Enlightenment Anxieties and the Classical Christian Task

A school can't be classical and Christian if it puts together what it calls a classical Christian curriculum but has an administrative structure derived from the anxieties of the enlightenment. These anxieties are rooted in a cultural loss of confidence: in the church, in nature, and in the God of the church and nature. The form of everything that has happened in the last 400 years in Europe can be traced to these anxieties.

Descartes, striving to swim this river of fear, attempted to develop a new philosophy - one, as it turned out - rooted in anxiety. He determined to doubt everything until he arrived at the one incontrovertible fact. Borrowing from Augustine and Montaigne, he concluded that the being of a self-conscious self was that one incontrovertible fact. "I think, therefore I am," he argued.

From this foundational premise, he developed his philosophy. Begin with doubting everything the authorities tell you. Seek precise and certain knowledge and dismiss all the rest. Reduce every complex problem to its simplest and clearest form. Measure these simplest forms with absolute precision. Use math to understand the cosmos and everything else.

To doubt, of course, is not to believe. And the Bible tells us that "whatever is not of faith is sin," while common sense affirms that we must always begin with and live by faith in something. But having lost confidence in God, nature, and church, people were looking for a new authority. They turned to reason.

And what did they find? What does unleashed reason do? It doubts. It breaks things to find out what they are. It rationalizes the appetites. It claims divine authority over knowledge and then dismisses what it cannot discover unaided.

Descartes bowed to the church, but his ideas are the seeds of the Enlightenment. The tree grew over the next 150 years, bearing fruit of radically diverse quality. That fruit began to fall in the French Revolution and Europe has fallen with it in the past two centuries.

Philosophically, it seems safe to say that the confidence of the Enlightenment is dead. The trouble is that the leaders of the Enlightenment were aggressive in establishing themselves in the cultural institutions. They replaced ministers with champions of industry in the universities. They replaced statesmen with bureaucrats in politics. They replaced pastors with psychologists and councilors in the church. They replaced natural historians with "naturalists" - i.e. people devoted to the religion of naturalism - in the science departments. Everywhere we turn they have replaced stewards with managers.

Not only did they establish themselves in the institutions of the west. They established themselves in the minds of the west. The quality of our lives is determined by three things: the questions we ask, and the categories and metaphors we use to answer those questions. The classical and Christian world had asked the right questions and used categories and metaphors that enabled them to discover tremendous insights into those questions. The Enlightenment changed questions, categories, and metaphors.

While this alteration is so far reaching as to be all pervasive, I offer the following primal example. The Bible and the classical world made a great deal of virtue and asked how to become virtuous. They saw it as dependent on the health of the being that sought virtue, and they saw it as the perfection of the nature of the being.

But the Enlightenment doesn't trust nature of any kind. Nature, according to Descartes, Bacon, and the rest, was something that had to be brought into the submission of the slave or it would be a destructive tyrant. Human nature too.

Given that we are fallen and that nature has fallen with us, it is easy to see how one can conclude this. But that is because the Enlightenment, beginning with doubt and insisting on reason over authority (obviously a self-deluding premise), could only see things as they are. Only an authority could tell you it was once different. Human nature and the nature around us are declared by God to be good on the day He completes them. Now they are sick, ruined, fallen, dead.

The Enlightenment becomes very confused on this point. They see nature around as dangerous, but they are inclined to worship human nature - at least among those they agree with in social rank or philosophy. At the very least, human nature is seen to be perfectible if only people will submit to the Enlightenment project - which, to an astonishing degree, we have been willing to do. And so we fall into the excesses and deficiencies of the age of reason.

To add insult to murder, these word thieves then steal "humanism" to describe this inhumane activity of perfecting mankind through their procedures. Worse, the Christian world lets them take it without an objection.

The classical Christian sees nature as good, though fallen. It is something we are not only to subdue but also to replenish. We are responsible to sustain it, to maintain its health, to preserve it for its maker's honor and delight. For the enlightenment project, nature can be used, exploited, made our servant. It is there to produce for us.

But if it gets in the way we will blow it to smithereens. Quite literally.

The classical Christian sees human nature as good, though sinful. Adam was a human before he was a sinner, and he and all the saints will be human forever in heaven long after sin is no longer part of their condition. Their human nature will remain - perfect. Sin will be washed away.

To the classical Christian nature is a stewardship. To the enlightenment, nature is a resource. Thus both nature and virtue are altered by the Enlightenment thinkers into something rationally measurable, surmountable, moldable - and meaningless.

So even though nobody outside a few science or philosophy departments believes in the enlightenment anymore, our institutions still embody their dead ideas. We still fall back on Enlightenment habits of thought and feeling. We are still driven by their anxieties. And we submit to their standards of measurement to determine whether we are succeeding.

The battle with these Enlightenment metaphors, categories, and questions rooted in Enlightenment anxieties is one of the most formidable tasks of the classical Christian movement. The parents of the children we teach are drowning in these anxieties. The children we teach are thinking with the metaphors and categories. We as teachers are asking their questions.

To win this battle, we must reexamine our foundations. One of the things we will need to do is to reconsider the structures and operations of our schools - or we will make progress on many fronts only to be turned back on many others.