What view should Christians take of Liberalism – by which I mean the exaltation of the ‘individual’ and the ‘secular’ ideology of the ‘nation state’ which sustains, and is sustained by, that concept? Is Liberalism an unqualifiedly good thing and – if Christians but knew it – a legitimate, if paradoxical, legacy of socio-political innovations made possible by the introduction of Christianity (as most recently argued by Larry Siedentop in The Invention of the Individual)? On this view, it becomes, in the words of John Milbank, an inveterate opponent of such views, ‘possible neatly to align one’s loyalties both to modern liberalism and to Christianity’.
Or is the ‘secularism’ of that ideology to be taken at face value, as correctly implying the exclusion, not just of ‘religion’, as negatively characterized by some Protestant Evangelicals, but of Christianity itself – or, at least, of anything but a watered-down, and potentially heretical, form of Christian faith (as argued by John Milbank in Beyond the Secular Order)? In which case, Christians should see Liberalism as, at best, an illegitimate offspring of the Christian faith, at worst, the product of an intrusion into the once orthodox faith of alien, non-Christian, elements.
Siedentrop vs. Milbank
As a presentation of the classic Liberal position, Siedentop’s book, The Invention of the Individual, seems particularly apt to serve as counter-argument to Milbank’s anti-Liberal, Beyond the Secular Order – and not just because both books came out in 2014. Take the following passage from The Invention of the Individual :
It is tempting to see his (Ockham’s) attack on the doctrine of eternal ideas as another stage in the prolonged struggle between polytheism and monotheism, for the rejection of essences and ‘final causes’ bears some resemblance to the attack on belief in ‘demons’ conducted by the early church. Both sprang from an aversion to populating the world with agencies intermediate between God and humans, agencies endowed with purpose or goals. In Ockham’s eyes, belief in such agencies obscured the direct relationship between the Creator and the created. (Siedentop, p. 310)
The story of progressive disenchantment (‘attack on believe in ‘demons’’) brings out a major theme of both authors – only where Siedentop, like Ockham seems to welcome that development as a clarification of ‘the direct relationship between Creator and created’, Milbank deplores it as being fundamentally secularizing and anti-Christian. For both, the figure of the C14th nominalist, William of Ockham, looms large, as representing a pivotal moment in the story, but as hero and villain respectively.
Read in its broader context, however, this passage reveals an intellectual common ground that goes considerably further. Both authors pre-suppose a socio-anthropologically-based conception of ‘demons’ and ‘intermediary’ agencies, whereby the latter imply socio-political structures. In Siedentop’s case, earlier descriptions of ‘the ancient cosmos’ reveal the role of pre-Christian, polytheistic pieties in upholding their fundamentally inegalitarian social and political structures. Accordingly, both appear to associate the Nominalist rejection of the mediaeval realism, not only with a desacralization and disenchantment of the old cosmos (as is clear from this passage), but with the undermining of social institutions (e.g. lineage, clan and tribe) intermediate between the individual and some absolutely ‘sovereign’ power, whether of church or state. As Milbank explains it:
… humanly invented ‘corporations’ cease to be thought of as having any organic integrity that exceeds the sum of their parts and a ‘mystical body’ becomes more or less cognate with a ‘pretended’ body, a group of individuals treated ‘as if’, for convenience, it really composed a whole (clearly nominalism greatly augmented this tendency). (Milbank, p. 138)
The difference between our authors consists in their very different evaluation of this development. Where one sees white, the other black; where Siedentop sees the culmination of the Christianization of European civilization, Milbank sees the moment where that process is fatally knocked off course, to the extent that any further advance requires us to reengage with the orthodoxy before the ‘rupture of 1300’.
