Heavens Below: The Religious Impulse in a Secular World

One of the benefits of receiving a religious upbringing is that the recipient is left with a heightened sensitivity to religious behaviour in others. Those others include the professedly secular, rationalist and anti-religious, who would reject any suggestion that their behaviour or ideas proceed along pathways laid down by religion.

In the 1990s I had a regular acquaintance pleased to describe himself as a Marxist. He dressed plainly and cheaply; he lived frugally; he was ‘so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit’, as Robert Lowell described a ‘fly-weight pacifist’ of the 1950s.[1] My modern-day Marxist railed against the vulgar seductions of consumer culture; he rebuked all bourgeois ideology, including that of the family. He opposed all forms of intellectual and political compromise. His favoured form of ‘praxis’ was meeting with six or seven like-minded intellectuals as a cell, to discuss matters of theoretical importance.

One night we saw a big-budget Hollywood action movie, which to me was disappointingly generic but otherwise unremarkable. My Marxist friend later informed me that the film had made him feel so tawdry, so polluted, that he sat up late that night reading long passages of Marx. It was as if this corruption of the righteous self, this stain of the commodity spectacle, could only be erased by recourse to the sanctified text.

I didn’t tell him what I was thinking: that in another age he would have made a first-rate monk. Or if not a monk, then an early Protestant of puritanical bent, such as the Pietists, who valued good works and Bible study in small groups. Like these devout individuals, my friend was disciplined, high-minded, austere. He was perpetually on guard against the mortal world’s contaminations. He had ascetic rigour. If he sensed the encroachment of the fallen world, he knew how to protect himself: through the healing truth of the pure text. If I had told him any of this, he would have been indignant, even hostile. His particular mission had no role for the opiate of the people.

Like many other atheists, my friend was perplexed that religious belief has persisted in the West, more than two centuries after the Enlightenment. Despite the triumph of science, despite the rationalism built into industrial modernity, despite general acceptance of the theory of evolution, and despite the best efforts of evangelists of atheism such as Richard Dawkins, religious faith has endured. In recent years, neuroscientists have posited an innate neurological basis for religious belief, finding an answer in ‘theobiology’ for the question of ‘why God won’t go away’.[2] However, I am less interested in this ‘neuropsychological’ pursuit of the God impulse than in the cultural circuits forged by religious thought. It is through these circuits that much secular intellectual and political activity continues to operate.

The Secular Age

The secularisation of religious thought, which has endowed Western culture with a great deal of its character, occurred to a large extent in the nineteenth century.[3] The century of Darwin and Marx was also the century in which disciplines such as history were defined in evidence-based, scientific terms. Techniques of religious scholarship, such as exegesis and hermeneutics, were transformed into tools of secular intellectual method. Yet the religious impulse was not obliterated in this process of making-secular. The Christian model of historical time became the foundation first for Hegelian Idealism, in which World-Spirit sweeps to the end point of history, and later for Marxist historical materialism.

Of the many commentators noting the connection between Marxism and Christianity, Albert Camus is perhaps the most succinct. In The Rebel, he describes ‘the Christian origins of all types of historic messianism, even revolutionary messianism. The only difference lies in a change of symbols.’ Camus identifies Marxism as ‘an enterprise for the deification of man’, which ‘assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religions’.[4] For Camus, this borrowing was inevitable, due to the fundamentally Christian underpinning of the Western philosophy of time. Unlike the ancient Greeks, for whom the history of the world was cyclical, the early Christians invented a linear conception of time, with a fixed beginning and movement towards a definite end point, which is preceded by apocalypse. In this new concept of history, ‘surprising to the Greek mind’, the end of history will be reached when ‘man gains his salvation or earns his punishment’.[5]

Camus wryly observed that for Marx and Engels, the class struggle culminates in revolution and the ‘final disappearance of political economy’, and with it the end of pain and suffering in history; at this point, Paradise will be attained.[6] While this parallel between Marxist and Christian narratives has been resisted by many Marxists and has embarrassed others, some Marxist historians, such as Hayden White, have embraced the confluence. Indeed, for White, ‘redemption’ is a key term in both master narratives, while the prophetic power of Marxism is rooted in the ‘moral coloration that Marx derived from his Hegelian, utopian, and religious forebears’.[7]

Nineteenth-century secularisation yielded these grand narratives of world history; it also generated many concepts that subsequently prospered in Western culture. One of these was ‘charisma’, a term unearthed from within nineteenth-century German theological scholarship by the sociologist Max Weber, whose theory of charisma was published posthumously in 1922. Charisma was originally a Greek word first used by St Paul in the mid first century, meaning ‘gift of God’s grace’. Charisma was a spiritual gift that could take many forms, including prophecy, speaking in tongues, teaching or healing. The endowment of these charismatic gifts was not dependent on church office or hierarchy: they were direct infusions of Spirit into the early Christian recipients. Because of this, the notion was viewed with suspicion by the church as it grew in sophistication (and hierarchy) from the second century.

