Some Comments

Unfortunately  I've been unwell for the last ten days and haven't been able to post.

One of the reasons I put up the posts on modernity is because Weber, in my opinion, puts up a far more convincing and thoroughgoing explanation as to why religion collapsed in the West with the onset of Modernity compared to any other I have seen. What I like about his approach is that it focused more on the experiential aspect of religion rather than its rational validity.  Many attempt to explain the decline of religion as a consequence of a triumph of alternate--philosophical--explanations of reality, whereas Weber sees religions decline as coming about primarily due to daily irrelevance, annoyance and competition from other newly available interests.  Interestingly, unlike many, he doesn't see Modernity and Religion as being intrinsically opposed and lays much of the blame on the hostility between the two on the clergy which he admits did not seem to know how to respond to the changes that it was experiencing.

This latter aspect is one that is worth more reflecting on. Human nature may remain the same but circumstances change, and a Church that cannot adapt to circumstances is a church that is going to have a very hard time. Many may read this as implying that the Church needs to "change with the times" or "be up to date", but that's not what I'm trying to get across.

Consider, for example, the practice of giving alms. The Church may have been right to emphasise this in previous times where there was no alternative social welfare service, but now in the world of universal social security the Church simply becomes another aid organisation, effectively "competing" against the State for their provision.  Rather where the Church seems to do well is when it tries to provide a solution for the "crisis" of the times.  I mean, in Communist countries, the Church was the resistance with its emphasis on human rights. But what this means is that the Church must be adaptable to circumstances while maintaining its deposit of the faith.

Unfortunately two things seem to have occurred which have stymied it in its approach. Firstly, there has been an exaggerated sense of tradition which has stymied its ability to deal with novel situations and secondly, I am increasingly of the opinion that it has lapsed into a Manichean type of heresy if not explicitly in theology then implicitly by practice.  Things need to change and imagine they will but I expect it will be a lay driven phenomenon and not a clerical one.

Anyway it's Lent now and I'm meant to take on some commitment for the season which is mean to improve my spiritual well-being. So I have decide to tackle Charles Taylor's, A Secular Age, again. I tried it before but it really didn't inspire. It's a sort of Lenten mortification. Blogging will therefore be very light over this period.

Modernity: The Return of Manicheanism

"The priest is the law, prohibition, forbiddance," wrote the Abbe Larichesse of Cantal in an 1865 study of confession. Familiar with claims that people avoided church because its doctrines ignored human passions, he did not see laxity as a valid remedy. No wonder that, by 1883, we find the public prosecutor at Grenoble noting that the reserve and mistrust with which the peasants of Isere treated their priests was "a form of self-defense" against the clergy's attempts to trespass on their freedom of conscience in newly reserved domains like family affairs and politics. An article in a clerical review published in the last year of the century summed it all up: "The clergy is unpopular. To men of the people the priest is by definition a hostile being." It was in this guise that many priests worked hard to saw off the branch on which they sat.

Interestingly, Weber devotes two chapters in his book on the transformative changes in the relationship between the clergy and the laity bought about by the process of modernisation. Weber sees the transformation arising as consequence and confluence of many factors,  both internal and external to the clergy themselves.  But I think the important point to remember is that prior to modernity, the Church was in equilibrium with the agricultural society of Europe, the process of modernisation destroying this equilibrium. Relgious commentators tend to see the Church as a victim of modernity, but it wasn't like the Church was passive in these events, it seemed to have responded wrongly and thus further damaged its situation. 

The French revolution had polarised society and established a militant anti-clerical element in it, and its easy to blame the dissolution of religion on forces which openly sought to undermine the Church. Yet this line of reasoning tends to neglect some of the self-destructive actions which the Church took.  Clearly, it mistook what it was up against. Much Christian literature on the subject of secularisation tends to focus on the philosophical dimension of this battle, ignoring the sociological dimensions which were far more corrosive to everyday belief.

Thus clerical or anticlerical politics affected the popular mind indirectly. They helped to sap tradition and disintegrate practices that had been part of life for centuries. But political arguments as the cities knew them would not and could not engage the countryside until the country mind had shifted to the wavelength of the city. This would take a long time. Meanwhile, the existence, the pervasiveness, the vigilance of politico-religious conflicts discredited what had long been undisputed and advanced alternative attitudes. As the century ended, a portion of clerical opinion recognized the  counterproductive effect of political involvement. My own belief is that pettier factors, more closely linked with the personality of the priest and his relations with the  community, contributed at least as much to calling him into question.

It's here where  Weber--and Pope Francis-- seem to have a far more intuitive grasp of the problems of Christianity than many realise. Just as all politics is local, all religion is personal, and the line of argument that Weber advocates is that personal factors rather than philosophical arguments were far more influential when it came to dissolution of religious belief.

Even in pre-Modern times there was tension between the priest and the people. He notes that one of the perennial problems that faced the priest was that of securing an adequate income. This created a tension with the laity who resented the contributions that they were effectively forced to make, especially in the environment of constrained means that many of the rural French lived in. Once again it wasn't the decisive factor but it was one which pushed people away.

The priest often appears as tyrant or exploiter, manipulating his monopoly of the essential rites of passage. Thus, at Bouan (Ariege) the gendarmes reported that he expected gifts or refused the holy sacraments and would not attend the dying, however poor they were, unless he was first paid nine francs. Nine francs in 1862 was a great deal of money! What little success Protestantism had in the countryside at mid-century reflected the peasants' attempts to escape from the high fees exacted by some priests. In Yonne,(Ariege), the Limousin, we hear that "the popular classes" were turned away by clerical demands for money. Protestantism was cheap. A novel about the Limousin countryside (written by a priest) records frequent grumbles about the cost of masses, burials, and other services. A Protestant sympathizer remarks that the Protestant minister provides his parishioners a bench to sit on and a stove to warm the chapel, advantages that one did not find in the Catholic church

There were, however, other factors at play:

The consoling cleric undoubtedly existed, but when we meet the priest he is always saying no. No drinking on the Sabbath, or in periods when a mass is being said, or while processions pass. No Sunday morning markets. Too many pigs-disgusting animals; people feast on them when they should be fasting. The fishermen work on Sundays, the priests persuade fish merchants not to buy fish on that day. The reactions were expectable. At Usclades (Ardeche), the priest entered the local tavern to silence "certain songs," but had to retreat under a barrage of insults, followed by snowballs! In a village nearby the priest ran out of church to put an end to a noisy farandole troubling the evening prayers, broke the drum with his fist, and barely escaped lynching. Men were becoming less willing to accept this kind of interference, and even less willing to admit the priest's right to interfere in their private lives.

Weber notes that there was a change in the nature of the French clergy during the 19th Century resulting in it become more austere. It went puritan.

One thing it sought to lick-and with a determination that cost it even greater popular sympathies-was the festival and the vulgar rejoicing that accompanied it[ED]. In Morbihan a local man of letters expressed regret in 1863 that priests, who once, far from condemning dancing, had given it tacit approval by coming to watch and applaud, had become rigorous and reproving. The permissive priest of yore was gone. For the new, stern cure, popular feasting went on for far too long. [ED] It kept a man from work not only while it lasted, but while he painfully recuperated in its aftermath. In any case, as the Oc ditty had it, "There is no feast without a morrow." A feastday was likely to run into two or three, its participants carried away by the unaccustomed respite. What was much worse was the abandoned behavior: the unchaste dress of women and lewdness of the men, the return home at dawn, the drunkenness and debauchery without measure.

and;

There has been some discussion whether the "Jansenism" of many graduates of nineteenth-century seminaries contributed to what has been called deChristianization- itself a misleading term if it suggests more than the abandoning of church rituals. As early as 1828 an old Yonne priest, trained before the Revolution, had criticized his younger colleagues: "The young reformers of humankind flatly refuse absolution to all but girls who do not dance and lads who never go to taverns ... and in this way they avoid the trouble of confessions." Doubtful about this view, Latreille and Remond remark that after all this was no more than "a certain moral rigorism or harshness, ... frequent in that clerical generation." Yet moral rigorism should not be underrated when its effects touched every aspect of popular observance and turned the priest into a killjoy [ED]-a resident and interfering Mrs. Grundy.

and;

We have seen that straitened means condemned the priests to rapacity. There was less excuse for their authoritarianism. The best historian of the French priesthood in the nineteenth century, Father Joseph Brugerette, has attributed the unpopularity of priests to their "absolutist and retrograde ideas," which in his view ran counter to the ideals of greater social and political independence that were gaining ground. My own view is that the tendency toward independence, itself a product of novel possibilities, did not suggest rebellion against the priest or a complete break with him; it simply made it possible. Like the stern schoolteacher, the authoritarian priest was the product of an authoritarian family in an authoritarian society. They would all be challenged in due course, when  opportunity offered. The priest's immediate problem was not that he was too absolutist, but that he was less retrograde than the villagers he sought to direct. Venality lost friends, but attempted reform lost more.

