Over at VoegelinView there’s an interview with yours truly, which my friend Dr. Jesse Russell conducted earlier this month. Jesse asked some terrific questions. I’m really grateful to him and to the folks at VoegelinView.
To give you a taste, here’s one of his questions, and part of my answer:
Q. You present the view in your work (shared by some secular historians as well) that people living in the Middle Ages may have at least sometimes been happier and healthier than we are today. Why is this so?
A. Serfs had lots of reasons to be happy that we don’t have. They got a lot more time off during the year than we do—weeks, even months more. They got to spend more time with their wives and children even when they were at work. Each family had more land than we do: about twelve acres on average. All of their furniture was handmade. All of their food was organic. Every beer they drank was a microbrew. They didn’t vote, which means they didn’t have to bother with politics. In fact, their government was practically non-existent.
Best of all, every aspect of private and public life was ordered by the Church. That made life better for people on earth. More importantly, it also meant that more folks went to Heaven.
There was one more reason I wanted to include but I didn’t have enough room. Then I thought to myself, “I’ll turn it into a Substack post.” So, here we are.
The final sense in which Medievals were better off than we are is this: they didn’t suffer from internalized materialism. In other words, they weren’t materialists by default.
Men of the Middle Ages didn’t have to go looking for God. He was everywhere. They saw that all of Creation bore the mark of its divine Creator—as did virtually all mankind, everywhere in the world, before the 20th century. Whether they were anamists or shamanists, polytheists like the ancient Greeks or dualists like the ancient Persians, they were all “spiritualists” by default. They could perceive the existence of nonphysical as well as physical things.
Now, that doesn’t mean we’re all basically atheists. Not at all. Atheists are only about 3% of the U.S., while vast majority of Americans profess belief in one religion or another. But with each passing generation it becomes harder to sustain that belief in the supernatural. Whatever we profess with our mouths, or even what we think in our heads, we don’t necessarily believe in our hearts. We don’t internalize it.
Of course, that’s not true for all of us. When my wife’s grandmother (a devout, lifelong Catholic) was in her final illness, she showed a confidence in the Faith that I’d never witnessed firsthand. “I want to go home,” she kept telling her family; she meant Heaven. You hear about saints saying things like that in old stories, though you can’t help wondering.
Believe me, Grandma Rose meant it. And I do think she’s a saint. But I’m not. Odds are you’re not, either. Not yet, at least.
Maybe you’re not blessed with a superabundance of supernatural faith. In the Middle Ages, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Every facet of human society would be ordered towards revealing the imprint of the Divine. The king was an officer of the Church in his own right, sworn to uphold the Faith within his realm. Workers were given time off for baptisms, funerals, weddings, and major feasts. All music was sacred music. All art was sacred art. Church spires soared over every skyline. Bells rang out in every town and village across Europe. Schools were run by monks and hospitals by friars. The whole architecture of public life was theistic, spiritual.
And while the Middle Ages may have been especially intense—“an amorous dream of Heaven,” as Maeztu called it—this was pretty much the norm for all premodern civilizations. Worship and prayer are always the heart of public life. (That’s why “cult,” or cultus, is the root for the word culture.) No doubt some individuals believed more strongly than others, but just about everyone believed.
Not today. Today, our society is torn between three distinct currents: a bland pluralism, a grim secularism, and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The architecture of public life is ordered towards suppressing, mocking, and/or explaining away our metaphysical sensibility. The only “spirituality” we tolerate is the sort you can buy in a Hallmark store: scented candles and inspirational quotes.
So, faith comes harder to us. It comes harder than it did for practically any generation that lived before us, anywhere in the world.
Our secular friends would say that’s because we know so much more about science and so we don’t need religion anymore, yada yada. But I don’t buy that for a minute. Science hasn’t explained the origins of the universe, nor can it ever. Hold up Darwin’s theory of evolution in one hand and Anselm’s ontological arguments for God in the other. They don’t conflict. They don’t even intersect. They’re making two totally different points that have virtually no bearing on one another.
Little wonder. The questions that “science” answers were of secondary interest to the Medievals. Sure: they were curious about where human beings came from. But they were more interested in where being itself came from. Why is there something instead of nothing? Again, that’s a question Darwin & Co. have not and cannot answer.
No, science isn’t the problem. The problem is scientism—or materialism, naturalism, postivism, or whatever you want to call it. The problem is an ideology that says only physical things are real, or they’re realer than nonphysical things, or we should treat them as if they’re realer because they’re more falsifiable and all spiritual things should be relegated to the private sphere.
I don’t buy any of that, either, for reasons laid out by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man. I believe the spiritual “sense” is as universal and reliable as our sense of smell or taste. The theory of a godless, soulless universe is illogical; it also doesn’t feel right. There’s nothing to support it, except the circular arguments of materialism. I can’t pretend to take that view seriously.
And yet… And yet… We can never quite purge it fully from our minds, can we? Even the most devout Christians tend to feel that the Medievals were a bit naïve, and that modern science has made it objectively harder for Christians to believe. The age of man’s innocense is lost. The most we can aspire to be is a kind of half-skeptic, tortured Kierkegaardian lingering at the marchland of despair.
