability clerics themselves, and the distinction they exploit in their works is one that could surely only have been thinkable after, and not before, the introduction of Christianity to Ireland.
If one accepts that it was Christianity itself that made the “secular realm” conceivable in the first place, to what extent might it be somewhat misleading to continue using the notion of “secular” or “secularity” to describe the present age? Are such terms still legitimate? For if in fact the “secular world” is a concept that only makes sense in relation to a transcendent, divine source that creates and sustains it, then, should the divine source fall away, another way of describing the former “secular world” would arguably need to be found.
Similar observations could no doubt also be made about such large questions as the ‘problem of evil’
To continue calling it “secular” would seem to be tantamount to looking at the world as though it were still dependent upon the Christian Deity, rather than robustly post-Christian.
Similar observations could no doubt also be made about such large questions as the “problem of evil”. For, strictly speaking, the “problem of evil” can surely only be a“problem” for those who believe in a good, transcendent God. Otherwise what has traditionally come to be called “evil” is simply “something that happens”.
And even such a “master concept” as “truth” itself — in a purely naturalistic view of the world — might well also finally be found to have feet of clay, and, perhaps incongruously, to depend on a prior act of faith for its apparently self-evident validity.
Could “secularity” be really just a Christian heresy?
- Fr Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, is a priest of Down and Connor diocese in Northern Ireland