What's interesting to see here is the transformation of French Catholicism from a "traditionally" more permissive variety into a more austere one. Weber raises the subject of Jansenism as being a potential source of this transformation, but in my opinion pseudo-Jansenism i.e Manicheanism is the more likely culprit.  Faced with the challenge of the modernity the Church retreated into a an austere spirtuality as a means of escape.

"Modern" religion extolled new cults (the Virgin, the Blessed Heart of Jesus, the Holy Sacrament) over familiar ones, and sought to purify practice. The clergy had always shown a certain hostility to popular rejoicing as essentially pagan; feasting was gross, libertine, leading to violence and keeping peasants away from church services. Unable to eliminate such feasts, the Church incorporated them but did not cease to treat them with suspicion [ED]. Around mid-century the hierarchy set about purification. Balazuc, in Ardeche, boasted a Confrerie de Saint-Antoine (better known as the Fraternity of the Cow, because its members killed one every year and distributed its meat to the poor). In 1845 the priest found the fraternal banquets were too washed down with wine and suppressed the confrerie. His action set off a riot, but it was final in Balazuc and representative of a wider trend. Religious congregations and fraternities, especially penitents, had lost sight of their original purpose, which was to aid the poor, bury the indigent, honor their members in death. They had become social and drinking societies-blancs le matin et gris le soir, they said in Velay-or political clubs, their chief public function restricted to marching in processions wearing colorful, awesome robes and hoods. "This form of devotion no longer corresponded to the mentality of the population," commented a canon. Certainly not to the mentality of reforming clergymen. Far gone in their worldly ways, the penitents were reformed to death and left to expire slowly in the first two decades of the Third Republic. They were replaced with  associations specifically dedicated to prayer and to pious works. The result was a setback on both sides: the new associations, which the clergy sponsored, sometimes wilted or died; meanwhile, the old groups, abandoned by the clergy, withered badly also. "In a few years," wrote Edward Harrison Barker in 1893, "there will be no Blue Penitents at Figeac. As the old members of the confraternity die, there are no postulants to fill their places.

This is an extraordinary passage which shows the damage an "excessive sprituality" can inflict on a public faith. It also shows the symbiotic nature of spirituality and corporeal practice. Separate one from the other and they both die, and it's a great example of what happens when you try to clericise the laity. Reading these passages makes me want to go Protestant. Where, for goodness sake, is dancing prohibited in the Bible, or reasonably derived from it? An yet this is what a generation of clergy thought of as sin. It wasn't moral rigorism as much as it was a distortion of Christianity.

Dancing, in any case, competed with the contemplation and the prayer that should command Sundays-the day of the Lord. "Today Sunday does not belong to the Lord, but to dancing," sighed La Semaine religieuse of Montpellier in 1877. But Sunday brought for most the only intermission in hard labor. They wanted to enjoy it as they could, and there was a widespread custom that after mass or vespers people danced. Priests denounced this, and also railed against the reels and jigs that joined on saints' feast days and pilgrimages. They tended to react to local fiddlers as if they were unclean sinners. We hear of one in Vernajoul (Ariege) who made a scene when the minstrels scheduled to play during the afternoon's celebrations of the Emperor's Day, August 15, escorted the mayor to church service in the morning. The report of the incident cites "his well-known feelings against music, dancing,.........A folklorist of the 1880's expressed regret at the oversensitivity of priests and warned that when these diversions held on pilgrimage days ended, the pilgrimages would end too. He was not fundamentally wrong. Pilgrimages endured, but when they were no longer part of popular rejoicings they represented only a religion from which the life had been drained away. Moreover, the danger to such institutions of the Church was all the greater because the Church was becoming more dispensable. Around 1900 the priest of Morette (Isere) refused absolution to a girl unless she promised to give up dancing. "If you don't want to give it, keep id" answered the girl.

Modernity gave people options, but the Manichean transformation of the Church worked to repel them from the old order. The destruction of the the faith was not a one sided affair. Many were working from within to undermine the old order.

Modernity: The Forces of Secularity

IN THE MID-1870's 35,387,703 of the 36,000,000 people in France were listed in the official census as Catholics. The rest declared themselves Protestants (something under 600,000), Jews (5,000), or freethinkers (80,000). The secular clergy of the Catholic church alone included 55,169 priests, one for every 639 inhabitants. Roman Catholicism remained, as it had been in 1801, "the religion of the majority of Frenchmen."

One of the things which completely blindsided the Catholic Church was the collapse of the faith among ordinary people following Vatican Two. This in turn has clouded many of the "interpretations" of the Council, with many of the Traditionalists blaming it for the Church's problems.  Yet astute minds had recognised long before the Council that serious problems were fermenting. In 1944, two french priests involved with the care of the working class published a survey of the state of the faith in that demographic. France, Pays de Mission?, shocked the clerical establishment in its estimate that eight million of France's working class were essentially pagan. What had happened in the period since 1870?  Remember this was 1944, well before Vatican Two.

Most analyses of secularisation tend to take a intellectual approach to the problem of the loss of faith but in my opinion this tends to focus on that small element of society that actually thinks and ignores the mass of men who experience their faith rather than intellectualise about it. This in turn leads to "intellectual" approaches towards re-Christianisation which have largely failed.  Weber, in my opinion, sees the practice of religion as being a consequence of an interplay with a wide variety of social and personal forces and in my opinion gives a far more convincing analysis as to why religion collapsed  in the face of modernity.

As mentioned before Weber paints a picture of a pre-modernity equilibrium between social circumstances and religious faith, weak or strong, which favored religion. But astute observers noted that much of the relgious zeal of the past was intermixed with intermixed with a great deal of worldliness. In a strongly "local" world the church had both a religious and sociological function, with each underpinning the other, and what modernity did is totally undercut the sociological dimension.

"Sunday, the peasants go to church," wrote Madame Romieu at the end of the Second Empire, "some moved by religious feeling, most by habit or by fear of what people say." One went to church because it was the thing to do on Sunday, because it was one of the few social occasions of the week, because it was an opportunity for talking business or meeting friends, acquaintances, relatives. It was--especially for the women, once men had grasped at the opportunities that fairs held out-the sole occasion to escape the isolation in which many lived, the major recreation or diversion in a restricted life. Observance business, and pleasure were combined. One went to mass wearing one's Sunday best, and given the muddy cart tracks, this often meant special paths, mass roads, chemins de messe. Public announcements were made by the village crier as the  congregation left the service, public sales were often timed to fall after it, one could slip off later to call on the notary or the doctor, or drop in to the tavern, circle, or cafe. Even if a majority did not attend the service but went about their work as on any other day, "a multitude of peasants gathered in front of the church, discussed politics, made deals, filled the taverns."

In a world where entertainment was scarce, church provided a certain festive diversion. Those attending might well "love the high mass, the rich ornaments, seeing a great many statues of saints in their churches." Writing about his grandmother, Charles Peguy presented church attendance as a treat for the lonely child raised in a woodcutter's hut in Bourbonnais in the early 1800's : "When she was good, she was allowed to go on Sunday to mass in the village she wore her sabots because one doesn't go to church barefoot, and she was happy because that's where everybody met, where they exchanged news, where one heard about deaths, marriages, births, where gossip flowed about what was going on, where servants were hired."

Technological limits placed practical restriction on the ability of people to leave their local circumstances and the only show in town was the Church. What modernity did is give people alternatives.

