The religiosity of the secular world
September 27th 2006 02:25
Hell and Secular World : The Religiosity of the Moderns
I am plodding through Dante's Inferno translated by Robert Pinsky,“widely-admired American poet” . So far, the verse is wooden and there is little inspiration or lyricism to be found here.
However, the edition comes with a nice foreword by one John Freccero. I will borrow a few words of his for today.
Commenting on the Comedy’s relation to the Augustinian tradition, Freccero writes, “The City of God and The City of Man were thought to be spiritual states, the antithetical allegiances of those who actually live together in the real city.” Heaven and Hell were cities for sinners and saints and “the earthly city was therefore an encampment in which saints and sinners meet and mingle as pilgrims en route to opposite directions.”
Beautiful as they are, we will not dwell on those remarks today. My point is different. Surveying how Dante has been received in modern times, Freccero writes, “The sense in which Hell stands for the real world has never been lost on Dante’s readers.”
Inferno is a “City of Man in the afterlife, which is why it contains no glimmer of forgiveness. At the same time, it may also be thought of as a radical representation of the world in which we live, stripped of all temporizing and all hope.”
Pray, why is the world in which we live stripped of all hope? These remarks, remember, do not tell you what Dante is but how he is taken or should be taken today. Do not bother about that medieval theology, the series of punishments, the moderns are saying here, read Dante because his hell is our reality.
The foreword continues--“Over the centuries, according to Auerbach, the sheer forces of Dante’s verses actually came to subvert his moralizing intention, transforming a medieval system of punishments and rewards into an autonomous, secular world, much like this one, in which human characters no longer signify anything, as Dante may have wished, but simply are in all of their tragic humanity.”
A distinguishing feature of any religion is not what it says what afterlife will be but what it says about life here. And all religions agree that life here is not an end in itself. The gloomy glasses through which many religions look at this world is not dependant on any historical accident; it is the nature of the world to be profoundly unsatisfying. It is because this world is so unsatisfying, religions can even putate an afterlife.
Now, turn a thought to our secular modernists and you will find they share this quality with all the religions; they too are not satisfied with the world we live in. The religious would say that the world is sinful, evil or corrupt and the modern would point out that it simply has no meaning. In the world according to Auerbach, human characters no longer signify anything, but simply are. Take the usually recommended classics of our literature--Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Wasteland or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for the Godot. None of them is a celebration. Each one of them is a mournful dirge that plaintively sings, something is wrong with this world.
That something usually turns out to be capitalism in the hands of vulgar theoreticians, or in the shrinking conceptual boundaries of today, American “hegemony.” But the individual prescriptions of what is wrong are not my main point. Even I would agree that there are many things wrong with the world. But, what I am talking about is this belief that it is the nature of the world to be so unsatisfactory.
Dante was an exile when writing the Comedy; a real exile, not a figurative one. His inferno therefore, “is also the state of the world as seen by an exile whose experience has taught him no longer to trust the world’s values.”
This state of exile is the one vantage point where the modern literature feels comfortable enough to see things. It wants to be an exile. Camus’s Mersault, Kafka’s K or Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, exiles in one way or the other. Paradise is the natural home of the soul and banished from it, the soul is in exile.
The moderns feel they are torn away from their paradise which they have just transposed from beyond death to before. And banished from this interiorized paradise, they are in an exile and no longer trust the world’s values. Like the souls bearing the punishments in Inferno, they signify nothing but simply are. Think Freud’s man who lives in constant state of anxiety because he has been torn away from the security of the mother’s breast or Foucault’s panopticism.
This is what tells us that our modern auteurs are not so different from the medieval theologians whom they profess to have surpassed. Modernism has lost heaven, has lost hell, it has lost afterlife, has lost gods, good and evil but what it has retained is this belief that the world we live is by its very nature unsatisfactory and they are nothing but exiles in it torn from some unclear natural abode. In that aspect, the so called moderns are still at one with the hoariest of the theologians.
No matter how agnostic, atheistic, secular and modern they profess to be, they have not lost religion yet.
[ Letters in bold represent my emphasis. Italics mean emphasis in the original]
I am plodding through Dante's Inferno translated by Robert Pinsky,“widely-admired American poet” . So far, the verse is wooden and there is little inspiration or lyricism to be found here.
However, the edition comes with a nice foreword by one John Freccero. I will borrow a few words of his for today.
