Is the Secular Age Mystical or Atheistic?
On Conscience and Self-Indulgence
The Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig said that “Mysticism and atheism can shake hands.”
Atheism says there is no God, while mysticism says God is everywhere, especially, in myself. Wallace Stevens captures this atheistic-mystical handshake when he writes, “God is in me, or else is not at all.”
The path to the secular age was paved by religious people of pious intent.
Martin Luther replaced the authority of the infallible pope (an external father figure) with conscience (an inner voice). Theorized through a theological lens, modernity is not anti-religious, but the “dispensation of the Holy Spirit” (to the use the phrase of Joachim de Fiore). We are all Luther’s children.
If the medieval Catholic Church was MMT, ruling by fiat, the Protestant age gave us the blockchain. If the God of the ancients persuaded through mighty supernatural miracles like the parting of seas and the resurrecting of the dead, the God of modernity largely presents as a feeling. Where ancient monotheists went to one temple in one place to worship a command and control God today’s God can be discovered in a yoga class, on the subway, on a hike, at a rave, at a commuter screen (reading this blog). The value proposition of Church, Synaogogue, and Mosque is weakened in an age where God is everywhere and can be found everywhere. If you don’t believe me, read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
Religious leaders today throw around the cliche that we are self-centered, self-absorbed, self-serving—we need to be more focused on God, on others, on something outside ourselves. But they fail to understand or appreciate or communicate that the reason why we are self-focused is in part because this is where theology itself led us.
Once you start emphasizing that each person has a divine spark, is created in the divine image (and thus deserving of equal rights); once you start with the liberal (and anti-hierarchical) ideal that each person is a mini prophet, a micro sage—it’s not long before this leads to relativism and self-worship.
A genuinely religious (and true) insight about the dignity of the individual leads necessarily to the cult of the self, stripped of God entirely. The secular age is thus a paradox—it’s the fulfillment of the religious idea of individualism and the replacement of God with the self.
While this particular challenge may be new, the inability to distinguish genuine faith from idolatry is as old as religious experience itself. The ancients had to choose between God and gods. We moderns must choose between the voice of God within us and the cult of the self. How do you discern the difference?
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