Charisma, a mystical theological concept, was marginalised within the church by the fourth century; it lay largely dormant as a term in Christian theology until the nineteenth century, when it featured in German histories of the early ‘spiritual’ church. Weber adopted the term from these works, shifting its meaning to an ‘extraordinary’ quality of an individual, who is regarded as ‘endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.[8] This recast definition, applied by Weber to leaders with extraordinary appeal, became the common meaning of charisma from the 1960s, when it was further applied to celebrities, cult leaders and any individual able to galvanise followers. The contemporary understanding of charisma may seem far removed from the original Christian meaning, but the secularisation of this concept has preserved something of its mystical nature: charisma is still regarded as an elusive characteristic, somehow innate, a mysterious ‘gift’.

The Ascetic Ideal

My appreciation of the religious underpinnings of secular behaviour was enhanced by my research into the history of the term ‘charisma’.[9] This investigation also revealed the paucity of religious history bequeathed by my Protestant upbringing, which had left me with a very flimsy appreciation of the period between Paul and Luther—that is, of a fifteen-century stretch of Christian history.

Of particular interest to me was the long struggle within Christianity, beginning in the second century, to define an orthodox position. This process entailed the suppression of many alternative versions of the faith, including those proposed by the various Gnostic sects. These and other rival interpretations elevated (as had Paul) the direct experience of the Spirit above the mediating role of church office. The Gnostics were outlawed as heretical by the Catholic Church, but their belief in a true and secret knowledge of the spiritual world has continued to fascinate Western culture, in both its religious and secular dimensions. Recent theorists of cyberculture have even traced a long line connecting the contemporary fascination with the immaterial realm of information to the mystical beliefs of the second- and third-century Gnostics.[10]

While a certain romance has enshrouded the ancient Gnostic belief in secret codes unlocking profound mysteries (Dan Brown, among others, has recently profited from updating this idea to a modern context), the severity of the Gnostic attitude to the material world is often overlooked. The Christian Gnostics conceived a dualism that was more extreme than that found in either Plato’s philosophy or mainstream Christian theology. The world of matter, including human bodies, was considered corrupt, base, worthy only of disgust. For the Gnostics, the true essence of the human was the divine spark trapped inside the degenerate mortal body. The search for gnosis or knowledge was a lifelong quest that would deliver specially attuned individuals to a purely spiritual level; instruments assisting this quest included occult techniques, magic passwords and secret methods of decoding religious texts (such as the Gospels and Paul’s letters) to reveal their true spiritual meanings.

The Gnostics framed their contempt for worldly, unspiritual matters in cosmology: in many Gnostic belief-systems, the mortal world was overseen not by a benevolent God but by a malevolent minor deity. They practised an extreme, even ferocious, version of that distrust of the mortal world that has coursed through much Christian theology. While Gnosticism was purged from the Christian faith, the belief in a higher spiritual plane that could be reached through great effort found other forms of expression both in and outside Christian orthodoxy. In the early fourth century, St Antony received acclaim following his spiritual quest in the Egyptian desert. This was a Christian form of an older tradition of the hermit or holy man, who found spiritual wisdom in the desert or wilderness, often after prolonged self-deprivation and ordeal. The holy man was itself a version of the even older shamanic tradition: the shaman was a specialist able to attain altered states of consciousness—often through fasting or hallucinogenic substances—allowing access to the spirit world for the benefit of the whole community.

The Christian inflection of the holy man emphasised the ascetic base of spiritual enlightenment. In the fourth century, the church, ever wary of individuals seeking their own direct contact with Spirit, created the ‘rule’ or regulated order to be followed in monasteries. The individual quest was subjugated to the discipline and daily routine to be followed by all monks. Monasteries developed a strong communal sensibility—their rejection of private property was an antecedent of the later communist ideal—that was based on ascetic order tightly regulating individual activities.

