Where evolution meets Christian life

Beeple continues the human trait of artistic exploration - NFT detail

Ruth Schuster is a senior writer on archaeology and science at the Haaretz newspaper in Israel. She had an interesting opening paragraph on a story this week about the news just out that a key set of human-like skull bone fossils is now reckoned to be thousands of years older than first thought. She begins:

When did modern humans begin to evolve? And from who? Once upon a time it was thought that, OK, we began from a monkey but then there was a linear progression to the wonder that is us, starting about 200,000 years ago. It is now abundantly clear that we are mongrels, admixing merrily with other human species until they all died out, and now an early modern human previously found in Ethiopia has been redated with the help of a volcano to 233,000 years ago. 

The previous date for the human ancestor referred to as Omo 1 was 197,000 years ago.

Schuster quotes one of the leaders of the study that produced the new dates as saying:

In my opinion, Omo 1 is the oldest unchallenged fully modern specimen, the oldest Homo sapiens as we morphologically define the species nowadays. This is why this new dates are important. They may not tell us much about how modern humans evolved, but they tell us that before 200,000-230,000 years ago, hominins that are by our current standard recognizable as Homo sapiens, were already present in Eastern Africa.

That leader is Professor Aurélien Mounier, a paleoanthropologist with the Museum of Mankind in Paris. His comment that there was still a lot unknown "about how modern humans evolved" underlines the still rudimentary state of knowledge concerning human prehistory. He goes on to discuss the doubts and debate arising because of  "the complexity of the evolutionary processes which gave birth to our species". 

Dark areas in this reconstruction show the Omo1 fossils found by Richard Leakey in Ethiopia over 50 years ago. The Natural History Museum, London

The main body of Christianity accepts evolution in general and of the human species. Pope John Paul II declared presentation to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996 that evolution is more than a mere hypothesis or theory – it has significant arguments to commend its truth. However, as Pope Pius XII had noted in 1950 in his encyclical Humani Generis, physical evolution is not all there is to the story.

To explore the unique feature of human evolution, I pick up the examination of this issue by Robert Spitzer PhD, an American Jesuit priest who has written extensively on scientific matters.  I like reading his writings because he believes in giving proofs for his statements. In giving a Christian context to the study of human evolution, he states:

A pure physical, organic evolution is only part of the truth of human origins because God has given every human being an individual and unique transphysical soul  – something that is not reducible to physics or to a physical evolutionary process.

[But] there is considerable evidence from all these rational domains [science, medicine, anthropology] to corroborate the existence of our transcendental souls. 

Spitzer provides evidence that, added to the physical element of human evolution, which can leave fossils across the hundreds of thousands of years, is the spiritual element, which he refers to as "transphysical". Therefore, the only thing about evolution Christians cannot accept is "a pure reductionistic physical evolution which precludes the existence of a unique human soul".

At some stage of human evolution God intervened and endowed the human species, through our first parents, a spiritual capability. However, Spitzer points out that the woman geneticists call “Mitochondrial Eve” was probably not the first woman (biblical Eve) having a soul – a non-physical capability – necessary for free choice and moral decisions , and the man geneticists call “Y-Chromosome Adam” was probably not the first man (biblical Adam) having a soul capable of free choice and moral decisions. 

Evidence of the spiritual ability in the human person comes from a scholarly work: 

There is a new book from the foremost linguistic theorist in the country, Noam Chomsky, and an MIT professor of computational linguistics and computer science and engineering named Robert Berwick, entitled, Why Only Us (published by MIT Press in 2016).

Without delving into the complexities of their analysis, I will give their main point – that between 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, human beings developed a capacity for abstract, syntactical, and universal communication that no other species – not even our most proximate ancestors – developed.

First, there is no known or probative biological or genetic explanation for this unique development in human beings, [which provokes] the questions, “What caused it?”, and “Was this cause physical or transphysical?”

Second, it seems that the progeny between mitochondrial Eve/Y chromosome Adam (200,000 years ago) and their progeny who were invested with this abstract and syntactical linguistic ability (70,000 years ago) did not seem to do anything more significant than use stone tools, live in community, and hunt in tandem – and then suddenly, after 130,000 years, an explosion of language, discovery, religion, symbolism, art, and geographical exploration. What happened? And what caused it?

It seems that our genetic ancestors did convey a genetic-biological-physical profile to us, but they did not give everything to us that makes us human.

Something else was added 130,000 years after them (70,000 years ago) that gave rise to the explosion of universal syntactical language, religion, art, mathematics, and the precursors to complex civilization.

I would submit that this “something” is a transcendent soul, and that such a soul is the condition necessary for all of the above powers and characteristics – syntactical language, abstract mathematics, religion, symbolic art, and the free choice and moral awareness necessary for law and civilization.

First, Spitzer looks at what Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick have to say about "the sudden and unique occurrence – explosion – of universal syntactical language".

Thus, very small children can understand the difference between “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” – and even see the humor in it.

But no chimpanzee – which can learn 200 individual signs in American Sign Language – can make this distinction.

They simply do not have the capacity for abstraction (necessary to relate distinct objects to one another in various categories) required to differentiate between subjects (in general) and objects (in general).

Chomsky and Berwick believe that there might be a physical explanation linked to a special genetic switch affecting the brain, but they are far from showing how such a genetic switch or a patterning of brain modalities could give rise to the power of abstraction (necessary for relating objects to one another in various categories).

The ability to distinguish that some things are in a relationship with each other and to apply the questions why, how, how many, what, where, and when show the power of our (spiritual) intellect.

These big general ideas could not have been abstracted from experience or from wiring or patterns in the brain, and this is what has caused philosophers like Bernard Lonergan, or the Nobel Prize winning physiologist, Sir John Eccles, to declare that they must have a transphysical status and origin – a soul.

The universality of the uniquely human capacity to pass the syntax test comes next:

What is remarkable about human beings is that we could take a child from an African culture which has a rather unique way of expressing syntax and grammar, and place him, say, in a Chinese culture which has a totally different way of expressing syntax and grammar, and that child will be able to learn the syntax and grammar of that completely different language almost immediately – as if there were a universal syntax underlying every particular expression of it which young children understand from birth!

No other primate, no matter how sophisticated, has ever crossed the syntax threshold according to the studies of not only Chomsky and Berwick, but also Herbert Terrace and a variety of others.

Along with this capacity for universal syntactical abstraction (and universal abstract language), humans received five other capacities/tendencies as well. The first was the spirit of discovery:

What explains this radical transition from a rather sedentary human community on the border of Namibia and Angola, to world exploration? Was it simply a lack of food? Simply a desire to escape tribal enemies?

Though this may have been part of the reason, it does not explain the rapid and world-wide expansion of the human population even on the oceans to Indonesia and even Australia.

I would submit that there is something more than simple need – there was a “spirit” of curiosity and adventure – something absent in our most proximate ancestors – that engendered the spirit to discover and explore.

Burial of the dead is another feature of this period about 70,000 years ago:

Something else also happened in this period: human beings started burying their dead, treating the remains of their deceased with respect, and burying them with rituals and objects indicating a belief that they would survive their physical death (see, for example, a burial site with these objects from this period in the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel).