We see that in the churches, as in the schools, non-attendance is a way of measuring ineffectiveness. The growing numbers of migrant workers going to the cities added to this trend. Urban workers worked Sundays and holidays, or did so very often. The more earnest the man, the more he worked. The less responsible were the more likely to get drunk during their free time. The Church did not see them either way. Like the Revolution, acquaintance with the city did not destroy religious sentiment. It simply made nonconformity possible or created another kind of conformity. Men who attended church at home because their peers did ceased to attend church where such attendance was  exceptional. The city merely provided an opportunity for the collapse of practices "shallowly rooted in the personality." Returning migrants may well have lost whatever impulse to religious conformity they had left with. They did not necessarily bandy this about so long as the priest retained his influence in the community. But they were ready to welcome emancipation when it came.

At any rate, all observers seem to have sensed the shallowness of faith behind the slackness of observance. In Beauce respectable farmers, "preoccupied by the care to augment their fortune, work to this end even on Sunday during the services, so that the churches are deserted." Not that they lacked respect for religion, "but they consider that the time they would spend in church would be lost for their work and their fortune."  Not challenge, but indifference and hardheadedness. One farmer declared that he would rather go to hell, since heaven was too high and far away. He was not interested in salvation ("it's not in my way of thinking; ... it's not done"). The paradise he sought was here on earth. "The absence of religious sentiment [in the countryside, especially] is such that there are communes where scarcely one marriage in six is blessed in church" (Yonne, 1862) .

What Weber argues is that modernity gave the people the real world option of not practicing religion in a way that was not possible prior to modernity. It's true that there were modernist elements that actually tried to stifle religion but the real solvent were the new opportunities afforded by modernity. City life, particularly, was different and provided for more anonymity--and opportunities for alternatives-- than life in the village. Life in small local communities is difficult to live anonymously and peer pressure tends to encourage conformity, not that there was much else to do. What all observers seem to note is that religious rot did not really set in till the last two decades of the 19th Century, just as French modernisation was gaining steam and well after the French Revolution with all of its Enlightenment Ideas.

In 1874 the bishop of Limoges bewailed "this grievous inertia of the masses." Alain Corbin, who has found no evidence of a great increase in religious indifference in the Limousin before 1870, notes a "brutal fall of religious practice" just about that time~not yet the godlessness the bishop of Limoges described in 1875, "but indifference, an incurable apathy, the total abandonment of religious duties, [and] universal disaffection." In the Limousin the Church's identification with the Moral Order brought anticlericalism. But even there, as almost everywhere, the most detached or hostile
maintained their loyalty to rites of passage and local festivals. More generally, as in Puy-de-Dome, "the religious question leaves our countrymen indifferent." though they "continue to go to church on Sunday out of habit."

and,

From the Church's point of view, every innovation only made things worse. The bicycle was blamed for enabling young people to avoid mass. Tourists, visitors, and returning emigrants felt increasingly free to speak of their indifference to religious practice or even their scorn of it. Military service side-by-side with "pagan" urban workers made some peasants ashamed of a show of piety as a mark of their bumpkin backwardness. Finally, with war in 1914 there came a culmination of the pressures toward detachment. Yet, how far and fast would all these factors have worked if religion had been solidly anchored in personality?

Weber hits the nail on the head here by recognising that a "personal" faith "anchored in personality" is a different thing than an apparent faith of custom, habit and convenience. What modernity exposed is that the "personal faith" was strongly lacking and that a lot of religious practice was a habit contingent upon circumstances. Modernity changed the circumstances and exposed the shallowness in religious belief.  What Weber is hinting at--in a roundabout way-- is the notion that a strong faith is not opposed to modernity its just that weak faith is corroded by it.  And pre-Modern Europe had a lot of weak faith. What Weber is getting at is that  Modernity is not a solvent of religion, it is a solvent of weak and superficial religion, it separates the wheat from the chaff.

The other element at play here was not so much the philosophy of scientific materialism but the practical consequences of it. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, in a world where life was precarious and the means for mastering nature extremely limited, prayer and religion were of some utility to the peasant:

Living was marginal, disaster inexplicable and uncontrollable. This added to the countryman's Winnie-thePooh syndrome of seeing the trace of fantastic monsters in tracks that he had made himself. Where harm and ill-fortune were swiftly come by, nothing was easier than to claim that they were punishments of heaven. Long centuries of trying to mollify and coax the powerful conjured up a religion where fear almost excluded love, a faith bent to flatter and do honor to the heavenly lords in order to obtain their protection or avoid their ire. Power and irascibility were what impressed. The peasants would not work their cattle on the feasts of the nastiest saints, the ones most likely to resent and revenge any irreverence; they sought to discover what "thrashing saint" lay behind their illness. Kindly saints could be invoked when they were needed; in grimmer mood, they evoked well-conditioned submission. 

God was far away. The saints were near. Both were anthropomorphic. Saints were intercessors. One did not address God directly, but prayed to saints to request his favors, rewarded them if the crop was good or the weather fair, ....

Practical science gave men some form of control over the environment and was therefore more useful than religion. Whatever its philosophical underpinnings--something the average man doesn't even consider---the insights and power bought about by science had practical consequences. Why pray to God when chemical fertilizers will do the trick?

A peasant quoted by Gaston Mery in 1907 explained: "We compare what the teacher gives us with what the priest can give. Well, he gives us more. It's the teacher that has taught us how to read, and that is useful in life. He has taught us how to reckon and that is even more useful ... and then that is not all. If we need advice for our taxes, for our business, we just go to see him. He's got books and papers about farming, about fertilizer." The things one could see, the things one could touch, were taking over; and the school rode forward on their tide. The peasant's need had shifted from consolation to advice on concrete matters; and on this level, at this time at least, the presbytery could not keep up with the school.

and,

Yet phosphates, chemical fertilizers, and schooling had spelled the beginning of the end. In 1893, a drought year in Bourbonnais when many men were having masses said for their emaciated cattle (which died anyway), the priest reproached Henry Norre, a self-taught man who farmed not far from Cerilly, for not attending church. "I haven't got the time," he answered. "And really, I haven't got much confidence in your remedies for the beasts. My remedies are better; you can check." Daniel Halevy quotes another story about Norre. This time the farmer returned from the railway station with a cartful of fertilizer and met the priest. "What are you carting there?" "Chemicals." "But that is very bad; they burn the soil" "Monsieur le cure," said Norre, "I've tried everything. I've had masses said and got no profit from them. I've bought chemicals and they worked. I'll stick to the better merchandise." It was the requiem of nineteenth-century religion.

Modernity: Chemins D'Enfer

Ed: Sorry, it's a long post but I think its important and Weber says it better than I can.

What comes across in Weber's book on the modernisation of France is the pivotal role that roads and more importantly, railways had in modernisation.  It really is difficult to overstate just how deeply the railway changed society but  suffice to say that Modernity would have been impossible without it. To understand the effect it produced its important to understand what life was like for the average peasant before it.

Prior to the invention of the railway, life was local with all that implies. The economy was local, social interactions were local as were materials and means. Economically, it meant that it was a world of limited economic opportunities which in turn produced a mode of life that was conditioned by these limited means.

Since for a long time they recognized few changes indeed as suitable, the peasant masses were widely regarded as passive, stubborn, and stupid. Yet we can see now that their narrow vision was the vision of frightened men in desperate circumstances; that the village was a lifeboat striving to keep afloat in heavy seas, its culture a combination of discipline and reassurance designed to keep its occupants alive. Insecurity was the rule, existence consistently marginal. Tradition, routine, vigorous adherence to the family and the community- and to their rules-alone made existence possible. The village was
an association for mutual aid. Lands, pastures, and ovens were generally ruled in common; dates for sowing and harvesting were set for one and all. Since all had to pull together, no deviance could be tolerated.

In such circumstances, innovation was almost inconceivable. Routine ruled: the structural balance attained by a long process of trial and error, reinforced by isolation and physical circumstances. At Tarascon (Ariege) in 1852, "the agricultural population thinks present agricultural methods have reached their peak of development and must not be set aside, being the fruit of long experience." Wisdom was doing things the way they always had been done, the way they were supposed to be done. "If you do as your neighbor does, you do neither ill nor well," advises a proverb of Franche-Comte. To the peasant, routine connoted not mindless labor but precious experience, what had worked and hence would work again, the accumulated wisdom without which life could not be maintained. For the Landais farmer, wrote Jean Ricard in 19I1, the past was "a guarantee of the present; in freeing himself from it he would fear to compromise the future."

and

Many peasants, says the Comte de Neufbourg in a book full of good sense and quite ignored, "live from day to day, and routine foresees things for them. We should not mock or destroy this routine: it would be missed, it is their wisdom." Subsistence farming-raising a bit of everything and making one's own bread and clothing-was a matter not of blind routine but of calculated necessity: "When one buys one's bread there is never any money left." Routine, concludes Daniel Faucher, is "the precious fruit of experience, a treasury of wisdom"; the peasant abandons it "only when assured that he can do so without damage." And that, as we have seen, is what happened.