This is ultimately an ideational difference. Siedentop, like many modern people, believes in some identity we all have as individuals that precedes our engagement in personal and social relationships – the ‘pre-social self’; furthermore, he attributes its ‘discovery’ to Christianity – as also (the theme of the whole book) its liberation from those intermediary agencies which he identifies with structures of social inequality. On the other hand, Milbank, like myself, regards this form of ‘identity’ as a social ‘fiction’ – perhaps we should rather say an ideational construct. Moreover, since its ‘liberation’ (from ‘corporate bodies’) means nothing, since:
no individual possesses any real liberties unless he can express these through the relative freedom of the local corporate body – the school, the club, the hospital, the trade union, the co-operative association and so forth. Nevertheless, the main line of liberal theory, which has ceaselessly tended to radicalise itself, has always sundered the body of the social animal by removing the integrating role of intermediary associations in general and that of the ‘virtuous few’ in particular. (Milbank, p.160)
It follows that, for Milbank ‘liberation’ of the ‘pre-social self’ promises little of substance, other than the empowerment of the would-be liberator – which seems hardly a recipe for the enhancement of human freedom. Instead, Milbank proposes a ‘re-enchantment of the cosmos and a recovery of the way in which it mediates to us the divine pattern of goodness’. (pp. 117-8) Unlike the ‘pre-social self’, ‘intermediary agencies’, Milbank claims, possess genuine social and relational content enabling the fulfilment of properly human goals, and are consequently able to establish a real defence of human freedom in a way that the Liberal ideology of the individual cannot. Not only is the devaluation of ‘invented corporations’ detrimental to human freedom and flourishing: it is also, Milbank claims, inherently anti-Christian, and for one very obvious reason: the Church of Christ is itself one such ‘corporation’. This additional point is almost certainly implied by Milbank’s use in one of the above-cited passages (p.138) of the term ‘mystical body’. The use of the term in such a context is a transparent reference to the argument of a Catholic theologian, very influential on the views of Milbank, namely Henri de Lubac. According to the latter, the properly ritual and organicist understanding of the body of Christ as the community of all believers was lost to general understanding, thanks to precisely the kind of shift in religious ideation that Milbank and Siedentop both associate with the legacy of Nominalism.
Where should Christians stand?
I have to admit to feeling somewhat divided. Fundamentally, I no more believe in the trans-cultural reality of Siedentop’s ‘pre-social self’ than Milbank does, and cannot accept that St Paul, let alone Our Lord, ever promoted such a thing. I am also aware that the ‘organicist’ understanding of ‘corporations’ as ‘more than the sum of their parts’ has, to a considerable extent, been lost to the modern world. I share Milbank’s alarm about this, since I believe, like Milbank and de Lubac, that it is within the framework of some such organicist understanding of Church and Eucharist – and perhaps only within that framework – that Christianity makes sense. You might, then, say that my sympathies are largely with Milbank.
That said, the freedom of the individual, and of individual conscience, appear to me, on the basis of my own historical reading, things relatively recently acquired and at great cost in human experience – what is more, things largely owed, as Siedentop argues, to the development of the modern bureaucratic nation state. It is not obvious to me that the existence of the latter has always shown itself incompatible with the survival of ‘intermediary agencies’ (think of their proliferation in C19th Britain and America, for example). Far from being the idolatrous object of Christian attack, I would prefer to think of the nation state as, on balance, a benign institution for which Christianity might even wish to claim some credit.
So, my big question: Is there a way to explain – if not reconcile – these opposed evaluations of the broadly the same phenomena from perspectives claiming ostensibly to be Christian, or at very least, highly appreciative of the contribution of Christianity to Western culture? Then, a subordinate question that follows on: Can we espouse de Lubac’s understanding of Church as mystical body without regarding today’s liberal bureaucratic nation state as an embodiment of evil?
What agencies/institutions are we talking about?
The first step to an answer, I would suggest, is to clarify what our authors actually mean by ‘intermediary agencies’; then, consider how compatible such agencies might be with the Christian Gospel.
Milbank is entirely unclear on this, preferring to refer, very broadly, to ‘pre-modernity’ in a manner that presupposes a distinction between the nation state and social institution prior to the ‘rupture of 1300’, but makes no further systematic distinctions between types of social institution existing prior to that historical moment, even though that period encompasses both the polytheism of antiquity and the institutional life of most of the Christian Middle Ages. On the whole, Milbank focuses on developments subsequent to the ‘rupture’, with any characterization of earlier social arrangements limited largely to generalizations consequent on his interpretation of Aquinas and Aristotle.