Outside the official Christian domain of church and monastery, heretical groups persevered in their quest for spiritual truth. One of the most famous were the Catharists, who flourished in France in the twelfth century before their violent suppression by the Catholic Church. Like the Gnostics, the Cathar sect believed in the debased, evil nature of the material world, which prompted them to lead a purified ascetic life (they took their name from the Greek word for ‘pure’). They and many other sects devised their own rites and practices by which adherents could navigate a spiritual path from within the fallen material world; all of them were outlawed by the church, many persecuted by the Inquisition from the thirteenth century.[11]

Perhaps the most potent image, in the popular imagination, of self-punitive practices by extreme Christian ascetics is that of the Flagellants, prominent in the fourteenth century. In the long dark shadow of the Plague, the Flagellants flogged themselves in public, convinced that they possessed special spiritual powers that were much more significant than any matter of mere flesh. However, the more profound influence on later ascetic behaviour has come not from the extreme practices of sects or marginal groups, but from the Reformation. Protestants retained the guilt from original sin at the core of Catholicism (absent in the Eastern Orthodox tradition), but removed many of the mechanisms used to expiate that guilt: confession, intermediary saints and angels. In its place was a commitment to piety, humility, self-discipline, and hard work—later characterised by Max Weber as the Protestant ethic.[12]

The Calvinist theology that informed the Puritans and other Protestant denominations valued thrift, temperance and austerity in worship. At its most extreme, this demand for simplicity and aversion to ‘idolatry’ prompted the ransacking of Catholic churches and monasteries; according to the new creed, the Catholic icons of religious beauty were deemed sacrilegious. These acts of iconoclasm aside, the basis of the Protestant ascetic model was an internalisation of the individual’s relationship with God. With Catholic ritual and hierarchy removed, the emphasis was on personal knowledge of God through the Bible, and as reflected in the individual’s public life. A sense of duty, self-discipline, performance of charity and good works, and personal display of modesty and austerity, were all observed—to varying degrees of extremity—throughout the many versions of Protestantism.

Je m’accuse

I observed secularised ascetic behaviour at close quarters when I studied for a communications degree in Sydney in the early 1980s. The politics in the university department was post-Marxist extreme left wing: aligned with the oppressed and wedded to all worthy causes. The problem facing many of my fellow students was that their family backgrounds left them with no personal experience of the oppressed in any form. They were mostly the sons and daughters of the upper middle class, the beneficiaries of an affluent upbringing in Sydney’s northern and eastern suburbs.

Faced with a disjuncture between the de rigueur politics and their own privileged backgrounds, some attempted denial—‘I come from the working-class part of Vaucluse’—while others sought to disavow their privilege through conduct. This involved a publicly expressed loathing of all things bourgeois, a commitment to good works, and a strong dose of self-denial. They dressed in the cheapest clothes, frequented the most dismal pubs and cafés, while many followed a resolutely joyless vegetarian diet.

One evening I discovered, in the kitchen of my shared student household, one of my housemates flat on her back on the floor. She managed to convey to me her utter exhaustion, due to the many political activities she pursued in addition to her full-time studies. She asked me if I would tend to her dinner, cooking on the stove, while she rested before her next political meeting. I obliged, stirring the amalgam of mushed vegetables frying in vegetable oil that constituted her nightly meal. These vegetables, usually combined with brown rice, were cooked with such indifference that they formed an amorphous sludge. It was an entirely dispiriting meal: thin gruel seemed to me more appetising. After a few minutes, my housemate struggled to her feet, consumed the amorphous sludge, and shuffled off to her meeting.

I had experienced in that kitchen the self-punishing je m’accuse of Western middle-class guilt. Having grown up in a working-class country town, I was immune to the middle-class guilt, but I recognised the religious roots of the self-deprivation so vigorously practised by my fellow students. It was a puritanical code of behaviour, developed within Protestantism on the older ascetic model, and readily adopted—in secular guise—by members of the concerned middle class anxious to dispel their guilt. The behaviour was not always as overt as that pursued by my housemate in the kitchen, but I have continued to observe a tendency, in sections of the intellectual middle class, to disavow their own privileged position through alignment with the popular, the ordinary, the demotic. The dominant strand of contemporary Australian media studies, for example, follows a populist imperative, celebrating all forms of the popular in popular culture—no matter how banal or narcissistic—while opposing any critical judgement of that culture as ‘elitist’.