If humans did not believe in their spiritual nature or life after death, we might ask, “Why did they bother to bury their dead with great respect – and with rituals and objects?”

And if they did have an awareness of their spiritual nature and life after death, we might ask the further question, “Where did they get this awareness from?”

After all, 130,000 years of ancestors did no such thing – and then suddenly, human beings seem to be doing it as a universal practice.

Did this spiritual awareness – this awareness of something beyond the physical world also come from our transphysical soul?

An additional quality that makes us human is the desire to express ourselves through what we call art, and symbolic representation:

There are cave drawings dating back to at least 35,000 years ago (see Jo Marchant in Smithsonian January 2016) that have been more recently dated at 44,000 years ago (see Ewen Callaway in Nature December 2019) on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

Many scholars believe that the animal drawings have sacred and cultural symbolic significance (see Ghosh, Pallab, “Cave paintings change ideas about the origins of art”). 

We come to numbers, which play a big part in human life:

There is no evidence of abstract numeration in any other species except human beings. Did this originate from our heuristic notion of “how many?” – And can this innate heuristic notion (standing at the foundation of all quantitative relationships) be explained by programming of the brain?

It is quite unlikely. For it is one thing to program a brain (or computer) to count, but quite another thing to understand counting itself and its significance.

It is these abstract concepts that elude mere programming or patterning of the brain. As Gödel's theorem reveals, humans do mathematics very differently from computers.

The latter follow programs while the former invent them. The former have an abstract understanding of numeration itself in all of its permutations, while the latter lack all such understanding.

The development of advanced social norms is also on our list of attributes anthropologists have noticed in our human ancestors from about 70,000 years ago:

Human communities having durable structures, some specialization of labor and commerce, and a sense of social norms began to arise as a result of migrations, differentiated linguistic systems resulting from those migrations, and the ability to barter and exchange on the basis of counting and tallying.

It seems that as migration occurred, some groups stayed behind while others continued to migrate. Those who stayed behind used their linguistic and numeric capacities to specialize labor, and their religious instincts to solidify basic social norms and rules.

Evolution within the physical world is one thing, but as we have seen here, our human experience makes a compelling case that there is more to the human person than the blind outcome of various environmental stimuli.

However, there is harder evidence for God's intervention at a point in the development of human ancestors, a historical point in time that stands alongside the original spark of creation launching the universe on its way, and the overwhelming arrival of God in our midst in Jesus, God uniting with the human as a single person.

But, please, pursue these issues by either going to Robert Spitzer's text, The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason (2016) or the article that gives a fuller  account than what is possible here of what science tells us about how modern humans are uniquely different from the rest of the natural world. Go here for Spitzer's article.

💢 See also: What about similarity to Chimpanzees?

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

That religion-science 'conflict' is nonsense

                                                                                                                                           Photo Word on Fire.org

Christianity is not in conflict with science, and that is one reason why those preaching hardline atheism fail to make headway in winning converts. This is true even in societies where there is a growing tide of disaffiliation with Christianity.  But the point is that reality can be encountered in different ways, a fact that materialists do not always appreciate but everyday people do.

Scientific endeavour that limits itself to only what can be counted and measured will remain blind to the state of pleasure or joy or bliss that are the product of art and music and friendship. These feelings are generically different from more ordinary psychical outcomes.

For example, people have always seen evidence that a Supreme Being exists and that there is more to our existence than meets the eye. Roy Abraham Varghese, an author the subject of science and religion, has written*:

While primitive animism and nature deities can be easily explained as attempts to personalize the forces of nature, the same cannot be said of the concept of a Supreme Being. It is entirely abstract and with no physical or imaginative correlate; and yet it came naturally to humans throughout history.

Scholars call this intrinsic awareness the numinous. It is the experience of the "uncanny" and the "awe-inspiring", which can have a positive impact on our lives. See this article on the BBC website that explores how intentionally seeking the feeling of awe can improve memory, boost creativity and relieve anxiety. 

The interest in what might be called "neopaganism" and in the occult also reflect how people recognise that a "creature-feeling" that causes a "shudder" in their self-consciousness can give those people a sense of the true nature of their place in existence, and that "the feeling of personal nothingness before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced", as Rudolf Otto described it,  can be related to the Christian understanding that "God is near us, that we can possess and apprehend Him, and that [each person] is His image and likeness".

But let's look at the way "science" is thrown at Christianity, and religion as a whole, as a kind of grenade in the hope of disabling belief in God, the transcendent, the holy, and perhaps (for some atheistic proselytizers) the hope of undermining the morality common to religions.

"The number one reason young people say they disaffiliate from religion," says Bishop Robert Barron of the Los Angeles archdiocese, "is that religion is in conflict with science. And in that conflict, science wins." He continues:

They have great reverence for science; religion's out of step with it; therefore, religion has to go. The warfare between religion and science is kind of assumed by a lot of young people who disaffiliate today.

And just think of the rhetoric that you'll pick up all over the culture. People just say “Galileo",  and right away you think, "Oh, there's obscurantist, oppressive religion standing in the way of the advance of the sciences."

The idea of there being conflict between religion and science is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Church scholars had largely laid the foundations of modern science. The rift arose particularly in the 1800s:

For the first roughly three centuries of the natural sciences, most of the great figures—Descartes comes to mind, Galileo himself, Gregor Mendel, so many others, Newton—were all devoutly religious people. So it's a relatively recent conceit that somehow religion and science are at odds, but it's certainly gotten into the minds of our young people.

Of course, there is the embarrassing refusal of some fundamentalist Christians to accept the evidence of evolution, preferring to hold to Luther's view that it is the "historical sense alone which supplies the true and sound doctrine” (LW 1.283) when reading the Bible, and also being entrapped by his emphasis on literal interpretation. 

However, presenting an accurate picture of the role of science vis-à-vis Christian belief, Barron delves into Matthew's infancy narrative of the foreign "Three Kings", or Magi, coming to pay homage to the newborn Jesus having studied the stars to learn place and time.

He relates how Matthew uses magoi in the Greek and that word covers astronomer, astrologer, wise man. He then develops how their scientific status is held up for admiration, their knowledge being so advanced that even the experts in nearby Jerusalem were unaware of what was going on:

In the Chaldean culture of that time, there was a pretty advanced culture of stargazing, and it probably involved, by our standards, a combination of both astronomy and astrology. But wise people, using their analytical reason, would look up into the night sky, and they would measure and they'd calculate the movements of the planets, and the positions of the stars.

[This is] in a very scientific spirit, but also something else. They would have recognized in these beautiful intelligibilities a sign of the intelligence who put them into existence. They would have looked at the stars and planets, and they would have delighted in understanding them more fully, but behind it, they would also have been discerning the will and purpose of the divine.

I think if you had said to these Magi, "There's a conflict between religion and science." They wouldn't have known what you were talking about. If they had said, "Hey, there's a tension between what you're doing, looking up at the night sky, and what people of faith are doing," I think they would have just looked at you with puzzlement.

