I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain
the future is.
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
their religion,
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;
(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,
Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
The life and mind of the contemporary American is beset by an insidious dichotomy of matter and spirit; of the immediate and the eternal; of realities and ideas. It is insidious because it is false and misleading. The very notion of a division between the material and the spiritual, often giving way to the implication that one is less real or good than the other, cannot but create an unnatural rift within the individual and society. To our own tragic loss, it can cause us to lose sight of the good; or, what’s more, to brand as evil what is good.[1] At that point we have lost an essential truth; that
The incarnation is the supreme exemplification of union between matter and spirit. Christ himself sustains the union. If this union is not manifest within us then something of goodness, righteousness, and holiness is lost to us. The effects of this loss are far-reaching, affecting both the intimate and the universal. For that reason, we will be focusing our discussion on the idea of division and union between just two lower, but no less important facets of the issue—progress and religion. Progress here will reflect the material; and religion, the spiritual.
For those who cling to popular, ahistorical, Dan-Brown-esque notions of the past, these two ideas (both in concept and practice) are plainly antithetical. There is no reconciliation possible. Religion is reactionary and repressive and progress is just that, progressive. In order for these to achieve any conceivable measure of coexistence, one idea must concede nearly all its independent substance and practical influence to the other. The lesser is left to try and perpetuate itself as a quaint and sentimental superstition. Religion in this day and age is most often cast into that secondary role; all too willingly by those religious individuals who accept it as penance in association with religion's sins. They submit their convictions to a secular doctrine of religious total depravity and construct a dissonance between their faith and its material manifestation.
Progress would be nearly immune to criticism if it were interpreted and applied in the same way universally. Sadly, this couldn’t be further from reality. The idea of “progress” has inspired eugenics, civil rights, National Socialism, the American Revolution, communism, and child labor laws equally. It is a decidedly mixed record. However, contrary to many attitudes towards religion, progress is generally considered to be sound in principle, flawed only in its application. Unfortunately, we seem to be confused as to what exactly that principle is. That is not to say that we should adopt a negative outlook concerning progress as an idea; though it is somewhat surprising that more have not gone the way of John Zerzan[3], disparaging the idea of progress in all forms. Nonetheless, that would at least be consistent with most reasoning concerning religion.
Despite the antagonism between progress and religion, neither has completely yielded to the other at any point in recorded history. Typically what we see is a transformation—like energy, undestroyed—of one of these archetypal ideas into simply another substance. In the 20th century we witnessed this phenomenon occur repeatedly within the budding communist and socialist states:
The state has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship…The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries.[4]
Such gross distortions do much more than wreak havoc on human moral judgments, but they also turn men and women against principles. This is the much more sinister, unseen effect of accepting perversity as reality. The flaws we perceive in the function of religion are such perversities. St. Augustine described the nature of the situation best in his Confessions:
And I asked what wickedness was, and I found that it was no substance, but a perversion of the will bent aside from thee, O God, the supreme substance, toward these lower things, casting away its inmost treasure and becoming bloated with external good.[5]
If we can accept this basic premise, that evil is in fact just good perverted[6], then it should bring us to an inquiry of the evils distorting religion and the good from which they were derived.
What then is the true nature of religion? In the Christian sense of the term this is necessarily a union of the material and the spiritual made manifest Church’s core rituals and traditions; that is, “to baptize by water and spirit in the likeness of Christ’s Death and Resurrection; to ‘come together as Church’ on the Lord’s Day, to hear His Word and ‘to eat and drink at His table in His Kingdom’; to relate—through the ‘liturgy of time’—all time, all cosmos—its time, matter and life—as a sacramental icon of Christ who is to ‘fill all things with Himself.’” The Christian religion, therefore, is the “mystery of the new creation;" the mystery of incarnation.[7] Thus we sing litanies petitioning the fulfillment of this Truth within our relationships, our society, and us.
Is this principle, then, irreconcilable with any conception of personal, scientific, social, and cultural progress? Must humanity arrest its mind, reasoning and creative faculties in order to live a life consistent with spiritual Truth? If the development of ancient civilization can be any guide, then this would certainly not be the case. Following the discovery of a 11,600 year old religious sanctuary in south-eastern Turkey known as Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists and anthropologists have begun to reconsider long standing assumptions concerning the growth of religion and civilization:
Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But [Klaus] Schmidt[8] argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths [of Göbekli Tepe] literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.[9]
This is consistent with the fact that the arts and sciences we have received from later, but still ancient, societies were originally developed in pursuit of the divine within man and the universe. Progress in these brought man wisdom as well as a greater and truer understanding of the divine in the entire material universe. Translating this fact into our own cultural circumstances, the principle of progress can be understood at its core to be a spiritual evolution; one that brings us as individuals closer to the Kingdom of Heaven and our higher nature; and this growth is, or ought to be, reflected collectively in our society. If ideas of progress are divided from this principle, progress itself loses its efficacy.
The problem of abuse, misinterpretation, or misapplication regarding religion and progress essentially arises from the rift that is often placed between the material and spiritual natures of both. We tend to consider these principles primarily from either their idealistic or pragmatic aspects, and often fail to discern good from evil. We become angry and resentful because of how abuse and perversity has affected us; but in allowing this to cripple our discernment, we inflict a far greater abuse on ourselves. We would do well to remember that the greater the good, the equally evil its perversion. There is no idea, system, or institution conceivable that is impervious to corruption. Seeing religion and progress distorted as they have been, and understanding that abandoning either places both the individual and society in an unnaturally divided state, our task becomes one of rectification—reclaiming both progress and religion in accordance with the truth of the incarnation.
All truths of Orthodoxy emerge from the one Truth and converge on one Truth, infinite and eternal. That Truth is the God-man Christ. If you experience any truth of Orthodoxy to its limit, you will inevitably discover that its kernel is the God-man Christ. In fact, all truths of Orthodoxy are nothing other than different aspects of the one Truth - the God-man Jesus Christ.[10]
[1] “He that has a crooked heart finds no good”; Proverbs 17:20
[2] 1 Timothy 3:16
[3] Primitivist author of Against Civilization, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, and Future Primitive
[4] C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
[5] St. Augustine, Confessions VII: 16
[6] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend
[7] Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann
[8] Archaeologist from the German Archaeological Institute
[9] Andrew Curry, Göbekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?, November 2008
[10] St. Justin Popovich