Commenting on the Comedy’s relation to the Augustinian tradition, Freccero writes, “The City of God and The City of Man were thought to be spiritual states, the antithetical allegiances of those who actually live together in the real city.” Heaven and Hell were cities for sinners and saints and “the earthly city was therefore an encampment in which saints and sinners meet and mingle as pilgrims en route to opposite directions.”
Beautiful as they are, we will not dwell on those remarks today. My point is different. Surveying how Dante has been received in modern times, Freccero writes, “The sense in which Hell stands for the real world has never been lost on Dante’s readers.”
Inferno is a “City of Man in the afterlife, which is why it contains no glimmer of forgiveness. At the same time, it may also be thought of as a radical representation of the world in which we live, stripped of all temporizing and all hope.”
Pray, why is the world in which we live stripped of all hope? These remarks, remember, do not tell you what Dante is but how he is taken or should be taken today. Do not bother about that medieval theology, the series of punishments, the moderns are saying here, read Dante because his hell is our reality.
The foreword continues--“Over the centuries, according to Auerbach, the sheer forces of Dante’s verses actually came to subvert his moralizing intention, transforming a medieval system of punishments and rewards into an autonomous, secular world, much like this one, in which human characters no longer signify anything, as Dante may have wished, but simply are in all of their tragic humanity.”
Dante's Inferno Source : art.gothic.ru
A distinguishing feature of any religion is not what it says what afterlife will be but what it says about life here. And all religions agree that life here is not an end in itself. The gloomy glasses through which many religions look at this world is not dependant on any historical accident; it is the nature of the world to be profoundly unsatisfying. It is because this world is so unsatisfying, religions can even putate an afterlife.
Now, turn a thought to our secular modernists and you will find they share this quality with all the religions; they too are not satisfied with the world we live in. The religious would say that the world is sinful, evil or corrupt and the modern would point out that it simply has no meaning. In the world according to Auerbach, human characters no longer signify anything, but simply are. Take the usually recommended classics of our literature--Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Wasteland or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for the Godot. None of them is a celebration. Each one of them is a mournful dirge that plaintively sings, something is wrong with this world.
That something usually turns out to be capitalism in the hands of vulgar theoreticians, or in the shrinking conceptual boundaries of today, American “hegemony.” But the individual prescriptions of what is wrong are not my main point. Even I would agree that there are many things wrong with the world. But, what I am talking about is this belief that it is the nature of the world to be so unsatisfactory.
Dante was an exile when writing the Comedy; a real exile, not a figurative one. His inferno therefore, “is also the state of the world as seen by an exile whose experience has taught him no longer to trust the world’s values.”
This state of exile is the one vantage point where the modern literature feels comfortable enough to see things. It wants to be an exile. Camus’s Mersault, Kafka’s K or Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, exiles in one way or the other. Paradise is the natural home of the soul and banished from it, the soul is in exile.
The moderns feel they are torn away from their paradise which they have just transposed from beyond death to before. And banished from this interiorized paradise, they are in an exile and no longer trust the world’s values. Like the souls bearing the punishments in Inferno, they signify nothing but simply are. Think Freud’s man who lives in constant state of anxiety because he has been torn away from the security of the mother’s breast or Foucault’s panopticism.
This is what tells us that our modern auteurs are not so different from the medieval theologians whom they profess to have surpassed. Modernism has lost heaven, has lost hell, it has lost afterlife, has lost gods, good and evil but what it has retained is this belief that the world we live is by its very nature unsatisfactory and they are nothing but exiles in it torn from some unclear natural abode. In that aspect, the so called moderns are still at one with the hoariest of the theologians.
No matter how agnostic, atheistic, secular and modern they profess to be, they have not lost religion yet.
[ Letters in bold represent my emphasis. Italics mean emphasis in the original]
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Comment by Anon
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Comment by anon
Wonder what God thinks of all this...???
Comment by Anonymous
Anon i wouldn't presume to know what god thnks of this as I am an athiest. bit of a clash there, don't u think?
Comment by Anonymous
well we can only hope that the world figures out religion is the true evil of this world.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
Comment by Jimbo
Media Blotch
Punk Rawk News
Not only is this a rash generalisation, but it also a rather religious statement in itself. Any juxtaposition and use of the terms "good" and "evil" in this sense relies on the cultural foundations which have been built up by institutional religion over thousands of years. Thus, you are succumbing to religion yourself. Rather, we must suffice to say that religion - not institutional religion mind you - is a personal choice, a set of beliefs relied upon by the individual as a basis for moral choice and method of living. I have my beliefs and you have yours. Of course, that isn't to say that I deny my right to attempt to dissuade you of your choices - if we continue to live in a world where we have the "don't try and argue against my beliefs" then we simply separate itself. Neither am I saying that I should do it in a forceful or violent way - rather, my attempt is merely sane and logical discussion, a juxtaposition of our two different sets of belief in an attempt to reach an outcome one way or another. While this outcome may never be reached, attempts are useful in themselves.
