Biblical origins of modern secular culture: an essay in the interpretation of Western history.

THE RIGHT BOOKS/CHILTON WILLIAMSON JR.

CHRISTMAS BEING a season of dispensations great and small, I am granting to myself one of the latter category by reviewing here a book published nearly four years ago, which at the time regrettably evaded my attention. Biblical Origins of Moden Secular Culture: An Essay in the Interpretation of Western History (Mercer University Press, Macon, Ga.; $23.95), by Willis B. Glover, is a learned and stylishly executed historical tour de force that turns on their heads a great many modernist assumptions concerning the pattern and progress of Western history in the past millennium. It is still in print, and is readily available from the publisher, as I learned from a telephone conversation last week.

According to the conventional (secular) interpretation, Western culture, having got off to a promising start among the Greeks and Romans of pagan antiquity, hit a bump in the road (the Rock of St. Peter) that blocked its progress for a thousand years or so until, in the late Middle Ages, a growing party of enlightened souls discovered the means of levering it out of the way. That obstacle of dark superstition and wizardry having been removed, Western man found himself moving forward again with the speed of an Olympic torchbearer. The Renaissance rediscovered classicism and, using it as the basis for its own brand of humanism, effected the first stage in the emancipation of modern man: a process finally achieved in the full-blown secularization of the Enlightenment, whose accomplishments Western civilization has been exploring, refining, and developing for the past two centuries. According to this view, Western history has been a kind of Shavian evolution, starting with Methuselah for its raw material and completing its work with its finished masterpiece, Norman Lear. Freed forever from the Biblical values and traditions of the Bad Old Days, modern man is at liberty to develop his own potential unencumbered by any standard of value higher than himself.

This interpretation is emphatically contradicted by Professor Glover. "The secularizing of the Biblical tradition in the Enlightenment," he argues, "was . . . the origin of atheistic humanism. The transcendent God was abandoned; but the Biblical understanding of man and of the world that had derived out of belief in such a God was retained." ". . . Nobody in the West, not even those who oppose it, escapes the influence of Christianity. The common ground between Christian and atheistic existentialists is a case in point."

So far from accepting the received wisdom that the Middle Ages were the apogee of Christendom, from which Christian belief has steadily declined, Glover insists that the medieval period was rather an epoch of strenuous expansion and consolidation, during which the Church battled against heavy odds to convert a pagan, semi-barbaric Europe. The late Scholastics, he claims, were not the "degenerate" inheritors of a great tradition, but men who, by demonstrating the failure of the Biblical and classical traditions to cohere at fundamental points, freed the "modern" world view from the ancient--that is to say, the Christian from the Aristotelian--and, by positing a created world ruled by a transcendent God, laid the foundations and supplied the impetus for modern science by supplanting the rationalistic, speculative, and cosmological metaphysics of the Greeks with an empirical, analytic, and critical epistemology.

The Renaissance, so far from being a reaction against all of this, was actually a development of it; not a reembracement of classical paganism but a celebration of the more optimistic implications of Christian revelation: man as the transcendent partner of God in creation, rather than man as sinner against God. It was during the Renaissance that the Augustinian will was rediscovered, and with it a rudimentary sense of the linear history implied by the Old and New Testaments and in contradistinction to the cyclical history of the ancients. The Renaissance, however, also produced a ferment of lay theological activity, which eventually led to the rationalistic theology of the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment was, of course, an era of aggressive, highly self-conscious revolt against Biblical tradition: a revolt whose thoroughgoing secularity was partially masked by deism, which Glover regards as not a religion at all but only a kind of apology. But the Enlightenment never managed to resolve the problem of man's freedom within a closed system: a contradiction that the "progress philosophies" of Kant, Hegel, and others were an attempt to solve.

Taking strong issue with Eric Voegelin, Glover insists that "humanism" derives, not from Gnosticism, but from the Biblical tradition itself. Humanism chooses, and discards at will, from among the rich cultural heritage of the West, trying to "put a big box in a little one." The impossibility of this endeavor has produced a crisis in the West; but it is a crisis of humanism, not of Christianity, which has managed to keep its hold on what uniquely belongs to it while at the same time sharing a shadow-zone (one is tempted to call it a no-man's-land) with humanism: a bit of accommodationism that Glover credits with maintaining what little common ground still remains to Western culture and belief.

The response of the humanists to this crisis is to appeal to history as the engine that will ultimately restore consensus by eradicating "superstition," without recognizing that it is from "superstition" that their sense of history derives. "The Western sense of history," Glover writes, "is a product of the Biblical-Christian tradition . . . some of the salient characteristics of modern culture are due to it. These would include modern faith in progress; a new pattern of explanation in history and science; professional historiography beginning about 1800; new ontologies of process; humanistic historicism; and existentialism." Humanism is trapped in a "problem of history" caused by the conflict between a powerful sense of historical existence and the "compulsion" to understand that existence according to strongly mechanistic assumptions concerning nature and man's place in it. Even more than they are aware, perhaps, the prophets of secular humanism confront a situation from which there is truly No Exit; but it is a situation of entirely their own making.