No, they saw both/and: looking analytically into the night sky also brought to mind the will and purposes of God.

And so, this beautiful image—and we've got it from a thousand Christmas cards, but hold that in your mind— of these wise men, astronomers, call them if you want scientists, who on the basis of their scientific investigation are now journeying to find this newborn King of the Jews.

At the end of their journey, they present him with their gifts. They opened the coffers of their wisdom and riches before him.

In other words, their science didn't lead them away from God and the things of God, but precisely toward God and the things of God.

We Christians understand why this is true, and I'm going to rely here on the great work of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, [who] said that in the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as the Logos.

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." And through that Logos, “all things came to be”.

I'm keeping it on purpose there in the original Greek, because I want to give this richer sense of what that word means. We say “Word”, in a fair enough translation. But think of Logos as the logic, the mind, the pattern—the intelligent pattern that was present to God from the beginning—and again, given God's simplicity [unity] was God from the beginning.

God is this primal patterning intelligence that lies behind all things. So nothing came to be, unless it was touched somehow by the Logos.

The world is not dumbly there for Christians—just there in a sort of chaotic, random manner. No, no; it's been spoken into being. Logos can mean tongue too.

When Aristotle referred to the human being as the zoon logikon, the rational animal, but what he meant was the animal with a tongue, and that knows how to use that tongue for language, for speech.

In the beginning was intelligent speech, and through that intelligent speech, all things came to be.

A further step in Barron's analysis of the supposed conflict between religion and science is this:

What do scientists look for? I mean every scientist up and down the ages, from the ancient philosophers and researchers, up through the modern scientists.

They're all looking in some way for Logos. They're looking for some patterned intelligibility in things. This or otherwise, science wouldn't get off the ground. If the world were simply a chaotic, random mess, science wouldn't work because there would be no objective intelligibility that corresponds to an inquiring intelligence.

Just think for a second, the way we name the sciences: psycho-logy, logos, the logos about the “psyche”, about the psyche. Physio-logy, the logos about the body. The sciences have that suffix of logos because they have to do with objective intelligibility.

"Where's that come from?" Barron asks. Further, does it strike you as a reasonable position if someone were to say that the world is a wild cosmic accident, but "every nook and cranny of the physical world is marked by patterned intelligibility"?

On the contrary. This very objective intelligibility, which is the ground for all science, leads one to acknowledge the existence of this Logos, which has spoken all things into being.

Now, go back to the Magi: good scientists looking up into the night sky, looking at the patterned intelligibilities in the stars and the planets. Where did it lead them? To a gross materialism? “That's all there is: just matter in motion.”

It's silliness; it's nonsense. They were quite right in intuiting that these patterned intelligibilities [would] lead them to the great intelligent Logos that has brought all things into being.

And so, beautifully, they go in search of this Word made flesh. What had they heard about in the ancient prophecies? That that Word, that Logos, the Creator God was becoming a king in the form of this little baby. Science led to faith; it was not repugnant to faith.

Where did I first learn science? And then philosophy, which I came to love? At Catholic schools, at Catholic University in Washington, at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

The Catholic faith at its best has never stood opposed to reason. No, no; it loves and embraces the sciences, loves and embraces philosophy, loves and embraces all expressions of rationality.

Where did I first study the great novelists and the poets, those who explore the objective intelligibilities within human experience, within the human mind? I learned all that in Catholic schools.

Very early on in the Christian tradition, there was a fellow named Tertullian—Church Father, great figure in many ways. But Tertullian said something and he expressed an attitude that the Church found repugnant.

Tertullian said, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" And what he meant was: What do the speculations of the philosophers of Athens have to do with the revelation given to the Jews?

Well, the Church repudiated that. The Church at its best, from the earliest days—think of Paul himself, all the way through Thomas Aquinas, and up to the present day—the Church at its best has said, "No, Athens and Jerusalem belong together." The questing mind of Athens should not be put to rest.

No, no; on the contrary. Allow all of that rich intellectual energy to express itself as fully as possible—because, because, it's always seeking some form of Logos and, therefore, ultimately is seeking the source of that objective intelligibility. It's seeking the source of all of that patterned intelligibility in the great intelligence of God.

Now, that's the Catholic tradition: faith and reason. John Paul II—one of his last encyclicals is called Fides et Ratio. That wonderful et: and... See, the Magi believed in reason, and faith; their reason brought them to faith.

Since it was the last Sunday of Christmastime when Barron drew into his analysis the shepherds that attended the infant Jesus.

In fact, shepherds were kind of seen as lowlifes. Their testimony wouldn't have been accepted in court; they weren't taken seriously. The angel appeared though to the shepherds. The simplest people come to Christ, and maybe they're the first ones really to hear the message [of God become man].

But now think of the Magi. Now [...] we're dealing with the cultural elite; we're dealing with the philosophers and scientists in one of the most advanced cultures of that time. Christ has come to them too. And in fact, their very work leads them to Christ.

You know, faith needs science to keep it from becoming superstitious. There's a danger of that. If you just block out reason, then faith can become superstitious. But the sciences need faith, so they don't become self-contained and self-referential.

Pope John Paul's document Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), which Barron refers to above, opens this way:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

The document spells this out in more detail:

[The Church teaches ] that the truth attained by philosophy [meaning science] and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known”.

It refers to the Book of Wisdom, missing from some Protestant Bibles:

There the sacred author speaks of God who reveals himself in nature. For the ancients, the study of the natural sciences coincided in large part with philosophical learning. Having affirmed that with their intelligence human beings can “know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements... the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts” (Wis 7:17, 19-20)—in a word, that he can philosophize—the sacred text takes a significant step forward.

Making his own the thought of Greek philosophy, to which he seems to refer in the context, the author affirms that, in reasoning about nature, the human being can rise to God: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5). This is to recognize as a first stage of divine Revelation the marvellous “book of nature”, which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the Creator. If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their sinfulness place an impediment in the way. (para.19)

In addition:

Seen in this light, reason is valued without being overvalued. The results of reasoning may in fact be true, but these results acquire their true meaning only if they are set within the larger horizon of faith: “All man's steps are ordered by the Lord: how then can man understand his own ways?” (Proverbs 20:24). For the Old Testament, then, faith liberates reason in so far as it allows reason to attain correctly what it seeks to know and to place it within the ultimate order of things, in which everything acquires true meaning.

In brief, human beings attain truth by way of reason because, enlightened by faith, they discover the deeper meaning of all things and most especially of their own existence. Rightly, therefore, the sacred author identifies [awe-inspired respect] of God as the beginning of true knowledge: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7; cf. Sirach 1:14). (20)

Finally, it is the Church that finds itself in the position of defending reason:

There are signs of a widespread distrust of universal and absolute statements, especially among those who think that truth is born of consensus and not of a consonance between intellect and objective reality. In a world subdivided into so many specialized fields, it is not hard to see how difficult it can be to acknowledge the full and ultimate meaning of life which has traditionally been the goal of philosophy [including science]. Nonetheless, in the light of faith which finds in Jesus Christ this ultimate meaning, I cannot but encourage philosophers—be they Christian or not—to trust in the power of human reason and not to set themselves goals that are too modest in their philosophizing. 