Siedentop, by contrast, focuses primarily on developments in Christianity and Christian society prior to Nominalism (which he sees as their culmination), and is more concrete and historical. His ethnography draws almost entirely on the French C19th historians, Numa Fustel de Coulanges and Francois Guizot. These were indeed giants of their age. But, given the flourishing condition of contemporary scholarship in the area of ancient religion and society, this exclusive dependency is odd. Nevertheless, as someone familiar with that more recent literature, I feel reasonably confident in affirming, that such ethnography suffices for the very broad-brush, distinctions for which Siedentop requires ethnographic support. (All credit to the prescience of those great minds!).
There are essentially two types of social institution with which we are concerned – possibly, two and a half. The distinction is essential to any argument of the kind we are currently pursuing.
The first, covered by Siedentop’s earlier chapters, is characterized in terms broadly reminiscent of what 1950s social anthropologists termed the ‘corporate descent group’: i.e. lineage, clan, tribe etc.. The essential characteristics of this type of institution is its basis in practices of collective ritual piety addressing a tutelary ancestor, and its establishment through such practices of an ideology of kinship within the group. Social structures arising from this effectively polytheistic institution are, by definition, hierarchical. To the category of institution, de Coulanges, famously, assigned the city (polis) of classical antiquity. The consensus of contemporary scholarship in the area of ancient religion would, I think, corroborate de Coulanges’s position.
Evidently, then, ‘agencies’ of this first kind are, indissociably, socio-religious institutions. They involve ‘demons’, and they establish ‘intermediary associations’, often at several super-imposed levels. It is this kind of institution that, Siedentop claims, it was the vocation of monotheistic Christianity to wipe off the earth. The destruction of hierarchical institutions allowed a new individual ‘self’ to emerge, charged with responsibility for its intentions, and gradually liberated to enter ‘free associations’ with other selves (notably within the Church). Thus, Christianity, wherever it came, brought an explosive transformation in the perception of ‘moral status’ – though it took centuries for that to work its way into the redefinition of ‘social role’. It was the first signs of the achievement of that redefinition which underlay the thinking of Scotus and Ockham.
The ’half’ of an institution referred to above corresponds to the social condition of ordinary European people working the land in later antiquity and the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire. According to Siedentop, no doubt following Guizot (and I have no personal familiarity with more contemporary sources), the ‘coloni’, ‘servi’, and ‘pagani’ of this era continued under the same social arrangements as their pre-Roman forebears. In other words, they remained clansmen and tribesmen, though the properly religious basis of these social formations had been stripped away by Christianity. I have no idea of social conditions in early mediaeval Europe. But the condition described, of a form of institution, that was formerly socio-religious but is now merely social, is one widely attested by the ethnographic record in the recent non-European world.
The second full type of ‘agency’ is the Christian type, and includes the Church itself, and monastic communities, living under the Benedictine rule. Siedentop has tantalizing little to say about these as institutions, though a general impression is given of their being, ideally at least, instances of the ‘free association’ of individuals. As for the case of Empire or kingdom, which could hardly have been such, Siedentop tends to describe this (at least, prior to the Gregorian Reforms of the C11th) as of uncertain status – an institution often inaugurated under polytheistic conditions but in the process of Christianization, and consequently manifesting the atavistic top-down tendencies of its pagan origin, while at the same time increasingly finding its properly Christian legitimation in the common welfare of every individual. So, maybe early mediaeval kinship would best be assigned to the same ‘half category’ as the tribes of the coloni.
But all such institutions begin to undergo a partial change of character from the end of the C11th, and, from here on, Siedentop has considerably more to say about them. Following the Gregorian Reforms, the Church starts to become a law-governed institution thanks to an increasingly strenuously asserted papal assumption of plenitudo potestatis enabling the exercise by popes of a properly legislative function. A remarkable proliferation of similarly law-governed institutions follows, both within the institutional Church itself (e.g. the inauguration of new ‘orders’), and, subsequently within Christian society beyond the institutional Church, as kingdoms begin to assume the same law-governed, legislating, and bureaucratic character as the Church under the post-Gregorian papacy, and we begin to see, simultaneously, a proliferation of non-ecclesial law-governed associations (e.g. chartered towns and universities).
