Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (115 page)

The very authority and plausibility of this overall historical context, as
expanded by recent scholarship, was most threatening to Christianity. On 12 August 1950 Pope Pius XII issued
Humani Generis,
an encyclical designed specifically to counter ‘extreme non-Christian philosophies of evolutionism, existentialism, and historicism as contributing to the spread of error.’
³⁷
Not that the encyclical was entirely defensive: the document called on Catholic philosophers and theologians to study these other philosophies ‘for the purpose of combating them,’ conceding that ‘each of these philosophies contains a certain amount of truth.’
³⁸
The encyclical condemned all attempts to ‘empty the Genesis accounts in the Old Testament,’ took the view that evolution was not as yet a proven fact, and insisted that polygenism (the idea that man evolved more than once, in several places across the earth) could not be taught (i.e., accepted), ‘for it is not yet apparent how polygenism is to be reconciled with the traditional teaching of the Church on original sin.’
³⁹
The encyclical turned existential thinking on its head, blaming Heidegger, Sartre, and the others for the gloom and anxiety that many people felt.

More lively, more original – and certainly more readable – resistance to existentialism, evolutionism, and historicism came not from the Vatican but from independent theologians who, in some cases, were themselves at loggerheads with Rome. Paul Tillich, for example, was a pre-eminent religious existentialist. Born in August 1886 in a small village near Brandenburg, he studied theology in Berlin, Tubingen, and Halle and was ordained in 1912. He was a chaplain in the German army in World War I and afterward, in the mid-1920S, was professor of theology at Marburg, where he came under the influence of Heidegger. In 1929 he moved to Frankfurt, where he became professor of philosophy and came into contact with the Frankfurt School.
⁴⁰
His books, especially
Systematic Theology
(2 volumes, 1953 and 1957) and
The Courage to Be
(1952), had an enormous impact. A great believer in the aims of socialism, including many aspects of Marxism, Tillich was instantly dismissed when the Nazis came to power. Fortunately, Reinhald Niebuhr happened to be in Germany that summer and invited him to the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Tillich mounted a complete rethink of Christian theology, starting from commonsense propositions – at its most basic, the fact that there
is
something, rather than nothing; that many people sense the existence of God; that there is sin (he thought Freud’s libido was the modern manifestation of the driving force of sin); and that atonement for our sins is a way of approaching God.
⁴¹
Tillich thought that these feelings or thoughts were so natural that they needed no complicated explanation; in fact, he thought they were forms of reason just as much as scientific or analytic reason – he spoke of ‘ecstatic reason’ and ‘depth of reason’: ‘The depth of reason is the expression of something that is not reason, but which precedes reason and is manifest through it.’ He appears to be saying, in other words, that intuition is a form of reason, and evidence of the divine. Ecstatic reason was like revelation, ‘numinous astonishment,’ which conveyed the feeling of being ‘in the grip of a mystery, yet elated with awe.’
⁴²
The Bible and the church had existed for centuries; this needed no explanation either; it merely reflected the reality of God. Tillich followed Heidegger in believing that one had to create one’s life, to create something out of nothing,
as God had done, using the unique phenomenon of Christ as a guide, showing the difference between the self that existed, and the self in essence, and in doing so remove man from ‘the anxiety of non-being,’ which he thought was the central predicament.

When he revisited Europe after World War II, Tillich summed up his impression of the theological scene in this way: ‘When you come to Europe today, it is not as it was before, with Karl Barth in the centre of discussion; it is now Rudolf Bultmann who is in the centre.’
⁴³
In the twenty years after the war, Bultmann’s ‘demythologising’ made a remarkable impact on theology, an impact comparable to that made by Barth after World War I. Barth’s view was that man’s nature does not change, that there is no moral progress, and that the central fact of life is sin, evil. He rebelled against the beliefs of modernity that man was improving. The calamity of World War I gave great credibility and popularity to Barth’s views, and in the grim years between the wars his approach became known as ‘Crisis Theology.’ Man was in perpetual crisis, according to Barth, on account of his sinful nature. The only way to salvation was to
earn
the love of God, part of which was a literal belief in the Holy Bible. This new orthodoxy proved very helpful for some people as an antidote to the pseudoreligions in Nazi Germany.