The lesson of [20th Century] history [...] shows that this is the path to follow: it is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason. (56)

💢 Fides et Ratio can be accessed here    

* The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared the Way for the Phenomenon of Jesus (2011)

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Abortion leaves women no less burdened

For good reason: The poorest 30% of women account for 75% of abortions in the US. 

"Our liberation cannot be bought with the blood of our children" has become a common slogan on placards or T-shirts carried or worn by women at events involving abortion laws. It's powerful because it captures the weakness of so much of the pro-abortion argument. Abortion kills, but also to argue in favour of abortion is to undermine the status of women, to present the unique dignity of each woman as nothing else than that a woman should be like a man in every way including unlovely sexual behaviour.

As Mary Harrington points out in reviewing Erika Bachiochi's The Rights Of Woman: Reclaiming A Lost Vision (2021) the central issue over women's rights, especially in the fraught area of reproduction that society has allowed to bear most heavily on women, is that campaigning should be directed to allowing women to be women, rather than trying to shoehorn one sex into the shape of the other. She writes:

Babies and children take a lot of looking after. How, then, [are] ideals of individual liberty to be balanced with the evidently asymmetrical burdens of human reproduction?

As in many areas of  activism,  "progressives" show a certain laziness intellectually and organisationally in ignoring the difficult duty of rectifying society's disregard of  the toxic economic inequality we see generally, shirking the task of taking on corporate power to enable the flourishing of unions, the sharing of profits with a greater focus on equity, the reduction of real working hours, more holidays, and parental leave. Instead, they use their elite status to impose a set of cultural dogmas that are as false as they are acceptable to their peers in academia, the mainstream media, and corporate and political leaders.

From a Guttmacher Institute statement on a study of reasons women give for abortion, the top is that:

Having a baby would dramatically interfere with their education, work or ability to care for their dependents, or they could not afford a baby at the time. In addition, qualitative data from in-depth interviews portrayed women who had had an abortion as typically feeling that they had no other choice, given their limited resources and existing responsibilities to others.  

The point is that: Under these circumstances there is no way abortion can be called a “choice”. Furthermore, as a response to an article in The BMJ (British Medical Journal) the authors state:

75% of women requesting abortion in the US are in poverty or in the low income bracket. The poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions and the poorest 30% for 75% of abortions. 

They continue: 

Abortion cannot be a solution for poverty; thereby surreptitiously allowing those in authority to abdicate responsibility of tackling socio-economic inequality. The BMJ has shown commendable leadership and been at the forefront of the campaign to eradicate period poverty but has been much less vocal at the scourge of poverty which suffuses the issue of abortion. Abortion may be a right in the UK but it is clearly not a choice.

To pick up again Harrington's concern that today's feminism is hurting rather than empowering women, she highlights the fact is that going back at least to the late 1700s it has been argued that "motherhood and family life are both ennobling in themselves and compatible with other activities in the wider world". Further:

As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”.

US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.

An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.

But women are more likely to show a willingness to accept that a woman's "absolute autonomy" does not reflect reality:  

Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.

Harrington speaks on this in a very personal way:

We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.

She adds that because a baby just a few days after conception looks little like an adult can explain why so many lack of willingness to face the reality of a claim from within the womb that demands recognition as an equal. However, the same is true with a newborn and an adult. In addition, peer pressure can override the scientific reality of what is being killed in abortion. 

For Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of Naral, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and who was once the director of the US's largest freestanding abortion clinic, the development of ultra-sound technology was a game-changer. Ultra-sound "for the first time threw open a window into the womb" and his rejection of the abortion industry.

In Nathanson's own words: 

Although we had a mound (literally) of empirical data attesting to the fact that a living human being had been destroyed in the act of abortion, it was not until after the advent of ultrasound technology that a true paradigm change took place. With ultrasound technology, we could not only know that the fetus was a functioning organism, but we could also estimate its age, watch it swallow and urinate, view it in its sleeping and waking states, and watch it move itself as purposefully as a newborn. 

No matter, science takes a backseat when self-interest is in play. As Harrington puts it:

The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women [at New York University] were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?

The necessity in a woman's life to provide care and cope with dependents has long been a feature of Bachiochi's career in law, including lecturing at Harvard, and in the exploration of sexual economics. Harrington taps into her expertise:  

Nothing, [Bachiochi] suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.

And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.

And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes.

Therefore, speaking to her sisters, Harrington asks: 

Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.

 On Twitter, Bachiochi posted this note:

NB: I was a pro-choice feminist (& women's studies student at Middlebury College) before coming to see what abortion *is* and what it has wrought for women's equality, so no "on-going strategy" here. "Feminists" always assume pro-life women are but a puppet of some man somewhere.

Her point that society must get away from the whimsical view of feminism and into the nitty-gritty of establishing a social order that defends women's needs and so the family, was made clear by a critical tweet in response to her op-ed in the New York Times in December (2021). It said:

How does forced gestation bode for women's equality? Asking for myself, who was terminated from a job while pregnant and couldn't find employment as a noticeably pregnant woman.

This challenge exemplifies the nature of  Bachiochi's argument that women will make no further progress in society unless society makes provision for the needs of women. And abortion is principally a factor of poverty, which is a route "progressives" decline to take because it means breaking from the rich and powerful elite that they travel with.

💢 Read more of Bachiochi's views here

💢 The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision - details here

💢 Read Life in the womb matters to these women

💢 Read Trauma from abortion - why the surprise?

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.   

Christians have a happy-marriage advantage

Equal in dignity but with different ways of serving the family.    Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

Christians have an advantage toward achieving a happy marriage because they acknowledge how God has created each man and each woman in His own image, especially with regards generous love and fecundity. They know that God gives each man and woman an equal dignity though in a different way, and this complementarity is oriented toward the good of the marriage and the flourishing of family life.

So we observe the equal personal dignity of husband and wife since both are created in the image and likeness of the personal God. However, to avoid a stalemated clash of wills, God offers a pattern for family life that also appears in His orientation of the Church, and that is referred to as "headship", where all conditions being equal, one of the parties is called to exercise a vocation to be decision-maker. Self-sacrificing love and a commitment to the common good are the guiding principles for the exercise of such a vocation.

C S Lewis's The Four Loves has a section that examines headship: 

And as we could easily take the natural mystery [of sex] too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery [of marriage] not seriously enough. Christian writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken of the husband’s headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—and gave his life for her (Eph 5:25). 

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife received most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism [anointing] of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. 

Phil Monroe, a psychologist who can speak from a Christian perspective, concludes in support of Lewis's insights into the husband's headship, "when we must refuse a loved one or confront them about their flaws, it should be done for their sake, and not our own". 

Furthermore:

There is great power in choosing to set aside personal desire for the sake of another. The same can be said for women who are trying to figure out how to “submit” to “unworthy” husbands.