How does Christianity relate to these agencies/institutions ?
On Siedentop’s view, Christianity is ultimately incompatible with the first type on account of its polytheistic character. The second type of agency is essentially Christian-inspired and based, not on hierarchical religion, but, ultimately – and to the extent it remains true to its initial Christian inspiration – on the free and voluntary association of individuals. Obviously, the elimination of the first type of agency goes along with the full dissemination of the second. If, like Siedentop we see philosophical realism as having a least one foot in the old world of type one institutions, then we would expect it ultimately to succumb to ways of thinking more consistent with the new world. With nominalism the triumph of individualism is, in principle, complete, and all of our modern agencies/institutions now possess a fundamentally type two character.
Milbank’s view is harder to pin down – in part, because it appears to change in the latter part of the book.
Earlier chapters (as already stated) lump together type one and type two as ‘pre-modern’, and contrast both with a third type. The latter is exemplified by the modern nation state and its derivatives. This is characterized, in contra-distinction to all pre-modern agencies, as a sovereignty of purely formal and abstract nature. In other words, it does not, of itself, involve real social or personal relationships of the kind produced by type one or type two agencies, and its claims are absolute. The relationship of this third type to Christianity, is, to say the least, problematic, because it constitutes an absolute break with anything that might have previously been considered a Christian agency, and it does not appear – at least to Milbank – to arise out of any real engagement with specifically Christian thought and practice. We are speaking, therefore, of a crucial discontinuity in Western tradition associated with Nominalist thinking (the ‘rupture of 1300’) that, in principle, relegates to the past ‘pre-modern’ agencies based on real-life agencies – though, of course, the realization in practice of this ideational shift takes centuries to work its way through, and is still far from complete.
Towards the end of Milbank’s book, however, a second perspective emerges which is not altogether consistent with the last. On the basis of what we have just said, Milbank would seem condemned to take a universally negative view of the present age. Actually, this turns out not to be the case. The Romantic revolution and its historical antecedents, opposed, of its nature, to the reductionist tendencies of the Enlightenment brings, for Milbank, a welcome restoration of pre-Nominalist possibilities of an indubitably Christian cast. These are based on a revolutionary doctrine of poetic creativity – of man as homo creator – that carries through the implications of the Biblical doctrine man created in the image of God (and so privileged to share in the creativity of his creator). The potentially political implications of such ideas, as seen in the organicism of Edmund Burke, Ruskin and, above all, the birth of early Socialism are, for Milbank, Christian to the core. Such is Milbank’s evident enthusiasm, it is hard to resist the impression that it is in this world of Christian Romantic socialism (rather than Mediaeval realism) that he actually wants to takes his political stand. Rather than the entire modern age being enveloped a single gaze of disapproval, a distinction is made between the arid fruit of Modernity (stemming from Nominalism and the Enlightenment), and the re-Christianizing effects of Romanticism. Institutions/agencies are evaluated positively or negatively to the extent that they fall under one influence or the other.
In the light of this more encompassing perspective, the mediaeval realism of Aquinas and, prior to that, the socio-political achievements of the post-Gregorian papacy, take on the shape of a pre-cursor of Romanticism, in that they anticipate the doctrine of homo creator though in a specifically socio-political vein. Following Kantarowicz, Milbank cites canonists who view the constitutional and legislative freedom of the Pope to create ‘ex nihilo’ as an act of social creativity, which, in respect to institutions and agencies, mirrors that of God the Father.
Now, on this view, the important distinction to make is not between pre-modern and type three agencies/institutions; it is between type two and type three. In addition, the scope of the former category expands to include a wide range of agencies/institutions constituted in modern times; whereas the basis of type two characterization ceases to be, as Siedentop would put it, ‘free association’, and becomes an exercise of supernatural creativity perhaps resembling the work of the Holy Spirit within the Church! In opposition to which there stands a purely formal and abstract type of agency/institution (the state and its derivatives) going back to an origin no earlier that the late Middle Ages.
