WESTERN
Atheism in Christianity
Michael Harrington: cultural Catholic
Perhaps it can be said that religion is not disappearing but only "relocating."
But the new religions that the social scientists are so fond of are, almost
without exception, personal rather than social. They are part of what Daniel Bell
has called a "retreat to the private world where religions have authority only
over their followers and not over any other section of the polity or society."
That is the definition of the abyss which lies between religion as the expression
of the values of a community and religion as a matter of private belief. The
latter may well be profound and even holy, but it is not the organizing principle
of a civilization. That is what Judeo-christianity was for several millennia.
That is why it is so sorely missed now. 4
In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church turned its back upon the
possibility of winning over Chinese civilization--by converting its
elite--because it insisted upon imposing its own theological terms upon a Chinese
culture that could not understand them. The Holy Spirit was transliterated into
Chinese as the "Superitsu Santo" and the Holy Office officially declared that the
ancient Chinese were idolators; the moderns, atheists. Voltaire agreed
with Rome on that last point and in the process committed its error under the
guise of sympathy and tolerance. He congratulated the Chinese on being so much
like himself. ... But the Chinese, "among all peoples, ancient and recent,
primitive and modern, are apparently unique in having no creation myths. ... that
is, they have regarded the world and man as uncreated, as constituting the
central features of a spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, god
or ultimate cause external to itself." --Frederick Mote 5
I left the Catholic Church almost thirty years ago. It is relevant to my present
attitudes that even though I rejected the Church, it provided me with my original
idea of what religion is. And I clearly remain a "cultural Catholic," much
as an atheist Jew is culturally Jewish. ... To complicate matters further,
I consider myself to be--in Max Weber's phrase--"religiously musical" even though
I do not believe in God. ... I am, then, what Georg Simmel called a "religious
nature without religion," a pious man of deep faith, but not in the
supernatural. And to move now from autobiographical to the political, i think
that in the late twentieth century serious atheists and serious believers have
more in common with one another than with mindless, de facto atheists (who
often affirm some vague and sentimental God) and routine churchgoers. Both have
looked into the same void at the center of this incredible age. So it is, for
instance, that the contemporary Catholic theologian Jürgen Moltmann concedes, even as he affirms the existence
of a nontraditional God, that the tragedies of contemporary history corroborate
the atheist argument from disorder, rather that the theistic argument from
design. More to my point, the committed believers and unbelievers now have the
same enemy: the humdrum nihilism of everyday live in much of Western
society. 10-11
In the Enlightenment, geniuses deeply convinced of the political necessity of
religion undermined the very foundation of faith by revealing the atheist
implications of the discoveries made by pious scientists. 12 Yet, [Heinrich]
Heine also said, Kant was more of a subversive than Robespierre. The Frenchman
only executed a king; the German killed God. ... Heine said of the Critique of
pure reason: "This book is the sword with which deism was executed in
Germany." 15/17
... the search for a substitute deity to take over the social functions of the
dying God of tradition. 18 In the process, Kant was one of the first
theorists of that most popular of substitute gods, history. A series of important
thinkers--Adam Smith, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx--sought to secularize the notion
of a divine providence. Where God once ruled there is now the invisible hand of
the market, the hidden plan of nature, the cunning of reason, the socialist leaps
from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. To be sure, the acolytes
of these theories often made them more "religious" than their authors (this is
true, above all, in the case of Marx). And they are still one of the most
important sources of consolation for the godless world of the last two
centuries. 19
The politics at God's funeral (Viking Penguin: NY 1983/1987)
re.
cultural/Catholic/Jewish/atheists, see Graham Greene,
Charles Maurras, Miguel de Unamuno, Mordecai Kaplan,
Sherwin Wine andAhad Ha-Am.
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