Note that "headship" does not refer to the type of behaviour where the husband is addicted to "bossing around" his wife. As one female writer put it:

If I am to enter into a marriage one day, I would expect that we at least consider that my thoughts, opinions, and decisions are as important as my husband’s. If not, then you won’t find me at the altar. I am not alone in this — I have a troupe of lovely lady friends who will tell you the same thing.

Rather, she concedes, it is "when fair discussion is exhausted and compromise is impossible, that Lewis suggests that it must be the man who is the 'head' of the family".

But Keri Wyatt Kent questions why a husband and wife need to have someone to break the tie: I [suggest] that God would break the tie, if you continued to seek God’s wisdom, asking to be led by the Spirit to unity. In a way, giving the man the deciding vote keeps God small, and prevents the man from actually having to do what Ephesians 5:21 says: submit to one another. If you know you’ve got the deciding vote, you aren’t really submitting.

If you trust that God is able to lead and give you the right direction, why does one person need to be the tie-breaker? Is it impossible for God to lead both a man and a woman to peace about a decision? Why the man? Can men hear God better than women? Is God incapable of speaking directly to both husband and wife?

Support for this view might be seen in the assent given to the equality of partners: “Children, obey your parents, and honor your father and mother” (Ephesians 6:1-3).

However, Wyatt Kent seems to focus on where power lies, as if the wife would suffer with regards a loss of personal empowerment in the marriage, and by extension in the life of the household.

A different perspective is given by Stella Morabito, who admits to a long struggle in reconciling her own views as a young woman on roles in marriage with that of Christian teaching. 

When responding to the modern arguments about the role of women, I had to ask myself: Does the order of creation as described in the Scriptures signify the inferiority of women? A number of annoying biblical terms haunted me: Woman is the "helpmate" of man (Gen. 2:18); the wife is to "submit" to her husband (Eph. 5:22) and "obey" him (I Pet. 3:4-6); and the woman is the "weaker sex" (I Pet. 3:7).

In our culture there are no two ways about it: All these terms are now pejorative, all these concepts are now reviled. And, to make matters worse, many men habitually exploit those passages for their own worldly and selfish gain. On the surface, this apparent male bias and condescension seemed to be a strong case for "editing" or rewriting Scripture passages that deal with the order of creation of male and female.

I could not deny that God intentionally created humanity as male and female — one species with two halves, each having different functions. I could not deny that Jesus Christ came to us in the form of a human male born of a human female. And I could not doubt that Christ died for the sins of both men and women.

Morabito examines how modern sensibilities have made this area of teaching more provocative:

[Paul] definitely sounds chauvinistic to contemporary ears. We so easily view the idea of headship of the husband as a position of power. This is not only the modern worldly view of headship, but an ancient view as well. However, the Christian view — Paul's view — is neither. The headship of the husband is not a position of worldly power. Rather, it is a function of total surrender to the Cross.

I finally came to terms with Paul's call to submission in marriage when I began to reflect on Christian marriage as a two-partner dance. Leading in a dance is simply a function. Following in a dance — i.e., "submitting" or "obeying" — is merely the reciprocal function. Both the husband and the wife are subject to Christ, as a man and a woman are subject to the music as they dance.

If the husband's role is to lead, and the wife's role is to follow, so what? What's the big deal? How does it make the wife inferior? The husband superior? To claim such things of dance partners would be as nonsensical as stating that an axle is superior to the wheel attached to it. They are simply acting as one unit. In fact, they don't get anywhere unless they act as one unit. The most important element of the dance is that both partners must follow the same music.

Contrary to popular revisionist belief, the writers of the Scriptures do not advise [a wife] to wallow in her suffering and to submit to abuse from a wayward husband who doesn't obey the Word. None of that is part of the solution offered in 1 Peter: that the wife, by example, show her reverence for the Word in order to bring her husband back to the Word (3:1-2). This passage reminds the woman that her first allegiance is always to Christ. She must, figuratively speaking, just keep humming the music of the Gospel to let her husband know he is out of line and out of step. Her tune should remind him that they are both called to total surrender to the Cross.

The wife can't easily do this if she loudly complains about his sins or tries to lead him or push him around the dance floor. The best bet is to remain humble yet active, and firmly determined to let the Holy Spirit lead her thoughts, words, and deeds. Then the husband is most likely to be brought back into the dance. Otherwise, there can be no dance, no Christian marriage.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul prefaces his whole discussion of headship with a statement clearly indicating that neither party has power over the other: "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph. 5:21). 

Feminists seek to replace Paul's formula for organic unity with the formula of secular equality. It is an unordered view of equality where there are no specific or reciprocal functions. The result is chaos, where there is really no room for the Cross to be the tempering, binding, and ordering force in marriage. It's a dance where everybody leads and nobody follows. 

[Revisionists] refuse even to entertain the possibility that headship and submission to headship can be reciprocal functions of total surrender to the Cross.  

By virtue of valid baptism, we are — regardless of our sex or other circumstances of birth — united into the One Body of Christ in the world. But how does that translate into the notion that God intended all Christians to have the same function? How does that translate into the absence of any specific God-given order for our creation as male and female — the only basic distinction in the creation of humanity? Revisionists ignore the fact that we are incarnational beings, created as male or female. The task of Christians is to deal with God's creation as He wills, not as we will. Therefore, our bounden duty is to put aside our egos.

When we filter out the modern distortions of Paul's message, his logic becomes obvious and plainly positive. If a man and a woman are to unite as one flesh that submits to Christ, they must perform complementary functions in order to work together as one.

One flesh, one organism, in marriage, but "male and female He created them" in the order of creation. Therefore, husbands must respect their own dignity and not contrive to get their way on trivial matters, but instead serve their family and provide it with authentic leadership that is pleasing to Christ. 

A final thought is this: The vocation of headship does not grant infallibility to the husband. A husband, in good conscience, though in the face of opposition from his wife, who does submit to the husband, may make a decision involving the family that does not achieve the desired goal. Such an outcome is not an argument against Christian headship. Rather it can be viewed as a "What's good luck, what's bad luck?" scenario. Humanly speaking the outcome may be a failure, but with a spiritual lens we see God blessing the family with valuable insights, a character-building experience, and success in enriching family life.  

See also: Women's full equality in the Christian family  

                Complementarity and Spiritual Headship

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What to expect in post-Christian 2022

Professor Chantal Delsol..."we are now living at a breaking point" over "choices concerning the meaning and place of the human person in the universe"

 In the year past, disregarding the Covid 19 public health regulations, did you feel that the powers that shape the character of society were pronouncing a lot of dogma as to how we should behave, that punishment by way of people being "cancelled" was common, and that ill-defined groups were intent on redesigning the overall culture going forward? 

If your answer is yes, then you are one of those who are realising that there is a massive transformation going on in society, deeper than technological change, empowering a revolution, a paradigm shift in the public mindset. The transformation afoot is not a sudden eruption, but a factor of emboldened forces deploying their power with greater intensity in order to bring about a new social order.  