Traditional communities continued to operate in the traditional manner as long as conditions retained their traditional shape: low productivity, market fluctuations beyond the producer's control, a low rate of savings, little surplus. What surplus the peasant could accumulate was taken from him in taxes or usurious interest, spent on church buildings and feasts, or invested in land. But land did not increase total production until capital investment in improvements became both possible and thinkable. And this did not happen until the market became an accessible reality, that is, until the expanding communications network brought it within reach. Economic growth could then proceed at a faster pace,· and producers could literally change their minds about what they were doing and to what end. Road and rail were the decisive factors in this change. Schools shaped and accelerated it. 

When you live an existence that is perilously close to starvation you minimise risk. Tradition was useful for precisely for that reason, and just as there are no atheists in foxholes, the precarious mode of existence, where death and ruin was a frequent and sudden occurrence, focused men on the afterlife and was conducive to religion. And it produced a certain mindset.

The very use of terms like out-of-date reflects a viewpoint alien to the traditional order. In a world highly dependent on natural conditions, seasonal and liturgical rhythms governed people's sense of time. Every situation had its earlier precedent, equivalent, or analogy. It was in the past that people sought lessons for the present: not new lessons but old ones that were never out-of date. Past and present were not two but one: a continuum of time lived, not a series of units measured by the clock. A feast or a fire, a harvest good or bad, a family event, lived on in memory and served as a more natural point of reference than the calendar. Songs and tales about events a century old evoked
powerful emotions. Proximity in time was relative, almost unimportant

Traditional time had no fixed units of measure; there was not even a break between work and leisure. Even the loss of time (comings and goings, pauses, waiting) passed largely unnoticed because integrated in routine and unquestioned. We have seen, for example, that land was often counted in the units of man or animal time it took to work it: not a fixed measure but one relative to conditions. Conditions also determined the value of time: it was cheap, very cheap, when everything else was scarce.

The railway changed everything. Weber quotes French statisticians that noted that were a railway appeared economic activity increased by about ten times. The railway bought prosperity but "prosperity" does not convey the profound change in the mode of life that it bought about.

The area around Die also changed radically after 1880. The region had stayed almost self-sufficient. So long as mules were the only means of transport, there was no point in growing commercialcrops for export, for instance fruit, to which its climate was well suited. Once roads and railroads breached the mountains and connected "this cell of the French Alps" to the life that flowed only some miles away, past the Drome gorges in the Rhone valley's plains, buyers appeared for cattle, lavender, and in due course fruit from newly developed orchards; chemical fertilizer and superphosphates could reach the narrow valleys and help meet new demands; rye gave way to wheat; comfort replaced grinding poverty. The profound transformation can be dated to the railway's coming in 1894 and the years immediately following, when the peasants became used to it and learned how to handle the formalities involved in shipping and receiving merchandise. The outside world, which till then had had little bearing on their own, now came in with a rush: skills like writing invoices and bills of lading, counting, and schooling in general acquired concrete meaning as occasions to use them multiplied. It was a story that repeated itself elsewhere

To illustrate just one way in which prosperity eroded the old order, consider the effect of dress and fashion on maintaining the social order. It's easy to maintain a heirarchy when the clothing you wear marks you out for belonging to a certain social class. However the prosperity bought about by rail also bought better clothing and the ability to keep up with fashion,  which in turn started undermining at the obvious social distinctions.  By the 1880's, Weber reports of how many people upper classes were lamenting about people dressing "above their station." On its own it means nothing, but taken in totality with all the other changes, it was part of a  force replacing the old order which was unstoppable.

My purpose is not to chronicle the growth of the wine industry or of any other, but to suggest what the presence of viable and accessible roads and rails did to people and to their way of life. It changed them radically. It opened possibilities sometimes sighed for but never within reach. The turning wheels on road and railway, even wheelbarrows, meant vastly greater carrying power, more movement and faster movement, more productivity and more resources,more choice or at least more freedom to choose. ..... Roads and rails brought men into the market, permitted them to drink wine or sell it profitably, or to develop crops that could not be marketed before, and to give up growing others that could now be bought more cheaply. They also brought ruin to local   enterprises no longer protected by earlier isolation, to outdated occupational groups like the riverboatmen, and to producers of mediocre local goods or crops fated to be  outmatched by specialized ones......The move was not only in space, but in time and mind as well: roads and rails introduced new foods into the diet, new materials in the building of the house, new objects in its interior, new tools in the fields about it, new things to do on holidays, and new kinds of clothes to wear. They offered opportunities for enterprise and hence for social mobility that were not there before; the jobs that went with roads and railways alone were temptations that set many on the move.

and,

A few peasants had watches and displayed them with pride. But even to them a watch was "a horse in the stable," useless when one could refer to cockcrows, to the stars, to the sun's touching this or that rock or tree, or to one's own shadow. As with watches, so with the calendar. The calendar year meant nothing, the rhythm of seasons everything. In Auvergne the basic division was between winter, from All Souls to Saint George's day (November I-April 23), and summer, when beasts could sleep out of doors. In Franche-Comte, summer was divided not into months but into "times": the time for going outdoors (patchi fou, going out), essentially spring; the times for haying and for harvesting. In the late autumn and winter, there were "times" for sewing and for vieillin (veillees) .

In the French language, temps refers to both weather and duration: two concepts to us but not to the peasant whose longer hours of work came in the fair weather of the summer. To the farmer, time is work; life is work; work brings subsistence and independence. In the city, time and work have another meaning: productivity, surplus, profit, comfort, leisure. In late-nineteenth century France these two notions of time clashed, and one disappeared. No other outcome was possible. The new world of markets and of schools worked only on its kind of time; and the difference was fundamental. Old skills based on watching and imitating what one's elders did, old forms of intuition learned from the wise or simply discovered in oneself, gave way before the new techniques and practices of rationality. Success was achieved not by harder work, greater strength, or inspired guessing, but by superior reasoning. The new process was rational ("we do this because"), quantitative ("this way we turn out that much more"), abstract ("these are the rules"). Internalized rhythms of labor were replaced by learned skills and norms. A man who thinks his work is no worse, certainly, than one who does not; but he is certainly different.

What Weber documents is the change in the mindset of the common man bought about by the new prosperity. And it was a change which was qualitative, discontinuous with the mindset of the past. And it was a mindset which I feel did not actively reject the past as much as it found it irrelevant and not of any use.  Charles Taylor talks about the change from the "porous" to the "buffered" self but the approach he takes is far too intellectual and implies a conscious choice in the state of being whereas what Weber describes is an adaptation to a new state of affairs: more evolutionary than deliberately revolutionary. Less a philosophical position than a pragmatic acceptance of affairs in the minds of the average man.

For Christianity, especially Catholicism, this change in mindset proved disastrous. But it should no have had to have been so.  While it's true that the old equilibrium between the agrarian existence of Europe and Christianity had been shattered  a new one could have probably been achieved had the Church the capacity to adapt, but it didn't. Instead it took a reactionary stance that went well beyond doctrinal lines and shot itself in the foot by doing so. Perhaps this is best expressed by the actions of Pope Gregory the XVI, who in an attempt to forestall modernity banned the introduction of railways into the Papal states.  His successor, seeing the benefits of technology and the benefits it conferred to the poor reversed this decision and thereby contributed to the modernity which Christianity has been unable to deal with.

I suppose what I'm trying to say here in this post is that engineering and not the Enlightenment is the pre-eminent dimension of Modernity.

Modernity: The Way We Were

 The Angelus. Millet, 1857-59

  

Those who express regret at the passing of the level-headed, vigorous, hard working countryman of yore have no idea what he was really like-no more, in many cases, than his contemporaries had. As Philip Gaskell observes, of the Scottish Highlander in roughly the same period: "He lived not in· picturesque, rural felicity, but in conditions of penury and squalor that can only be fairly compared with those of a famine area in contemporary India, and that were tolerable only because they were traditional and familiar" .