Bultmann took a crucially different attitude to the Bible. He was very aware that throughout the nineteenth century, and in the first decades of the twentieth, archaeologists and some theologians had sought evidence in the Holy Lands for the events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. (One high point in this campaign had been Albert Schweitzer’s
Quest for the Historical Jesus,
published in 1906.) Rather than express ‘caution’ about these matters, as
Humani Generis
had done, Bultmann argued that it was time to call a halt to this search. It had been futile from the start and could not hope to settle the matter one way or the other. He argued instead that the New Testament should be ‘demythologised,’ a term that became famous. Science had made much progress, he said, one effect of which was to suggest most strongly that the miracles of the Bible – the Resurrection, even the Crucifixion – may never have taken place
as historical events.
Bultmann knew that much of the information about Jesus in the Bible had been handed down from the Midrash, Jewish commentary and legend. He therefore concluded that the Bible could only be understood theologically. There may have been an historical Jesus, but the details of his life mattered less than that he was an example of
kerygma,
‘the proclamation of the decisive act of God in Christ.’
⁴⁴
When people have faith, said Bultmann, they can enter a period of ‘grace,’ when they may receive ‘revelations’ from God. Bultmann also adapted several ideas from existentialism, but Heidegger’s variety, not Sartre’s (Bultmann was German). According to Heidegger, all understanding involves interpretation, and in order to
be
a Christian, one had to
decide
(an existential act) to follow that route (that’s what faith meant), using the Bible as a guide.
⁴⁵
Bultmann acknowledged that history posed a problem for this analysis: Why did the crucial events in Christianity take place where they did so long ago? His answer was that history should be looked upon less in a scientific way, or even in the cyclical way that some Eastern religions did, but existentially,
with a meaning fashioned by each faithful individual for himself and herself. Bultmann was not advocating an ‘anything goes’ philosophy – a great deal of time and effort was spent with critics discussing what, in the New Testament, could and could not be demythologised.
⁴⁶
Faith, he was saying, cannot be achieved by studying the history of religion, or history per se, nor by scientific investigation. Religious
experience
was what counted, and
kerygma
could be achieved only by reading the Bible in the ‘demythologised’ way he suggested. His final contentious point was that Christianity
was
a special religion in the world. For him, Christianity, the existence of Christ as an act of God on earth, ‘has an inescapably definitive character.’ He thought that at the turn of the century, ‘when it seemed as if Western culture was on its way to becoming the first world-culture, it … seemed also that Christianity was on its way to attaining a definitive status for all men.’ But of course that didn’t happen, and by the 1950s it appeared ‘likely that for a long time yet different religions will need to live together on the earth.’
⁴⁷
This was close to saying that religions evolve, with Christianity being the most advanced.
⁴⁸

If Bultmann was the most original and uncompromising theologian in his response to existentialism and historicism, Teilhard de Chardin fulfilled an equivalent role in regard to evolution. Marie-Joseph-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on 1 May 1881, the fourth of eleven children, seven of whom died. He went to a school run by Jesuits, where he proved himself very bright but besotted by rocks more than lessons. He became a Jesuit novitiate at Aix in 1890 and took his first vows in 1901.
⁴⁹
But his obsession with rocks turned into a passion for geology, palaeontology – and evolution. In his one person Teilhard de Chardin combined the great battle between religion and science, between Genesis and Darwin. His religious duties took him to China in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, where he excavated at Choukoutien. He met Davidson Black and Wen Chung-Pei, two of the discoverers of Peking Man and Peking Man culture. He became friendly with the Abbé Breuil, who introduced him to many of the caves and cave paintings of northern Spain, and with George Gaylord Simpson and Julian Huxley, two of the scholars who helped devise the evolutionary synthesis, and with Joseph Needham, whose seven-volume
Science and Civilisation in China
began publication in 1954. He knew and corresponded with Margaret Mead. This background was especially significant because Teilhard’s chosen field, the emergence of man, the birth of humanity, profoundly affected his theology. His gifts put him in the position of reconciling as no one else could the church and the sciences, especially the science of evolution.