So, then, how do these two perspectives – those of Siedentop and Milbank – stand up to scrutiny, and which is the more faithfully ‘Christian’?
Siedentop convinces me that Christianity brought into being the possibility of a world in which the individual freedom counts for something. That said, to base one’s characterization of the Church and its entire institutional legacy on the principle of free voluntary association of individuals seems, to say the least, inadequate. Moreover, it probably bears little relation to reality. The fundamental problem, however, is that Siedentop isn’t much interested in the Church as an institution. From his perspective, the important legacy of Christianity seems to lie elsewhere, in the social implications of its teaching. That perhaps is why his presentation of Christianity focuses exclusively on St Paul, rather than on a more comprehensive understanding of the tradition of which St Paul constituted only an (admittedly) essential part. It’s hard not to conclude that, however fulsome Siedentop’s eulogies of Christianity, the fate of the Christian tradition itself is not his chief concern.
But the problem with Milbank’s account – and reading Siedentop makes this very clear – is that it assigns the institutions of the post-Gregorian papacy (including the Church itself) and the early modern state to two entirely separate categories of agency/institution. This is hardly plausible; the historical record links the development of the modern ‘state’ with the ever-increasing imbrication of the ecclesial and secular, as mediaeval kingdoms increasingly emulated the legislative and bureaucratic innovations of the papacy. One can easily forget, reading Milbank, that the philosophy of Scotus and Ockham belonged to precisely this world of proliferating ‘intermediary agencies’, and innovations of the canonists, accredited by Milbank himself with the first anticipations of a doctrine of homo creator, constituted the historical precondition for the one as for the other. Numerous historians have seen the first anticipations of the modern state in the post-Gregorian papacy. They are not likely to be wrong.
Reconsidering dis/re-enchantment in the light of Barfield
I now wish to propose a corrective to Milbank’s interpretation of events in the shape of a theory of which Milbank must be very aware, and would, I presume, respect, if for no other reason, because it was greatly respected by C.S. Lewis, though I have never encountered any mention of it in Milbank’s oeuvre.
This is Owen Barfield’s eccentric, but still not perhaps outdated, text, Saving the Appearances.
Barfield shares, amongst other things, Milbank’s appreciation of mediaeval realism, his rejection of the new anti-realist ‘idolatry’ of Enlightenment modernity, his positive appraisal of Romanticism as the potential moment of a return to Christian belief, and his understanding of the Eucharist as the basis of the new Romantic doctrine of homo creator.
Though, superficially, Barfield may appear not to be concerned with social institutions, but rather with a history of collective human representations (hence, ultimately, of human experience), actually he is so concerned, for the simple reason that ‘human representations’ are ‘collective’.
Mediaeval realism and the religions which historically precede it (with the most significant but not sole exception of the Judaeo-Christian tradition) are both distinguished by a form of representation of the world described as ‘original participation’. By this Barfield means that the representation of whatever it is that lies behind our perceptions (which Barfield terms ‘the unrepresented’) involves not only the senses, such as sight, touch etc., but a broader kind of awareness of what the representation owes to the collective business of representation itself. In practice, the contribution of the collective representing subject ensures that the culturally-mediated experience of different ‘worldviews’ (those of the Inuit and the Dinka tribesman, for example) would differ, even in the hypothetical case of their response to comparable exposure to the unrepresented. Barfield sees that as cashing out in the shape of what Westerners would see as diverse ‘mythical’ understandings of the world.
By contrast, the representations of modernity are distinguished by the repression from our consciousness of precisely that element of the representation contributed by the collective representing subject. This is not, of course, to say that element does not play just as much a part in modern representation as it does in the representations of original participation. But, unlike the latter, we identify the representation with the unrepresented ‘thing in itself’, and speak and think of the representation as though that is what it was. This is what Barfield terms ‘idolatry’ – i.e. the fixation on ‘idols’, or images of our own making.
So, we have a fairly neat tie-up here of Barfield’s ‘original participation’ and ‘idolatry’ with Milbank’s realism and nominalism. But at the next and final stage, things get altogether more interesting.