One of the books which has strongly shaped my interpretation of modern history is, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France, 1870-1914 by Eugen Weber. The book has won numerous accolades and is considered one of the influential texts of modernisation theory. Weber has a great writing style and the genius of the book is writing it from the perspective of the peasant/worker rather than from the vantage of the upper or intellectual class. Through numerous anecdotal examples of the effect of modernisation on the "little" people, Weber is able to convey the profound changes and transformation of the traditional French way of life that it was able to effect.

I think many of the traditionalist intellectuals who despair of the changes modernity has bought about tend to focus on the intellectual and philosophical developments which enabled the modern degeneracy. But what is often ignored in this analysis is the profound way technology and organisation, morally neutral things in themselves, utterly uprooted the traditional way of life independently of any corruption of ideas. It's not just the ideas but the "environment" matters as well.

Weber, while taking a humanist approach, is not a sentimentalist and his description of pre-Modern France, i.e the France of the recent Enlightenment is pretty brutal, and dispels any notions of a of an idyllic Christendom of milk and honey that is so often intimated by Christian Traditionalists. The life lived by the average man prior to modernity was strictly local...and hard.  Through page after page Weber describes the grinding affect of poverty on peoples lives. Death through overwork, neglect of those who cannot produce, risk aversion--which stifled innovation--and poverty, endless poverty.

Peasants in Upper Quercy began work at dawn, ended late at night, often went to work their own plot by moonlight after having worked another's land by day. "No more rest and no more easel" lamented a landowner near Nantes in 1856. "Everyone scrimps, ... works without care for rest or food, ... to buy a plot of land from some neighbor ruined by usury ."

The more ambitious you were, the harder you worked. Benolt Malon's father, employed on a Forez farm, was free to work his potato patch and his kitchen garden on Sunday after church. He died at thirty-three of pleurisy, which he contracted as he hurried to get to his freshly planted potatoes. As late as 1908 in the marshlands of the Vendee a man farming four hectares with only a spade (thus able to work no more than four ares a day) left home at five in the morning, returned at seven in the evening, and never saw his children. · Hard labor without chains-to which one remained bound by necessity and from which only death could bring release.

The other impression that Weber is able to convey is the sense and primacy  of locality in the Pre-Modern world. For many people, life was lived almost entirely within a circle of ten miles across. Isolation meant that ideas and customs arose endogenously and locally with the result that each region developed its own unique identity. On the other hand, the isolation locked the community out from the outside world and its ideas.

The only "trans-local" institutional presence in these rural areas of France was the Church which usually formed the focus and defacto administrative body of the locality. In essence, given the environmental and technical limitations it had a captive market and over time it developed a symbiotic relationship with its communities. Time, as well as agricultural production, was organised through the Church calendar, knowledge was dispensed by the priests, all significant events such as births, deaths and marriages had a religious involvement. A local public celebrations and feasts were usually Church run affairs. Religion and agricultural localism had become integrated.

But the religiosity of the people was not one of doctrinal purity, instead it was mixed with a strong sense of magic and superstition. And while many of the priests were conscious of the mixture and tried to rid the peasantry of these unwanted additions to the faith, the fact was--as Weber demonstrates through numerous anecdotes--an accomodation was reached whereby the Priest tolerated--and frequently suffered--for these foibles of the faithful.

But what I think Weber conveys quite well is how Pre-Modern society was the way it was because of the interplay--and equilibrium-- between cultural factors and physical constraints. And this is really important, because modernity is not just simply the consequence of "bad philosophy" but its also the consequence of technological advancements which were able to break down many of the constraints of the past, destroying the equilibrium.  Once you recognise this important point you realise that technology is as much of a solvent Old World as are some of the corrupt ideas of certain strands of the Enlightenment.  Christian restorationists, wanting to go "back",  have to reckon not just with bad philosophy but also with good technology,  that point being that any restoration of the Old World is impossible except apocalyptically.

In essence, what Weber's book does is demonstrate to a certain degree, Lewis Mumford's thesis in Technics and Civilisation: namely the key feature of modernity is the increasing integration of the machine into civilisation with the consequent possibilities and transformations that it brings. Mumford also recognised that while the machine was integral to the modern world the direction which the modern world took was a function of the values to which the machine was applied.  Any Western restoration, which in my opinion requires the rebuilding of Christianity, is going to have to stop trying to restore the past but will instead have to rely on the capturing of modernity. 

Protestant Integralism

I know I told Bruce Charlton that my next post was going to be on modernisation but I've been struck down with a cold and the brain is a bit mushy.

One of the interesting questions for me is why did countries like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, which could in many way be considered Integralist,  so rapidly secularise following the collapse of the political structures which supported the Church.

One of the brightest guys dealing with the subject is José Casanova, one of the world's top scholars on the sociology of religion. Cassanova's expertise is in the relation between religion, modernity and secularisation. I thought I would post an extended quote from one of his books as he provides a very good explanation with regard to the mechanics at play.  For those of you who can't be bothered reading it the executive summary is as follows:

1) Catholicism made no space for the secular.
2) Any secularising force had to to oppositional to Catholicism and therefore hostile.
3) Calvinism allowed a secular space.
4) Protestantism was able to blur the distinction between the secular and sacred, integrating the two in a way that Catholicism was never able.

As John Witte shows in this book, Luther reassembled the dualism of the Augustinian two kingdoms theory in novel ways that led to relocations of the sacred, the religious and the secular. Most importantly - and this is the key difference with the laicist Southern-Latin pattern - the core dualism between the religious clergy and the secular laity is dissolved by mutual infusion, so that, in Witte's formulation, "Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers at once laicised' the clergy and 'clericised' the laity."[ED] The 'clerical' office of preaching and teaching was secularised, becoming one secular vocation just like any other, while the traditional 'lay' offices now became "forms of divine calling and priestly vocation." 

The 'church' is also radically transformed in the process. A new dualism now emerges between the ecclesiastical institution, which as a visible church is just, part of the saeculum that falls under the law of the earthly kingdom, i. e., the state, and the invisible church of the eschatological communion of the saints. In the process, the 'true religion', the Kingdom of God, of Love and of the Gospel, mutates into a religion of inwardness and migrates to the individual conscience, eventually giving birth to pietist movements on the margins of the ecclesiastical institution, which prepared the ground for the modern cult of the individual and the sacralisation of human rights. Secularisation or soft `deconfessionalisation' in this context means : a) continued adherence to the national church, which remains under the jurisdiction of the national sovereign; b) a drastic decline in religious (ecclesiastical) beliefs (confessional faith) and practices (rituals); c) interiorisation of a modern, individual, spiritual realm which becomes the authentic space of the sacred. There are of course tensions between the three domains of the religious-secular-sacred: a) the democratic national collective (the civil religion); b) the ecclesiastical Lutheran church; and c) the individual inward conscience. But there is no radical chasm or schism between the three.

 The Southern Latin Catholic pattern evinces different dynamics of dissociation and relocation of the social sacred (state and nation), the ecclesiastical institution (the Catholic Church) and the religion of the individual. The process of absolutist confessionalisation is based on a close alliance between throne and altar, but the transnational structure of the Catholic Church and papal supremacy do not allow the kind of integration and fusion of the two one finds in the Nordic Lutheran pattern, even under caesaro-papist Gallicanism[ED]. The secularisation of the state takes place through a radical break with the church that resists disestablishment. The schism here leads to a protracted chasm, indeed to a kind of prolonged civil war within the social sacred between a new republican laicist civil religion and the old national Catholic religion. The Latin-Catholic path of laicization is marked not by integration but by civil-ecclesiastical and laic-clerical antagonism. It maintains rigidly the boundaries between the religious and the secular, but pushes those boundaries into the margins, containing, privatising and marginalising everything religious. When it breaks the monastery walls, it will not be to bring the religious into the secular world, but to laicize them, dissolving and empting their religious content and making religious people (monks and nuns) civil and laic before forcing them into the secular world. Deconfessionalisation of state, nation, and individuals here means assertive anti-Catholic unchurching.

and,

The absolutist principle cuius regio ejus religio was not significantly altered by the shift of sovereignty from the monarch to the nation or people with the fall of the ancient regimes or with increasing massive democratisation process in the 20th century. European societies have remained religiously homogeneous societies, and the only significant change has been that from belief to unbelief. In this sense the process of European secularisation ought to be understood primarily as a process of deconfessionalization of states, nations, and individuals. But here one can also distinguish between the Nordic pattern of soft deconfessionalisation, which can best be characterized as 'belonging without believing', that is, secularisation without unchurching, and the more radical deconfessionalisation of the Catholic South that accompanies laicist unchurching. Denmark presents the paradigmatic case of a European society with one of the lowest rates of religious belief and practice accompanied by one of the highest rates of confessional affiliation in the national church, the Church of Denmark. In this respect, to be Danish, to be Lutheran, and to be secular amounts to one and the same thing. This contrasts with the Southern Catholic pattern (France, Belgium and, increasingly, Spain, but not so much Portugal or Italy) of radical secularization and laicist deconfessionalisation.