For Teilhard, the ideas of Darwin showed that the world had moved out of the static cosmos that applied in the days of Plato and the other Greeks, into a dynamic universe that was evolving. In consequence, religions evolved too, and man’s very discovery of evolution showed that, in unearthing the roots of his own humanity, he was making spiritual progress. The supreme event in the universe was the incarnation of Christ, which Teilhard accepted as a fact. The event of Christ, he said, as a self-evidently nonevolutionary event – the only one in the history of the universe – showed its importance; and Christ’s true
nature, as revealed in the Scriptures, therefore served the purpose of showing what man was evolving
toward
.
⁵⁰
Evolution, he believed, was a divine matter because it not only pointed backward but, allied with the event of Christ, showed us the path to come. Although Teilhard himself did not make a great deal out of it, and claimed indignantly that he was not a racist, he said clearly that ‘there are some races that act as the spearhead of evolution, and others that have reached a dead end.’
⁵¹

All his life, Teilhard planned a major work of religious and scientific synthesis, to be called
The Phenomenon of Man.
This was completed in the early 1940s, but as a Jesuit and a priest, he had first to submit the book to the Vatican. The book was never actually refused publication, but he was asked several times to revise it, and it remained unpublished at his death in 1955.
⁵²
When it finally did appear, it became clear that for Teilhard evolution is the source of sin, ‘for there can be no evolution without groping, without the intervention of chance; consequently, checks and mistakes are always possible.’
⁵³
The very fact that the Incarnation of Christ took place was evidence, he said, that man had reached a certain stage in evolution, so that he could properly appreciate what the event meant. Teilhard believed that there would be further evolution, religious as well as biological, that there would be a higher form of consciousness, a sort of group consciousness, and in this he acknowledged an affinity for Jung’s views about the racial unconscious (at the same time deriding Freud’s theories). Chardin was turned down for a professorship at the Collège de France (the Abbé Breuil’s old chair), but he was elected to the Institute of France.

But the church was not only concerned with theology; it was a pastoral organisation as well. It was rethinking the church’s pastoral work that most concerned the other influential postwar religious thinker, Reinhald Niebuhr. Significantly, since pastoral work is essentially more practical, more pragmatic, than theological matters, Niebuhr was American. He came from the Midwest of America and did his early pastoral work in the capital of the motor trade, Detroit. In
The Godly and the Ungodly
(1958), he set out to rescue postwar America from what he saw as a fruitless pietism, redefining Christianity in the process, and to reaffirm the areas of life that science could never touch.
⁵⁴
The chapters in his book reveal Niebuhr’s anxieties: ‘Pious and Secular America,’ ‘Frustration in Mid-Century,’ ‘Higher Education in America,’ ‘Liberty and Equality,’ plus chapters on the Negro and on anti-Semitism. Niebuhr thought that America was still, in some ways, a naive country, sentimental even. He acknowledged that naïveté had certain strengths, but on the downside he also felt that America’s many sectarian churches still had a frontier mentality, a form of pietism that took them away from the world rather than toward it. He saw it as his job to lead by example, to mix religion with the social and political life of America. This was how Christians showed love, he said, how they could find meaning in the world. He thought higher education was partly to blame, that the courses offered in American universities were too standardised, too inward-looking, to breed truly sophisticated students and were a cause of the intolerance that he explored in his chapters on blacks and Jews. He made it
plain that pious Americans labelled everything they didn’t like ‘Godless,’ and this did no one any good.
⁵⁵