Its a great post, nagster, but unfortunately ignores postmodernism, which is such a huge "intellectual" (in speech marks because I don't see any intellect to it) influence on modern society. The basis for postmodernism is that there is no truth, and thus there is no evil, there is no good, there just is. Under postmodernism, we shouldn't even bother with religion because there is no truth, just the perspectives forced upon various stimuli by the individual. Stupid, in my opinion, but its an unfortunate aspect of 21st century society.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
I was trying to get the meaning of religion as a philosophical phenomenon rather than an institutional one. So, the philosohpical categories of good and evil are relevant because they are part of the phenomenon called religion.
I'd like to write about postmodernism but I'd thought it was outside my context. I'd write about it in some other post.
Comment by Gareth
Comment by Helen's House
Truth Wisdom Freedom
I'll go one further and say that the atheists, postmodernists etc have a pretty well defined religion. It's called the theory of Evolution which proposes that everything is relevant to the survival of the fittest. Thus no moral climate has reality.
There is some truth to this theory. Natural Selection is an observable phenomenon. However there has never once beenany evidence that DNA can promote itself to a more complex level. In fact the opposite is true, that anything left to itself will disintegrate. This is very readily observable. Yet they fight very vigorously against the very reasonable idea that there must be intelligent design behind creation, in spite of the very obvious laws of cause and effect. Any action has a cause and an effect. What is so terrible about an intelligent designer, unless they are afraid of being toppled off the throne of great knowledge and intelligence! Of course there has to be a mind a bit greater than ours to take in the whole, or better, to establish the whole inthe first place. It perfectly stands to reason that nothing comes from nothing, as nothing has ever been observed to come fromnothing.
How anyone can move scientifically from observable natural selection to unobservable evolution from nothing beats me.
Having some truth to the theory confuses the issue as the whole theory is not tenable. Natural selection refers to loss of unuseful DNA in a population rather than any upgrading of complexity.
The "religion" of evolution actually doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. It lets down its adherents rather savagely.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
Well, it's not just Budhists wo use the "unsatisfying" nature of the world as a "positive." The very idea that the escape from this world is postive should spring from some preestablished idea that this world is wrong. Once however, slavation or nirvana has been established and shows as achievable, then of course, the unsatisfying nature becomes a positive.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
I know that Christianity is making a big comeback and having a ball with "evolutionists". But our point here is whether those who claim to be secular might not have as their foundational basis a significant bit of what they claim to negate , that is, religion. I do not argue that all the theoreticians that I mentioned are wrong. They might be , they might not be.
Thanks for supplying the example of evolution but would it fit my arguement? I'd think not. Leaving aside whether evolution is right or wrong becuase that's not my main point here, what are the fundamental metaphysical bases of evolution?
That life is random or is it causal, either way it doesn't quite fit my argument.
And is evolution was proposed in 1856? Does it fit the tag modern? I dont know.
Comment by Helen's House
Truth Wisdom Freedom
Comment by Jimbo
Media Blotch
Punk Rawk News
And herein lies my problem. Many people on both sides of the Christianity vs science debate treat each other as complete opposites, incapable of any cooperation. My personal belief is quite different. When Charles Darwin first theorised about evolution, he used it as a argument in favour of God's existence, proof that God was in the world and still working today. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that science is wrong and Christianity is right, however thats the way that many on both sides think.
My personal beliefs pertain to the existence of a God as described by the Bible. But, my beliefs also allow for the inclusion of science - not that either cancels out the other, but they work in collaboration. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that God is quite logical, and all the things he created were done in a logical fashion. As such, science is there in modern society simply as a tool for humans to understand how things work, not why they do. Evolution still exists today - there is proof in favour of it. However, there is no concrete proof of life beginning as evolution and, as logical as science attempts to be, I really don't see the logic in the randomness of such a thing as life beginning as evolution.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
Do "evolutionists" that this world is fundamentally unsatisfying? Do they posit an original paradise from which we have been torn away? I do not think so.
Comment by Anon