The secular is understood here in drastic laicist, anti-clerical, and often anti-religious terms that demand assertive unchurching. Spaniards in post-Francoist Spain who took the resisting Catholic Church to court in order to get their names erased from the church's baptismal registry may serve as a vivid illustration of this assertive deconfessionalisation.

(José Casanova:Secular and sacred? The Scandinavian case of religion in human rights, law and public sphere)

Merry Christmas

I'd like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a prosperous and safe New Year. In keeping with the Protestant theme of recent posts I thought I would post a link to one of my favourite Christmas carols: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. The Catholic Right likes to diss Protestantism but its worth remembering that there are a lot of good things in Protestantism that need to be acknowledged and affirmed.

God bless.

Alternative Modernities

How Modernity differs from the pre-Modern is rather difficult to succinctly state but suffice to say that there is a qualitative difference between pre-Modern and Modern societies which can be recognised by looking at them.

For the purpose of this post I want to take world as it was in 1940 to illustrate what I'm getting at. The England of 1940 was modern society compared to the England of 1640. Industrialization, urbanisation, mechanisation and so on had changed life to such a degree that the mode of living for the average citizen was substantially different.  England was modern in a way that Yugoslavia or rural Romania was not. Likewise Germany, France, USA, Sweden, Russia, Japan etc were modern societies.

While all of these societies were modern, the expression of their modernity was largely contingent up local factors which shaped the path of modernity in their countries. Germany, while modern, was different to the U.S.A., which was different to Japan. Remember, this is 1940.

One of the distinguishing features of modern societies is the rise of a managerial class which is responsible for the administration and co-ordination of all the institutions which make modern life possible. In Germany and Japan, this managerial class was fascistic, in Russia, it was Marxist and in England and USA it was Protestant. Modernity, in each of these countries was strongly influenced by the cultural values of its managerial class. The reason why the Anglosphere was a haven for individual liberty, freedom of conscience, respect for the person, prosecution of degeneracy and freedom of religion is because they were the values of mainstream Protestantism at the time. Anglosphere modernity was Protestant tinged. Mainstream Protestantism as it was 1940.

I don't want to get into Catholic modernity since it is a far more complex subject but suffice to say Catholicism has a very difficult relationship with it and its relationship to it has been frequently antagonistic instead of co-operative. In 1940 it proved to be relatively irrelevant to world affairs.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at is that modernity can assume many different forms and not all of them are intrinsically hostile toward religion. I think one of the great weak spots of Right wing thought is the anti-modernistic sentiment seen so often in many of the commentators. Agrarian simplicity is only appealing to those who have never had to work the land. The problem is not so much modernity as it is irreligion.

Rethinking Protestantism III: Ernst Troeltsch

Gentlemen, Everything is tottering!

Protestantism gets a lot of grief in reactionary circles especially with regard to its relationship with liberalism and the modern world.  And I personally feel that a some of this criticism is quite justified. However, I do think that many critiques of Protestantism miss the fact that it seems to have "handled" modernity in a way that Catholicism wasn't able to.

In order to keep this post manageable, I'm going to define modernity as the sociopolitcal environment that has come about from the implementation of ideas of the Enlightenment. i.e. contemporary society and political state.  The distinguishing feature of modernity is the legitimisation and autonomy of the secular.

From the outset, Catholicism has had a problem with this state of affairs. UntilVatican Two, it could be safely said that it's aim was to reintroduce the Church's position in society that it had assumed in the Middle Ages. i.e. A complete involvement in every aspect of life to the degree that it felt it was appropriate. Any "secular space" in such a schema was really nothing more than "light touch" Catholicism. There was no true secular space in such a society nor can there be one where the faith is "integral" to it.

However, the ages of faith were as much a condition of temporal contingencies as they were of religious devotion and Modernity sideswiped Catholicism because it didn't understand this fact. The Printing press, large scale commerce, industrialisation, steam power and urbanisation were as toxic to its medieval preeminence as were heretical ideas. Modernity inherently generates secular spaces and the problem for Catholicism is that it doesn't know how to deal with secularity.

The other problem with Catholicism is that it has one model of "holiness".  Good Catholics are those who spend a lot of time practicing Catholic asceticism which involves an effective withdrawal from the world. However secular competence involves spending more time in the affairs of the world. The result is that the more "holy" a catholic, the more "aescetic" they are and the less secular they can be. i.e. Good Catholics spend lots of time in Church like affairs, bad Catholics spend time in the affairs of this world. Hence Catholicism's paucity of lay saints.  This may also go a long way to explaining the inefficiency of many Catholic secular institutions.

At the dawn of the 20th Century Ernst Troeltsch was one of the foremost public Protestant theologians. Unfortunately, he seems to have been mostly forgotten during most of the 20th Century, though recently there has been a resurgence in his thought. One of his areas of interest was in the relationship of Protestantism and Modernity. He was also a fair and sympathetic critic of Catholicism and incidentally, the next door neighbour of Max Weber.  His book Protestantism and Progress deals with this subject explicitly and I thought it would be worth to jot down a few of my thoughts on it as Troeltsch has several interesting ideas.

Firstly, Troelstch does not see a direct link with Protestantism and Modernity, the relationship being far more complex. Troeltsch, unlike many Catholic scholars, situates the origin of Modernity in the Renaissance humanism of Italy and regards early Protestantism as the continuation of the Middle Ages and anti-Modernist. The early Protestant division, Lutherism and Calvinism initially compete as alternative "churches" to the Catholic Church. It's approximately two centuries after the division that the Protestantism starts to fully develop along the lines of its doctrinal innovations and begins to rid itself of the habits of Catholicism.

Secondly, Troeltsch argues that Protestantism develops along its doctrinal lines and emergence of personal conscience and self-sanctification through the pursuit of vocation enable it to engage the world in a way that Catholicism could not. Protestant "vocationalism" is able to Christianise the world by getting into the thick of it.

...while Protestantism has furthered the rise of the modern world, often largely and decisively, in none of these departments does it appear as its actual creator. What it has done is simply to secure for itgreater freedom of development and that, moreover, in the various departments in very various ways ; and besides, the action of the different Confessions and groups has differed  in strength and direction. All it has anywhere done is to favour, strengthen, colour, and modify the course of the development, while in some cases it maintained and even rein forced the opposing influences drawn from the Late-medieval view of life

and,

...religion is really derived from religion, and the results of its influence are really, in the first place, religious. Religion becomes a power in ordinary life only by taking up civilisation into itself and giving it a special direction. But it always itself remains distinct from this civilisation ; it is always more a formative than a creative force.

Protestantism is able to "capture" modernity and modulate it according to its particular denomination. In the case of the Amish it is a "backwards" force, while in the case of the Calvinists it was able to develop it along Christian lines in a "forward" direction.

Thirdly, Troeltsch recognises--like much of the reactosphere--that the weak point of Protestantism is its individual subjectivity which is able to ditch the theological doctrines which enabled it while maintaining the habit of them. Protestantism while being able to engage the world also has the dangerous propensity to become part of it and in the end undermine itself.