Those with their hand on the wheel form an elite comprised principally of players from academia, the mainstream media, and the political arena. Their program is not offered by way weak influences here and there but it is part of a campaign that is on the offensive, that is very political, and which is mounted with purpose. 

There is a utilitarian foundation to the program; however, though it has a fluidity of manner it is intolerant of any divergence from any of the dogmas its operatives are establishing. It is without any central dogma, but its key players show remarkable intolerance toward those who fail to agree on its rapidly expanding creed.

To comprehend what is happening around the world - not in every nation or society but in most - and most strikingly in the stalwarts of Western civilisation, we can usefully explore the ideas of French political philosopher Chantal Delsol, who last year gave a lecture on the death of Christendom, which is not synonymous with Christianity, but which refers to the radically different social and political order that grew from the principles of the new religion.

Delsol received her PhD in philosophy at the Sorbonne and became a university professor, a member of the French Academy, and winner of many awards, including the Academy of Ethical and Political Sciences Award in 2001.

Her theme in the lecture is that the West is at the end of a 16-century-old civilization, termed Christendom, that Christian culture "formed a world, a world cohesive in all areas of life", and "for two centuries [it has] struggled not to die".

Christianity has built a civilization, which has lived according to its laws and dogmas, as best they can, for 16 centuries.

Christianity as a civilization is the fruit of Catholicism, a holistic religion, defending an organic society, challenging individualism and individual freedom.

The fate of Christianity makes it irremediably inclined to hate modernity, which challenges its first principles: truth, hierarchy, authority and coercion.

Late modernity, which begins after the Second World War, definitely regards the Church as an obsolete institution. During the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the differences have accumulated. The reigning liberalism/libertarianism represents the exact opposite of ecclesial thinking.

Delsol points out that the fading Christian presence does not mean the death of the spiritual, and certainly not the acceptance of atheism:

Of course, the twenty-first century is religious - but it is no longer Christian. Other religions have taken over the scene. There is no great prophecy in predicting that a century will be religious - for all centuries are.

As long as humanity is imperfect and mortal (until the end of time no doubt, despite the fabrications of post-humanism), it will give itself religions, wisdoms, morals.

Only the extreme and fleeting rationalization of the Enlightenment, detached from realities, could believe in the future of atheism [...] since as soon as Christianity fell, all kinds of other gods took its place.

Societies are not made up of a few intellectuals, but of peoples, to whom common sense prompts that there are mysteries behind the door, and who are at least agnostic if they are not believers.

Ideals are reinvented differently, but disenchantment does not mean the reign of atheism and all-powerful rationalism.

Daily experience confirms to us that morality did not disappear with the fall of Christendom; neither civilization nor morality ends with Christendom. They orient themselves differently and follow other paths.

We are not going through a descent into hell or a total loss of what makes humanity, but a paradigm shift that can be considered radical and questionable, but which nevertheless defends other honorable principles.

Though "New Age" was commandeered decades ago by Shirley MacLaine in her books on metaphysics, spirituality, reincarnation and more, Delsol posits that what we are seeing unfold is just such an experience:

I use this expression again. The new age will be the age of wisdom and paganism, necessarily rediscovered after the challenge of transcendence.

I think we have to understand the moment that we are living as a revolution, in the strict sense of the return of the cycle, in both areas of morality and ontology.

The picture presented in this lecture is that of paganism, once overthrown by the upstart Christian religion, reasserting itself, and in fact, reclaiming its former dominant position as the force that shapes the culture.

Since the second half of the 20th century, and significantly since the 1960s, our moral hierarchies have literally been reversed. It is not uncommon, concerning individual behavior and social acts, that in a few years an evil has become a good and vice versa, that the old hated behavior is now praised, that the old admiration is changed and challenged.

In the world of our fathers, colonization was generous and admirable,  torture was part and parcel of war; today, colonization and torture are satanic acts, and very largely, war too.

Homosexuality was banned and despised, and today it is not only justified but praised. Abortion, previously criminalized, is being legitimized and advised.

Divorce, which was almost impossible and then difficult, no longer encounters any obstacle.

Suicide was frowned upon (suicides were not offered a religious funeral), it is considered a possible benefit, and the laws in some countries may help to achieve it.

"The table of mores" of a society reveal its reigning philosophy, its "gods". Even if a society does not define its creed, "any signifying act reveals a sleeping belief".

All behavior engages beliefs that are often buried and secret. The normative reversal that we have before us appears to a large part of the youth to be quite natural, because children are always educated by their time more than by their parents.

We must put a name on this inversion. It translates and tells the story of the end of Christendom. And it will be even easier to understand if we go back to the origins.

Christendom was established by a normative inversion, in the other direction. The fourth century was a break in the paradigm, both in the philosophical sense and in the ethical sense.

The universe of the Christians was the reverse of that of the Romans: they introduced a dualism between temporal and spiritual, here below and beyond, men and God, while the ancient religious world was deeply unified.

The Romans must have felt as if they were entering a torn intellectual and spiritual world. In the space of a few decades a reversal of mores took place. The old morality was replaced by another. In the context of what we now call the societal, in other words mores, there was an inversion of values.

Everything had to be reversed, as Tertullian, a 2nd century Christian theologian, wrote: “It is against all these prejudices that we have to fight, against the institutions, the ancestors, the authority of the thing received, the laws of the rulers, the reasonings of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against the examples, the wonders, the miracles, whose help strengthened all these adulterous divinities".

Christianity opposed the lax Roman strictures against divorce. Moreover, "abortion and infanticide had always been legitimate among ancient peoples, except among Jews and Egyptians". Romans families kept daughters only when the first born. Christians opposed those practices, and homosexual behaviour as well.

Within the Roman sphere of influence, Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313. Within very few decades, the reversal of Roman mores had been achieved, though the country people - the paganus - ran at a slower pace. "And Christians called themselves 'modern' - the word modernus appeared at this time." 

Perhaps in our time we are seeing the term "Christian" and "bigot" serve the function of "pagan" - "Paganism is given as superstitious, obsolete and outdated."

It is already a march towards progress: the winner appropriates the meaning of history. The revolutionary period in the 18th century was what can be called the beginning of the end of Christendom. At this time the Westerners begin to overthrow the common civilization.

This process lasted two centuries. [...] Take divorce in France. A law authorizing divorce was promulgated in 1792 during the Revolution. It was repealed in 1816 under the Restoration. But divorce was reestablished in July 1884. A law of the Vichy regime of April 2, 1941, restricted the possibilities. Finally, after the second war, the laws on divorce made it easier and easier, until mutual consent was reached.

Delsol sees a definite "drive to root out the principles of Christianity". However, "the tide has been sweeping for two centuries always in the same direction, and never stopping".

The recent history of abortion laws reflects the same upheavals, strewn with violent reactions in both directions. The demonstrations are screaming. The laws passed arouse cries of joy and cries of horror, and excesses everywhere. Passion is always involved. Women march by screaming that their bodies belong to them. Extremist groups are trying to block the operation of abortion clinics.

The same goes for marriage between two people of the same sex, for assisted reproduction, for assisted suicide.