Barfield regards Romanticism as a return from idolatry to participation – though it is now participation of a new kind: not ‘original participation’, but ‘final participation’. What we see in the case of the representations of Romantic theory and aesthetic practice is a restoration of what the representation owes to the representing subject. But the effect of this is not exactly a mythicizing re-enchantment. Modern people, according to Barfield, are no longer capable of that naïve representation whereby the representing subject sees itself represented in a divine reality behind the representations. Instead, we (as representing subjects) see ourselves represented ‘within our percipient selves’:
We are told by the Romantic theory that we must no longer look for the nature-spirits – for the Goddess Natura – on the farther side of the appearances; we must look for them within ourselves …. Pan has shut up shop. But he has not retired from business; he has merely gone indoors.
We come back here to Milbank’s issue of enchantment and re-enchantment and the forms it will assume:
If nature is indeed ‘dis-godded’, and yet we again begin to experience her, as Wordsworth did – and millions have done since his time – no longer as dead but as alive; if there is no ‘represented’ on the far side of the appearances, and yet we begin to experience them once more as appearances, as representations – the question arises, of what are they representations? It was no doubt the difficulty of answering this question which led Wordsworth to relapse occasionally into that nostalgic hankering after original participation, which is called pantheism – and from which Coleridge was rendered immune by his acquaintance with Kantian philosophy. ….. There is only one answer to the question. Henceforth, if nature is to be experienced as representation, she will be experienced as representation of – Man.
Thus, Barfield firmly closes the door on any re-enchantment involving the straightforward return to original participation. Barfield sees a work of providence in this. And here is what is really relevant to case of Milbank.
Original and final participation are, naturally, incompatible with each other. Idolatry has cleared the cultural landscape of the kind of enchantment associated with original participation – and it has done so once and for all. But in this, Barfield repeatedly argues, it has served the purpose of opening the world to a new kind of participation and a new kind enchantment to which it would otherwise have remained closed.
I return, once again, to Milbank in order to observe that his is a bifurcated vision of the modern age in which the threads of modernity and orthodoxy, deriving ultimately from nominalism and realism, remain discrete, and the Christian can shun the former and embrace the latter. Barfield, on the other hand, offers us more a dialectical vision in which the threads of both are effectively merged, and the institutions/agencies of modernity, which cannot be bypassed, lead irrevocably onwards towards final participation. Yes, in principle, we could stick with idolatry; but, according to Barfield, this is not something that has happened, or was ever likely to happen: the highwater mark of idolatry was passed somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the world of Barfield’s day – still more our own – now finds itself in a completely different place. So, from Barfield’s perspective, Milbank would be seen as fighting yesterday’s battles.
Fighting the right battles
This raises the question what are Christianity’s battles today? And, it was ultimately to bring us to a consideration of this issue that this whole piece was written.
Here is Milbank’s answer to that great question:
The twenty-first century is likely to be shaped by interactions between the one truly global religion, namely Christianity, and the only seriously rival global world-view, which is scientistic rationalism …. However, … the latter is always likely to exhibit a palpable slide into … nihilism … nihilism is not really liveable. For this reason … modernity … is never likely to be simply superseded by the secular. Instead, what should be dubbed … ‘modern Christianity’ is likely to make a constant return in order to ensure a more stable modernity that is restrained by a morality confined mostly to the private sphere. (p.115)
In other words, the opposition to orthodox Christianity comes from scientism relieved by occasional dashes of Evangelical Christianity.
This I believe to be fundamentally mistaken – and I hope my argument hitherto has demonstrated why I believe that to be the case. Scientism is not – and will never again be – the principal antagonist of orthodox Christianity. And as for what Milbank claims about the role of ‘modern (i.e. Protestant Evangelical) Christianity’, I could only wish it had the influence that Milbank gives it credit for. The serious opposition to Christianity comes from quite a different quarter – from within the stable of Romanticism and final participation. It comes in the shape of a modernist, and idolatrously incomplete assimilation of final participation. Barfield pinpoints it very accurately in the discussion broken off after the passage cited above: ‘Henceforth, if nature is to be experienced as representation, she will be experienced as representation of – Man’. The author continues:
Herein lies the direst possibility inherent in idolatry. It can empty of spirit – it has nearly succeeded in doing so – not only nature, but also Man himself. For among all the other idols is his own body. And it is part of the creed of idolatry that, when we speak of Man, we mean only the body of this or that man, or at most his finite personality, which we are driven more and more to think an attribute of his body.