Another point which has to be taken into account is that the inner ecclesiastical structure of the Protestant Churches, and especially of Lutheranism, is considerably weaker than that of Catholicism, and therefore when con fronted with the modern world of ideas, has less resisting power than Catholicism.

and

Here the essentially Protestant basis of this movement is clearly evident, the transformation of the idea of freedom and grace into the ideas of the self -directing personality and a spiritual fellowship having its roots in history, all on the basis of a theism which has taken up into itself the idea of immanence. Moreover, this modern religious temper, in a thousand various modifications, has been so thoroughly absorbed by large portions of modern Protestantism, that the latter can scarcely be distinguished from the former. But it is equally unmistakable that modern religious feeling is in other cases dissatisfied with this, after all, ultimately Personalistic idea, and under the sense of the iron uniformity of natural law, of the world as a monster devouring all humanity, or, on the other hand, of the aesthetic glorification of the world and cult of individuality, tends towards ideas and feelings which are radically pantheistic, pessimistic, or, again, absolutely revolutionary, aiming blindly at producing some change or other. And where this spirit prevails, all relation to the practical, political, economic, and technical side of our civilisation is often entirely forgotten.

Troeltsh seems to recognise that Protestantism, in practice is a spectrum from the religiously sincere to those with a habit of it only. When Protestantism is "good" it is able to Christianise modernity, when Protestantism goes bad, it becomes an anti-civilisational power.

Sex Abuse Saga Quote Du Jour

Although it comes from the local left wing rag, this comment by the Chief Commissioner of the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse is worth some thought:

“I cannot comprehend how any person, much less one with qualifications in theology [ED] ... could consider the rape of a child to be a moral failure but not a crime,” Justice McClellan said in a speech to the Australian Human Rights Commission. “This statement by leaders of the Catholic Church marks out the corruption within the Church both within Australia, and it seems from reports, in many other parts of the world.”

It's easy when your theological training effectively makes mercy to the criminal more important than justice to the victim.

As I've said before there are two elements to this saga:

1) The particular crimes committed by the individual criminals.
2) The institutional response once the crimes were made known to the Church.

As the institutional response was the same throughout the world, the failure of the Church to respond appropriately should not be seen primarily as a failure of specific individuals to act, but rather a systemic problem in the Church rooted in its "operational" principles.

Rethinking Protestantism: II

As Max Weber made clear, the Protestant Reformation will open up one of these two roads by erasing physically and symbolically the walls separating the world and the monastery and by extending the calling to perfection to all Christians living in the world through their professional calling. 'To be monks in the world,' this is the spirit of the Protestant ethic and of modern secular vocational asceticism. In Protestant countries, secularization will have from the beginning an anti-monastic and anti-popish, but not an anti-religious meaning, insofar as its rationale was precisely religious reformation, putting an end to the dualism between religion and world, making religion more secular and the saeculum more religious, bringing religion to the world and the world to religion. The Protestant Reformation brought down the monastery walls separating the religious and secular worlds, and opened the way for their mutual interpenetration. This marks particularly the Anglo-Saxon Protestant road of secularization. Secularization and the parallel modernization do not entail necessarily the decline of religion.
 

Jose Cassanova. Rethinking Secularization.

Catholic conceptions of holiness tend to strongly emphasise the ascetic nature of religion. Holiness, in this schema, is thought of an increasing devotion to God through prayers, self denial, sacrifice and asceticism, and is seen as synonymous with the ideal clerical life. The lay person, who wishes to seek  holiness, aims to emulate the best practices of the clergy in their devotion to God. So, in a way, if a Catholic wants to become more deeply religious he does by following a model pioneered by the priests and monks. More prayer, more adoration, more Masses, more fasts, etc. And one of the interesting things about Catholicism is the fact that majority of the saints come from the ordained and relatively few from the laity. This state of affairs is more a reflection of the fact that the Church's  has only one recognised mode of "holiness"  and that the practices associated with this mode is is only practically attainable by those who deliberately pursue the consecrated/religious life.  In effect, Catholics have one "mode" of holiness and its difficult to live the lay life and combine it with this modality.

This guy--of all people!--highlights the problem succinctly.

Yet, this would appear to be a "modern" innovation. It was accepted--in the Middle Ages-- that a certain type of holiness could be achieved through the profession of arms. i.e the knight. And that sanctity was possible through just action on the battlefield.  But it does appear that Catholicism developed only a limited number of different modalities for achieving sanctity. By and large, sanctity in Catholicism was mainly achieved by following the model pioneered by religious ascetics.

One of the consequences of the Reformation was a rethinking of the nature of holiness. Protestantism vigorously attacked the distinction between the clergy and the laity. Under Protestantism, all who believed in Christ were "Priests" and this had the effect of opening up the possibility of sanctity to all believers in a way that Catholicism couldn't. Unlike Catholicism  where sanctity was seen as being synonymous with self-denial, mortification and asceticism, the Protestant conception of holiness recognised that it could achieved through the sincere Christian expression of whatever office or rank a person held in life. Some would say that Protestantism clericised the laity but that conception mixes the habits of the clergy with life practices of the laity. I think it would be far better to say that Protestantism produced a "Civic Christianity" in place of the "Clerical Christianity" of Catholicism.

Protestant bankers, for instance, could be considered "priestly" if they executed their office with righteousness, honesty and integrity. Protestant workers were righteous in the sight of God if they did not attempt to defraud their employer and worked for him as if they were working for God. Protestant public servants would strive to be honest and incorruptible.  The whole principle being that a Protestant's Christianity would infuse whatever task he was doing so that standing before God he would be able to claim that he was acting as God's faithful steward; be that a banker, a clerk, railroad worker or teacher. In the movie, Chariots of Fire, the Protestant, Eric Liddell, is able to transform his athleticism into a powerful expression of the Christian faith. Running and not ascetisicism  is the mechanism of his sanctification.

What Protestantism effectively did is expand the modalities by which a Christian could achieve sanctity, opening it up to people who neither had the time, nor the inclination to pursue the "clerical" model. Whereas the secular, before, could afford to be a bit "dirty" since it wasn't holy, Protestantism cleaned it up.  Protestantism infused Christianity into the secular domain in a way that Catholicism couldn't and suddenly it became a far more serious matter to be a corrupt businessman, judge or politician. And it's this type of Christianity which I believe was instrumental in the rapid social and economic advance of the Protestant countries following the Reformation.

The superior socio-economic performance of these societies was an emergent phenomenon contingent upon their civic Christianity. Independence of action, high trust, low levels of dishonesty, honest and good public governance, personal freedom and private initiative worked synergistically in a way that was not possible in Catholic countries and produced a superior social, economic and political outcome. Catholic countries could only begin to approach such levels in the late 20th C. (which also resulted in a pseudo-Protestantisation of their countries). Uncritical Catholic fanboys may dismiss this view but when Clark liberated Rome and the Vatican from the Nazi's it was as an Episcopalian General commanding an army of soldiers from a country founded on Enlightened Protestant beliefs---formerly condemned by the Pope.< /irony>  The Catholic world had no response. Catholic South America was twiddling its thumbs and France was useless.

As as side effect of this transformation of religious expression,  Protestantism was able to achieve a degree of integralism that Catholic traditionalists could only dream about. Whereas in the Catholic  model, there was in inbuilt duality between the secular and clerical/religious,  any attempts and "evangelising" society within this model resulted in the state managed imposition of the clerical onto the secular which resulted in a pressure cooker situation.

On the other hand, Protestantism, with its much broader conception of holiness, did not demand the everyone assume a quasi-clerical lifestyle. This blurred the distinction between the secular and the religious and made a confessional state far easier to achieve as less was demanded by the state on the citizen.  Therefore there was far less tension between the Church and the state. Compare the hostility of the Spanish secularists with that of the Nordic.

Despite all of it's faults--and there are many--it's increasingly my opinion that the emergence of Protestantism was a necessary event for the survival of Christianity. At it's birth, Modernity was around the corner, and its emergence provided the necessary vehicle by which Christianity could transition into it .

Vatican II as Catholic Perestroika

It is said that the priestly ordination of lay people in distant communities is necessary, because of the difficulty encountered by ministrants in reaching them. In my view, the setting of the problem in these terms reveals an ingrained clericalism. It seems that where there is no "priest" or "nun" there is no ecclesial life. The basic problem is much more serious. A Church has been created where the laity do not see themselves as protagonists and where there is little or no sense of belonging, a Church that, if there is no "priest", does not work. This is an ecclesiological and pastoral aberration. Our faith, as Christians, is rooted in baptism, not in priestly ordination.