Christians try to defend traditional morality with non-Christian arguments: they know very well that their dogma would not be heard at all.

They argue from nature, natural law or peripheral reasons which are not necessarily less important. In doing so, they even find unexpected allies, as when today groups of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists devoid of religious convictions join the ranks of Christians in the fight for the defense of fatherhood.

But all this, without any result, ever. Our societies do not care about natural law, and widely believe that this sort of thing does not exist, and that we are the inventors of nature.

Whatever happens, the old principles are going back step by step, sometimes fast and sometimes slowly, but with regularity and certainty. Their Christian defenders struggle only for ethics of conviction or for panache.

Countries that resist total liberation are singled out by others, treated as backward, as if there was an obligation of good taste, good conduct, reason and intelligence, to erase old mores.

We can see that the currents that defend ancient morals, although elected by many voters, have difficulty finding representatives or rather find only extremist representatives [...] The fate of a current condemned by history is to become more and more extremist, to lose its most competent defenders, and finally, by a sort of disastrous process, to end up resembling the description of its adversaries.

The normative inversion that we see at work here, through this quiet and decisive evolution that crosses the 19th and 20th centuries, represents almost the exact opposite of what happened in the 4th century. Plutarch's cry, "The great Pan is dead" might have anticipated the end of paganism - at least that is how Christians then interpreted it to their advantage. Pan, or Priapus, is the God of sex and violence.

The present cultural environment reflects the completion of the circle of life, Delsol suggests. There is a coherence in the "normative inversion" taking place. It is not a metter of any march of "progress", toward "freedom", for example.

What is inevitable is "the result of a radical transformation of beliefs".  Hearts and minds have absorbed, or been captured by, newly attractive principles.

A normative inversion, especially of this magnitude, rests on the basis of a philosophical inversion. This is quite natural: we do not upset the whole of morality in this way on a simple whim - we do it because the foundations on which the old morality rested have been replaced by others.

Each culture or civilization poses, at an original and decisive moment in its history, primordial ontological choices on which everything else is built and supported - morals and mores, laws and customs. For Christendom, this decisive moment was the time of the first councils, which established the outlines of the first truths on which sixteen centuries of Christianity would live: God, the person, the moral.

There comes a day when faith in first principles breaks down. As far as we are concerned, we are now living at a breaking point where the primordial ontological choices - concerning the meaning and place of man in the universe, the nature of the world or of the gods, are overturned.

If beliefs collapse, laws and mores will continue for some time without further justification and by force of habit alone - but that will not last, and they will eventually collapse under the accusation of illegitimacy.

What founds a civilization is not the truth - as all claim it - it is the belief in a truth. And only this belief guarantees the persistence of the original choices.

Examples of radical transformations include Moses leading the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt into a realm ruled by one god, not a bevy of gods - from polytheism into monotheism. The Hebrews were constantly tempted to revert to the polytheism  - "cosmotheism" - of their neighbours.

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The banishment of the Greek-Roman gods marks a similarly thorough ontological reversal.

Historians of religions have differentiated between two types of religions: cosmotheisms or polytheisms which are natural and obvious, and monotheisms or "secondary religions", [which] appeal to the concepts of revelation, faith, interior wisdom. They are constructions and always require to be reaffirmed, maintained by constant efforts.

[In contrast,] primary religion arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies or re-occupies its place as soon as it is free.

This is what is happening to us today. Cosmotheism has never disappeared from the scene in Western societies shaped by monotheism. Many figures or authors have been inspired by it to varying degrees: alchemy, the cabbalah, Spinoza, freemasonry, Lessing, German romanticism, Goethe, Freud, Nazism, the new age ...

We can be sure that cosmotheism remains there, asleep and always reborn as soon as the secondary religion which replaced it shows signs of weakness.

In his famous 1917 lecture, The Profession and the Vocation of Scientist, Max Weber described how monotheism had dethroned polytheism in the name of universal reason. And how polytheism remains, ousted but lurking, awaiting its revenge.

Christian rule is already being replaced - neither by nothingness nor by the storm, but by well-known, more primitive and rustic forms of history.

Behind collapsed Christianity come Stoic morals, paganism, Asian-type spiritualities. Nietzsche had foreseen this evolution when he wrote: "European China, with a soft Buddhist-Christian belief, and in practice, an Epicurean savoir-vivre".

At the start of the 21st century, the most established and most promising philosophical current is a form of cosmotheism linked to the defense of nature.

We can also speak of pantheism or polytheism. Our Western contemporaries no longer believe in a beyond or in a transcendence. The meaning of life must therefore be found in this life itself, and not above it, where there is nothing. The sacred is found here: in the landscapes, in the life of the earth and in humans themselves.

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, we have changed the paradigm by making a new choice of understanding the world.

Under cosmotheism, man feels at home in the world, which represents the only reality and which contains both the sacred and the profane.

Under monotheism, man feels a stranger in this immanent world and longs for the other world. For the monotheist, this world is only a stopover. For the cosmotheist, he is at home. The post-modern mind is tired of living in a stopover! He needs a home of his own, complete in its meanings.

He becomes a cosmotheist again because he wants to reintegrate this world as a full citizen, and no longer as this "domiciled foreigner". 

The post-modern man wants to do away with distinctions - his favorite adjective is "inclusive". And cosmotheism suits him because it erases the old dualism characteristic of Judeo-Christianity.

It requires escaping the contradictions between the false and the true, between God and the world, between faith and reason ...

Ecology today is a religion, a belief. "Belief": not that the current ecological problem should not be considered scientifically proven; but because these scientific certainties about climate and ecology produce irrational convictions and certainties, in reality religious beliefs, endowed with all manifestations of religion.

Today, ecology has become a liturgy: it is impossible to omit the question, one way or another, in any speech or fragment of speech.

It is a catechism: it is taught to children from kindergarten and repeatedly, to help them acquire good habits of thinking and acting.

It is a consensual dogma - whoever asks questions about it, who dispels the slightest doubt, is considered mad or evil.

But above all, and this is the clear sign of a vigorous belief and certainly not of a rational science: the passion for nature makes us accept all that was challenged by almighty individualism - personal responsibility, debt imposed on descendants, duties towards the community.

It is therefore in the name of this immanent and pagan religion that we are reintegrating the indispensable dimensions of existence, which previously were taken into account and cultivated by Christianity.

The new ecological religion is a form of post-modern pantheism. Nature becomes the object of a cult, more or less proven. Mother earth becomes a kind of pagan goddess, and not only among indigenous Bolivians, among Europeans as well. So much so that Pope Francis speaks today of "our mother the earth", in a Christian sense of course, but leaving open the ambiguity that allows the link with contemporary beliefs.

We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality.

She is now alone in the world. We see a philanthropy unfold, a love for humanity directly inherited from that of the Gospel, but without the foundations.

Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but stripping it of all transcendence. For contemporary American political scientist Joseph Bottum, today a disfigured Protestant morality without transcendence dominates morality across the Atlantic. Membership of [US Mainline] Protestantism has decreased from 50% to 4% in half a century, and the deadly sins are: intolerance, power, militarism, oppression.