No, it isn’t something we think with our heads. We’ve read the great apologists, from Anselm to Lewis. We know the perfectly feasible arguments laid out by Augustine and Aquinas. We nod along to G. K. Chesterton and William Lane Craig.
We think Christianity is true, but we don’t feel like it’s true. We certainly don’t act like it’s true.
I’ve noticed this tendency in myself. A friend of mine noticed it in himself, too, recently. He confided that he had doubts about the existence of God. I asked him if he’d spoken to his priest, and he blurted out, “I don’t want to make him doubt, too.”
Ahh, there it is. That quintessentially modern sort of doubt. That internalized materialism. Not only do we take it for granted that we’re deluding ourselves: we take it for granted that our fellow Christians are deluding themselves, too. It’s not innocence, but the ceremony of innocence. And should anyone break the fourth wall, the curtain will come down. The ceremony will be drowned.
I suspect that this internalized materialism is far more common than any of us realize. For example, I think that’s a huge part of the reason why we (both conservatives and liberals) put politics before religion. It’s why we make up stupid rules for ourselves that don’t align with our faiths, like traditionalists who say that Catholics actually shouldn’t eat turkey on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Why do we do it? Because, deep down, we’re not sure that God or the Faith or the Church really have the answers. Our faith is much weaker than we realized. It hasn’t penetrated the depths. We’ve internalized materialism, not Christianity.
Yet at the same time we assume that, because we call ourselves Christians and read Christian books and attend Christian churches, we have faith. It’s everyone else who needs the faith. That’s an easy assumption to make, if you go with the modern idea of faith as “believing in something that can’t be verified”… and if you also settle for modern standards of verification.
But that’s not what faith actually is. Faith is a gift. Do you accept it?
If you’re looking for me to answer that question for you, I’m sorry, but I can’t. You have to search your own heart. But I do want to say this:
If you have any doubts about God or the Church or Christianity, first of all, that’s perfectly normal. You can talk about it. You can break the fourth wall. The sky won’t fall, I promise.
If you’ve ever wondered if someone can confront their “internalized materialism” and come out the other side with faith, that I can answer, and the answer is yes. I did. And, if you like, I can share with you my method for accepting the gift of faith.
Step 1: Pray. “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Step 2: Acknowledge that your doubts are irrational. Like 99.999% of all human beings who have ever lived, you sense that there’s a nonphysical dimension to the universe. And that’s not a coincidence. It isn’t you who are absurd for believing in God: it’s they who are absurd for denying Him. As always, Waugh was right—if not kind: “There is a danger that we look on ourselves as the exceptions, instead of in the true perspective of ourselves as normal and the irreligious as freaks.”
Step 3: Seriously, pray. “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Step 4: Having acknowledged that your doubts are irrational, enlist your reason to help break the patterns of doubt. If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety and depression, you know that, at some point, you have to “retrain your brain”. You have to restructure your neural pathways so your thoughts don’t keep getting stuck in the same ruts. I had to do the same with my faith. I had to train my brian to avoid those needless doubts (as opposed to the needful doubts—the ones that break the mold of your immature faith and, in so doing, help it grow). Materialism only claims that theism is irrational, but since I can easily see that materialism is irrational, I make my brain privilege my logical faith against my illogical doubts.
Step 5: Pray again. “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Step 6: Live the faith. This one is actually harder than it sounds, even if you’ve been practicing Christianity your whole life. But let me explain….
In the course of the same conversation, my friend also confessed that he felt closer to God when he got up early, ate well, etc. When he was in the habit of staying up late on YouTube, etc., his doubts intensified. Isn’t that proof that spirituality is just a kind of wholesome pleasure we can get from clean living?
Well, if God ordained the virtues (both natural and theological), of course we’d feel closer to Him when we’re living virtuously. How could it be otherwise? But I get what he means. Sometimes, it seems like these things line up a little too well. It used to bother me that, the more frequently I attended Mass or read the Scriptures, the stronger my faith became. Not only that: a kind of equilibrium would grow up between my body and my soul. I had more faith and less anxiety.
Was I deluding myself? That’s one explanation, but it’s neither the simplest nor the most reasonable. The simplest, most reasonable explantion was given by Pope Benedict XVI: “Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of His existence appear.”
And by the Ven. Fulton Sheen: “Either you live how you believe, or else you will begin to believe how you live.
And by St. Anselm: “I believe that I may understand.”
Best of all, though, is St. Augustine. As he says in On the Sermon on the Mount,
Now, they are peacemakers in themselves who, by bringing in order all the motions of their soul, and subjecting them to reason—i.e. to the mind and spirit—and by having their carnal lusts thoroughly subdued, become a kingdom of God: in which all things are so arranged, that that which is chief and pre-eminent in man rules without resistance over the other elements, which are common to us with the beasts; and that very element which is pre-eminent in man, i.e. mind and reason, is brought under subjection to something better still, which is the truth itself, the only-begotten Son of God.
For a man is not able to rule over things which are inferior, unless he subjects himself to what is superior. And this is the peace which is given on earth to men of goodwill; this the life of the fully developed and perfect wise man. From a kingdom of this sort brought to a condition of thorough peace and order, the prince of this world is cast out, who rules where there is perversity and disorder.
The life of reason, the life of virtue, and the life of faith are all one and the same. So, live it.