(Father Martin Lasarte)

I really did not take much interest in the Amazon Synod simply because to me it looked like more of the same thing that the Church has been doing for the past fifty years. People got worked up about Pachamama and the issue of lay ordination but to me it really was all about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  Still, one guy did catch my attention and that was Father Martin Lasarte, a hand picked representative of Francis, who seemed to have more sense than most when it came to the issues at hand.

Unlike the partisans who pitched battle during the Synod, Lasarte recognised that the Church's problems are much deeper than the superficial issues blathered about in the media. Lasarte recognised that Catholic Church seems to have a serious problem with the laity, regarding them as sort of half-Christians, with the consecrated life being the only true "authentic" Christianity. And, as Lasarte recognises, this "operational" view has devastated the life of the Church.

While many may balk at the proposition, in understanding the trajectory of modern catholic history its useful to think of the Catholic Church as being sociologically similar to the Communist party of the USSR. There was Big Brother (Pope), the Inner Party (Curia), Outer Party (Clergy) and the Proletariat (The faithful). The Party was always right and it was the role of the Proletariat to follow instructions......or else, especially in Pre V2 (Stalinist) times.

Ask any old Commie(Trad) what killed the Soviet Union and they'll all point the finger to Gorbachev, their John XXIII, who initiated the policy of Glasnost and Perestroika, the Soviet Union's version of Vatican II. And they would be right since the system, as it was envisaged, left no room for independent action within it. It also needs to be remembered that many of the men who initiated the policy of Perestroika weren't sentimentalists, rather they could see that they were being out-competed by the West (Modernism) and they had to reform if they were to survive.

Following the collapse of the Soviet system it was felt by all the boffins at Harvard that all one had to do to encourage the flourishing of the free market in Russia was to enshrine property rights, liquidate inefficient industries and lower taxes and all would be hunky dory. But what was never considered is the fact that how do you produce a free market in a people who were for generations deliberately prosecuted for showing any entrepreneurial spirit and who were continually weaned on the nipple of state managerialism. What eighty years of the soviet experience had produced is an economically docile and inept man who had no skills at operating in a free market, and when the market was finally liberalised the only people who had actual authority and initiative made off like bandits, impoverishing the rest of the country.

Likewise, Catholic glasnost came about at the same time as the cultural revolution of the Sixties, and catholic laymen, much like "freed" soviet workers, got to fend for themselves  in the "free market of ideas" with the same observed results. When you start thinking about it the parallels are very eerie.

The reason why perestroika failed to produce the expected benefits in the Soviet Union is because the Stalinist/Leninist system had wiped out the entrepreneurial spirit that is vital in the formation of small to medium businesses, the backbone of any capitalist system. Likewise, the Catholic system had wiped out any form of spiritual entrepreneurialism leaving the laity open to Modernity.  The theologians conflated obedience with faith. and failed to recognise a very deep weakness of the Church.

Lasarte recognises that arguing about all the other stuff is useless unless the fundamentals are sorted out first. He also lists several instances where because of circumstances, the laity were able to build thriving Christian communities in the absence of clergy and one certainly gets the impression that Church governance rather than lay "disobedience" may be more of an issue.   For those who are interested, here are a few pertinent links. 

Amazon Synod: Are married priests really a solution? 

Amazon Synod: New paths and pastoral illnesses (Part Two) 

Evaluating the Synod for the Amazon: Fr Lasarte’s ten ‘likes’ and nine ‘dislikes’


My own thoughts are that any Christian revival of the West is going to be lay led, I also imagine that it will be strongly opposed by large sections of the Clergy.

The Wages of Monophorism

 “Monophorism” was Blondel's term for a reigning clerical authoritarianism which on principle refused to recognize that grace can be at work from below. 

One of things which you become aware of when you start digging into theology is that some guys foresaw the current apostasy from miles away.  Maurice Blondel was one of these and recognised that the traditional model of "Priests Smart and People dumb" i.e. Monophorism,  devastated the interior spirituality of the laity and facilitated the destruction of the faith.  Now, while many of the laity could be "good" under this model,  it was a goodness of docility and obedience. The layman was not meant to have ideas or internal volition and the faith was to be received and not really thought about and it produced a sort of spiritual infantilism which as able to lapse if the strong parent went missing.

The Catholic Church under this model resembled a typical World War 1/Soviet Era combat formation. Strongly disciplined and led by the general. A battle plan was drawn and the soldier was expected to advance according to the plan;  individual initiative being frowned upon, especially by the lower ranks, since everything had been worked out and co-ordinated by the staff officers.  The innovators of stormtroop tactics immediately recognised  that there was a weak-point with this approach: if you could decapitate the leadership, then the troops would be helpless and easily destroyed. Sure, there would be pockets of strong resistance, but without command from the top many of the troops would simply surrender and walk away. There was no defence-in-depth.

Protestantism, especially in its evangelical versions, avoided this approach and tended to stress the layman's strong personal relationship with Christ and left the individual to their own Christianity. As this blog has mentioned, there are many faults with this approach but it does tend to produce a more autonomous Christian than traditional Catholicism does.

To illustrate what I mean here are two bits of data from Pew Research. The first, graph compares the commitment gap between Catholics and Protestants in South America. The metric of commitment--a reasonable one in my opinion--being attendance at regular Church services and praying daily.  From the table we can see that in every country in South America, Protestants out perform Catholics by this metric.

The second table, looks at approval of same sex "marriage" by religious denomination in the U.S. The data is pretty damning for U.S. Catholics. Mainline Protestant denominations are marginally worse but not by much. However , those "dumb" Evangelical Christians appear to have views which have a far better correlation with Biblical views of homosexuality. What gives?

One of the things about Protestantism is that it a religion strongly associated with the bourgeoisie. And one of the the thing about bourgeois society it the strong emphasis it places on individual act and responsibility. Protestant societies encourage more individual autonomy and internal locus of control. What this means is that although Protestants may think badly--with all the problems that brings-- they think for themselves. Paradoxically, "simplistic" Protestants who take the Bible literally are quite likely to be its strongest adherents as they can't "explain away" Biblical imperatives to conform with contemporary fashions.

In my opinion, Catholics can only provide a strong pushback against the Pozz  only if they are capably led and strongly disciplined. When the leadership is effectively "decapitated" the average Catholic lacks the internal resilience to push back against it. This would--in a way--seem to shore up the arguments of the Traditionalists who see Vatican Two as the great mistake of Catholicism. Vatican II gave the spiritually-infantile freedom........with predictable consequences.

See, the thing to understand is that Catholicism prior to Vatican II, despite all of it's window dressing  and railing against Modernism was actually Modernist itself and was unwittingly encouraging the production of Mass-Man and it's hard to fight the thing when you're the thing itself.

Let me explain by way of uncomfortable analogy.

Life inside the Soviet Union Catholic Church was strongly controlled by the clergy Party. Information was heavily censored filtered, lest the laity workers be corrupted. The Papacy Party was always right and it was the duty of the worker to obey the party and deviation from the party line sent the worker to Hell Siberia.

The underlying principle at play here was the if the Church Party could engineer a society where it could control what the laity workers were exposed to and protect them from bad ideas they could engineer a faithful Catholic Worker through social engineering. Just as the modern degeneracy feels that through appropriate social engineering and censorship it can create the soytopia, traditional Catholicism felt as long as it had the reigns of power it could create its own version of the same.

Astute observers will note that this is the Leftist project in a nutshell. Once you start looking into it, the similarities in social structure and command between Communism and Pre-Vatican II Catholicism are uncomfortably close.

So, in a sense, the critics of Vatican Two are right: "relaxing the system"  bought the whole house down in the same way that Perestroika eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.  The old System only worked under strong social control.  The problem for the wistful trads is that although they may dream for a return of the pre-Vatican II Church, the social and cultural contingencies that shored up the authoritarian societies of the past have been undercut by the phenomenon of modernity. As Franco's Spain, De Valera's Ireland and Salazar's Portugal have shown, Integralist societies rapidly collapse into "Modernity" as soon as the thumbscrews are taken off. Years of integralism did not produce the internal resilience to protect against the Pozz, and paradoxically may have created the preconditions for its rapid adoption.

On the other hand, despite the being exposed to the cultural sewer that is the contemporary West, Evangelical Protestants tend to be holding firm.

It is my opinion that the Vatican Two would have been far more successful if the Church gradually relaxed its rules and "softly" Protestantised the Church but this is just speculation and beyond the scope of this current post.