In other words, a degraded Gospel produced the decolonial current - we must add: after having produced communism in its time.

We remember that in pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose morality.

This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce it, and possibly enforces it through insults and ostracism.

Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. She dominates the television sets. She inhabits all the cinematography of this time. She rules in schools and in yards, in families.

When it needs to be straightened out or given a good direction, it is the governing elite that does it.

The European rulers represent in this respect the tabernacle of the clericature.

In short, we have returned to a typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.

Given the powerful winds of change blowing against it, Delsol bravely faces the key question: "What becomes, what will become of the Church without Christendom?"

The "radical upheaval" under way has led to resignation by many leaders in the Church; "disarmed in every way, [they] cease to claim lost power and even repent of having used and abused it"; [they] are now silent and discreet apostles".

"A humble testimony" is in order - anything else is "propaganda", which is totally in "bad taste". 

[Therefore,] "reduced to the situation of silent witnesses, Christians today are doomed to become soldiers in a lost war. Their fights, especially - and these are the main ones since they concern principles and virtues - fights on societal issues, lead nowhere and moreover have no chance of succeeding.

Christians who protest tirelessly to try to prevent rogue laws on abortion or assisted reproduction can only be successful by first implementing a spiritual revolution.

Convert people to Christianity, to the intrinsic dignity of each embryo, and then you can abolish abortion.

Wanting to do it in the opposite direction would be like trying to impose confession on non-Catholic peoples: terrorist nonsense. Belief and adherence to principles precedes acceptance of laws.

Far from wanting to conquer the world, from now on, like the Jews, we are going to worryabout living and surviving - and that will be enough.

When one cannot be a power, one can be an example, said Camus.

Modernity, in fact, is probably both a rejection of Christian power (challenge to societal laws),

and a revival and adaptation of Christian principles (especially social ones).

In all its dimensions, modernity is established against Christianity as a civilization, and not against Christianity. It only challenges the power of religion and not religion itself, as Tocqueville wrote [of the French Revolution]:

"It was much less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution that Christianity had kindled this furious hatred".

For most of us, the past has become a foreign land - and I will add, unwanted. After the adventures of the last two centuries, [...]  it is no longer Christendom leaving us - it is we who are leaving it. Why?

Delsol's reasons include that we don't want Chrisitianity to be taken as an ideology. Also, "because we have given up the reign of force", our mission must be as witnesses rather than as conquistadors. 

Probably it would be better if we were only silent witnesses, and ultimately secret agents of God, since despite the normative and philosophical inversions, Christianity is still, in its way, the spirit of the place.

Renouncing Christendom is not a painful sacrifice. The experience of our fathers brings us a certainty: our business is not to produce societies where "the Gospel governs the States", but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupéry, to "walk very slowly towards a fountain”.

It is clear Delsol would not give any weight to the attempts in the United States to develop a Catholic  "integralist" platform as a way of involving Christian principles into civic life.

At the end of her lecture Delsol, considered questions from the audience. The discussion touched upon the need to examine pagan life in Athens and Rome to grasp the spiritual culture appearing most prominently in Western societies.   

However, she believed that the concept of human dignity will remain important, without its assessment of human value being the prerogative solely of the world of politics. 

I think that about human dignity, there is a paradox, because it is a Christian concept, but the world of modernity wants to keep this concept:

The reception of the Holocaust in Europe proves clearly, I think, that the concept of human dignity is very strong. You don’t have any sign of that, though, in China or Vietnam with the Holocaust.

People are indifferent, you see. There is a will to keep it but in another place it is abandoned - abortion for example. There is a paradox - we would like to keep it but also abandon it. But it is a little hope [for Christians] to see that it is important to keep something.

Discussion leader Dr. Dariusz Karłowicz said that what surprised him about much of the controversy in Italy about immigration is that supporters did not based their arguments on human dignity but on utilitarian arguments.

That was absolutely surprising, because the concept of the relative dignity of the pagan world was based on the utilitarian category. If you were good for the polis - you were okay, if not - you disappear.

As to the possibility of stopping the secularisation process in the world, Delsol was adamant that there is no way to reverse what has happened.

I don’t see any chance to stop it [because] everything is based on beliefs. There are no beliefs for this. The young generation doesn’t understand at all our explanations, they don’t have the same beliefs.

Everything is going to be paganism in lots of aspects. You will have a sort of cosmotheism, ecology with religion, some gods will appear, wisdom, epicurean wisdom, stoicism... But everything will be secularised, I think.

A further question was on the role that believers will have in this new world. Delsol replied:

They have to be witnesses. I think that believers can’t argue to speak. I think the speech is finished. We have to live and to live well. We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think.

Clarification was asked for in this way - Has the communicative element in society been destroyed? Are there no arguments that may be shared? Delsol gave her reply firmly:

No, because we have been speaking for centuries and centuries. Now people are tired of hearing us. They don’t believe us, it’s not the time to speak. It’s the time to exist. To act.

This question was asked again from another angle:

One of the features of cosmotheism is the idea of complete unity with the world, which closes us to transcendence. Can we find contemporary philosophy attempts to reopen to transcendence and rediscover monotheism?

The reply was as before:

I think we have to evangelize as in the beginning… to take people one by one and convince them. We can’t do anything now. I don’t know what else we can do. We have to convince, evangelize individually.

Karłowicz agreed with her but he added that from his study of the ancient world it occurs to him that "paganism raises many questions, which it can’t answer itself. So Christianity is a proper answer. It’s not a question of rhetoric that you mentioned, it’s a question of existential experience, the problem which cannot be fulfilled in any other way."

In turn, Delsol agreed with Karłowicz that what is occurring at this point of history is an attempt to transform the whole Western civilisation founded on Christianity. Karłowicz's view was this:

Today's version of the cosmic religion [...] offers the construction of a new fate and civilisation and it [demands] strong dogmatic proof of faith, its moral codex. This new religion considers it's truth as universal and good. And that’s not intended to deal only with gentle testimony, but has a strong ambition to win in the struggle of political and civilisation victory.

And it’s not only about political power, it’s about human souls to be converted to the truth.

However, it remains to be seen whether this post-Christian and post-Enlightenment program will embed itself thoroughly in the culturally dominant societies on the world stage, or whether it will collapse as the Soviet hegemony did in Eastern Europe as the tide of public disillusionment rose.

Secondly, Christians have faced reversals and persecutions over the centuries, weathering the storms by the power of God - "And remember! I will be with you always, yes, even until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

To conclude, in so many ways we see that traditional Christian culture is at an end. To make a new beginning we need to take Chantal Delsol's words to heart when she urges her listeners to "live and live well" - "We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think."

💢 See Rod Dreher's response to Professor Delsol's lecture here.

💢 Useful resources for preparing a Christian response to the new totalitarianism are the books by the prescient Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Society (2017), and Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).

💢 Go here to read the thoughts of the future Pope Benedict on the prospects for the Church given the adverse cultural environment of secular Europe.

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