Thus it is, that the great change which the evolution of consciousness has brought about … have all been wrenched awry. We had come at last to the point of realizing that art can no longer be content with imitating the collective representations, now that these are themselves turning into idols. …. We have learnt that art can represent nothing but Man himself, and we have interpreted that as meaning that art exists for the purpose of enabling Mr Smith to ‘express his personality’. And it is all because we have not learnt – though our very physics shouts it at us – that nature herself is the representation of Man.
Hence the riot of private and personal symbolisms into which both art and poetry have degenerated. If I know that nature herself is the system of my representations, I cannot do otherwise than adopt a humbler and more responsible attitude to the representations of art … For in the case of nature there is no danger of my fancying that she exists to express my personality. I know in that case that what is meant, when I say she is my representation, is, that I stand, whether I like it or not, in a ‘directionally creator’ relation to her. But I know that what so stands is not my poor temporal personality, but the Divine Name in the unfathomable depths behind it.
This danger affects not only the practice of art. Charles Taylor has taught us to see the importance of a generally modern – and, from a Christian perspective, unredeemed – practice of ‘epiphanic art’ in
the forging of a contemporary and idolatrous worldview that we have recently learnt to term expressivist individualism. Valuable recent surveys and analyses have appeared (discussed elsewhere on this site) charting the multifarious forms and varieties it assumes in the increasingly widespread religious practices and beliefs of the ‘spiritual and not religious’. Here is Christianity’s principal rival and antagonist in the twenty-first century. It is the struggle against expressivist individualism, not fantasy-battles against the ‘liberal modern tyranny’ (‘the totally non-Christian reality of contemporary economic, bureaucratic, spectacular and military power’) that should occupy the attention of the Christian apologist.
Individualism vs. individuation
I want to return, finally and briefly, to the earlier question of the genealogy of liberalism and modern state, and its compatibility with Christian orthodoxy. Siedentop himself introduces a potentially fruitful distinction, which, I hope, the preceding paragraphs on Romantic final participation may help us to understand:
If the fundamental feature of modernity is an individuated model of society – a model in which the individual rather than the family, clan or caste is the basic social unit – then it is important to distinguish that test from other criteria. Celebration of the Renaissance has confused the emergence of what is better called the pursuit of ‘individuality’ – an aesthetic notion – with the invention of the individual – a moral notion …. This was an emphasis that shaped what might be called the cult of individuality, depicting the individual as the ‘victim’ of social pressures and heroism as resistance to such pressures. Social institutions were presented as a threat to the self. (p.337)
Leaving aside the whole issue of what it owes to the Renaissance, ‘Individuality’ as referred to here is evidently what is at issue in the development of expressivist individualism. It is very much a ‘moral’ as well as an ‘aesthetic’ notion – indeed it belongs to a world which is already with us in which the distinction of the ‘moral’ from the ‘aesthetic’ is meaningless. Nevertheless, it alludes to an aspect of contemporary society – perhaps the aspect – with which Christians should be concerned. It is then reassuring to find the notion of ‘individualism’ for which Siedentop credits Christianity with the invention, hived off from ‘individuality’ in this way. Certainly, it is what Siedentop terms ‘individuality’ that presents the element in the commonplace understanding of individualism that Christians have grounds to be concerned about. If we can somehow purge ‘individualism’ of anything savouring of what Charles Taylor calls ‘expressivist individualism’ – and that is what seems to be implied by Siedentop’s distinction of ‘individualism’ and ‘individuality’ – then I do not believe there to be anything inimical to Christianity in what remains. Indeed, Siedentop makes a good case for it being a benign legacy of Christianity itself.