More generally, the Western liberal middle class has assumed an extra burden of guilt over the last decade, as awareness of global warming has consolidated. As the chief contributor to human-induced climate change, the affluent Western middle class has accepted responsibility for making amends, while many of its members have adopted ascetic codes of behaviour to limit consumption and minimise carbon footprints. Books, blogs and websites depicting sacrifices and ascetic rules designed to protect the environment have proliferated: eating only home-grown food, or food produced in a 100-kilometre radius, or existing without fossil fuels, or living for a year—in Manhattan—with no electricity and no waste.[13] Meanwhile, the old Christian narrative of time has been repurposed once again to fit the environmental theme: impending global climate catastrophe is the new Apocalypse, while the guilty need not wait until the end of time to be judged, as they have already judged themselves.

Doctrinal Theory

During my university studies, I continually noted the religious undergirding of much of the theory—critical left, post-structuralist—dominating the curriculum. The approach to preserving and imparting theoretical knowledge often struck me as more religious than critical-materialist. The ascendant film theory of the time—based around the British journal Screen—attempted to fuse concepts from psychoanalysis with a commitment to radical filmmaking. Essay after essay restated theoretical positions as if they were articles of faith; arguments were built up from first principles derived from Freud and developed by Jacques Lacan—but these first principles were never questioned. This form of theorising was not so much open-minded enquiry as it was the inscribing of doctrine, laid down upon unimpeachable foundations.

The psychoanalytical theory of Lacan seemed to me a grand construction in the French Catholic tradition: the Fall of the self into the world of language dubbed the Symbolic; the mysterious background realm of the Real. Foucault’s theory of the diffusion of power through society struck me as hauntingly similar to the Protestant conception of God: invisible but everywhere, pervading everything, all-seeing, surveillant. The religious base of the former theologian Heidegger was too evident even to bear mention. The infinite deferral of meaning in Derrida had much in common with rabbinical notions of scholarship, conceived as an incessant quest for revelation through textual study.

Nobody else ever made these connections, and the prevailing ethos—historical materialist, politically urgent—would have ridiculed any alleged debt to religion. Perhaps I was unduly influenced by the sight of so many modern-day Puritans, Pietists and Flagellants studying around me. But the religion-inside-the-secular perspective hasn’t diminished for me over time. Years later, I heard the performance artist Mike Parr describe his preparations for a new performance work—days of fasting, readying himself for a prolonged ordeal—and thought of the holy man, fasting ahead of his ordeal in the desert in search of new truths. I have observed groups of scholars clustering around their intellectual heroes—Derrideans, Deleuzians—in the manner of sects or even cults, applying the master’s truths to all aspects of cultural life, but never exposing the founding texts to serious critique. The great mechanisms of secular thought—scepticism, radical doubt, evidence-based argument—have taken flight from these followers of latter-day gurus.

Acknowledging the religious foundations of secular thought has the advantage of situating that thought within a broader and deeper historical context. Where does our compassion for refugees or the underprivileged come from, for example, if not from the Judeao-Christian tradition? A philosopher may be able to mount an argument for ethical behaviour on rational grounds, but the religious doctrines of compassion and equality before God have laid the groundwork for this behaviour. To deny this influence, even to deny the role of Western middle-class guilt in one’s decisions and activities, seems to me to limit self-awareness. And the secular tradition of intellectual enquiry, even as it assaulted religion during the Enlightenment, was intended to increase self-awareness, not to limit it.

Notes

1. Robert Lowell, ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, Selected Poems, Faber, London 1965, p. 51. Back to article

2. Two examples of this scholarship are: Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Ballantine, New York, 2001; and Jensine Andresen, Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Rituals and Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. Back to article

3. Hugh McLeod, in his book-length study of secularisation in Europe, proposes that the period 1848–1914 is the most significant in this historical process: Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914, Macmillan, London, 2000. Back to article

4. Albert Camus, The Rebel, Penguin, London, 1971, p. 160. Back to article

5. Camus, p. 157. Back to article

6. Camus, p. 189. Back to article

7. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md, 1987, pp. 143–4. Back to article

8. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Bedminster Press, New York, 1968 (1922), p. 241. Back to article

9. John Potts, A History of Charisma, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009. Back to article

10. The most well developed treatment of this approach is by Erik Davis, TechGnosis, Serpent’s Tail, London, 1999. Back to article

11. An informative and entertaining history of the Christian spiritual ‘enthusiasts’, from the second century to the nineteenth, is provided by R.A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1950. Back to article

12. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Unwin University Books, London, 1971) was originally published in 1904–05. Back to article

13. Colin Beavan, No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 2009. A survey of this and other recent books is provided by Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Green Like Me: Living without a Fridge, and Other Experiments in Environmentalism’, New Yorker, 30 August 2009, pp. 70–4. Back to article