Franciscan Penance Library

November 2013 -- The Secular City

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger begins his 1967 book Introduction to Christianity with a discussion of belief in the world today. He opens Chapter 1 as follows: “Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien-----and alienating-----nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard’s famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown’s shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried. The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get the people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly-----until the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.”

This parable is meant to convey the great gap between religious persons (the clown) and secular persons. The “clown” in this story stands not only for priests and religious in their traditional garb but anyone who sees God as the Supreme Being Who stands outside of both the physical universe and time. Professor Cox advises that we all take off the “clown suit” of religious outlook at least in our public life. I had read The Secular City many years ago, but I decided to reread it again to get an understanding of the mindset of our very secular society. Professor Cox bases his thoughts about secularization on the writings and ideas of many philosophers, theologians, and other commentators. The Secular City was written in 1965 and revised in 1966 when the process of secularization was well underway. This process has advanced a great deal since then.

Professor Cox describes “secularization” in the following manner: “What is secularization? The Dutch theologian C. A. van Peursen says it is the deliverance of man ‘first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.’ It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents ‘defatalization of history,’ the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularization occurs when man turns his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time.”

Professor Cox then goes on to assert that this process of secularization is the logical consequence of biblical faith. How does he do this? He does it by filtering the facts of the Bible through the lens of liberal biblical criticism and theology. This “lens” rejects supernatural occurrences and miracles as myths which modern scientific man can no longer accept. This “lens” also rejects the consideration of ontological and metaphysical questions. Ontology deals with the question of being and metaphysics deals with the ultimate nature of reality. For example, the question of whether Jesus Christ was True God and True Man as the Creeds assert, or was he only a man, is an ontological question. The question of whether the physical universe constitutes the whole of reality, or are there other aspects of reality which are independent of the physical universe such as God, angels, demons, pure spirits and so forth, is a metaphysical question. According to Professor Cox, “secular man” does not provide answers to metaphysical and ontological questions but refuses to deal with or consider these questions. Of course, the rejection of the supernatural, as well as the refusal to consider ontological and metaphysical questions, easily could be considered a “metaphysical statement” since it certainly affects how we deal with reality.

Professor Cox correctly stresses that the Genesis account asserts that God created the physical world, and this world is not divine. Using his “lens”, he believes that we should not be concerned with any reality independent of the physical universe. He considers the Hebrews’ exodus from the divinely ordained Pharaoh of Egypt as a justification for elimination of any religious or metaphysical considerations from politics. Finally, Professor Cox uses the prohibition of graven images in the Mount Sinai covenant between Israel and God as a support for the relativization of all human values since he considers moral absolutes and divine commandments to be idols. While it is easy to see why atheists and others who have no use for religion would applaud secularization, for religious people to accept secularization means the acceptance of “liberal” theological opinions.

Professor Cox then goes on to describe the “style” of the Secular City. He states that it is pragmatic and profane. ”By pragmatism we mean secular man’s concern with the question `Will it work?’ Secular man does not occupy himself much with mysteries. He is little interested in anything that seems resistant to the application of human energy and intelligence. He judges ideas, as the dictionary suggests in its definition of pragmatism, by the `results they will achieve in practice.’ The world is viewed not as a unified metaphysical system but as a series of problems and projects.” Concerning profanity he states “By profanity we refer to secular man’s wholly terrestrial horizon, the disappearance of any supramundane reality defining his life. Pro-fane means literally ‘outside the temple’ ---- thus ‘having to do with this world.’ By calling him profane, we do not suggest that secular man is sacrilegious, but that he is unreligious. He views the world not in terms of some other world but in terms of itself. He feels that any meaning he finds must be found in this world itself. Profane man is simply this-worldly.”

Professor Cox’s description of pragmatism and profanity fits even more the world of today than the world of 1965. Politicians promise to give benefits to this or that portion of the electorate and concentrate on “what works” to get themselves elected. Politics is limited to the pragmatic level. Politicians cannot or will not go to a deeper level and tell us why they accept certain newer trends such as gay marriage or abortion. Perhaps if they did this, they would not get them elected. As citizens, we can go to church and have “freedom of worship”, but we do not have freedom of religion----the right to bring our ideological, philosophical, and religious views into the public square. Religion is deemed a totally private matter. This is why the American people are getting more and more divided over the policies that we need. We can talk about what we want and what we think will work, but we cannot talk about the religious or philosophical views which are the basis of our ideas. The further that secularization proceeds, the deeper will be the divisions between people, since they can’t really discuss the real things which divide them. While secularization is put forth as increasing freedom, it actually decreases freedom.

We can easily understand why atheists and agnostics would support secularization. Professor Cox’s book explains why some religious people feel they need to support secularization. The support for secularization comes from certain liberal theological assumptions such as the rejection of the supernatural and the avoidance of metaphysical assumptions. One could say that the Secular City operates under a regime of practical atheism. It operates as if God, in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense, does not exist. This way of operation is very attractive to many people.

We need to understand that when secular people speak of God, their “God” is very different from the traditional Judeo-Christian concept. Traditionally, Scripture and tradition contain “divine revelation”. Instead, Professor Cox says “God manifests Himself to us in and through secular events.” Later he says “God does reveal His name in history, through the clash of historical forces and the faithful efforts of a people to discern His presence and respond to His call.” Elsewhere, Professor Cox states “God comes to us today in events of social change, in what theologians have often called history, what we call politics.” In this way of thinking, God is much more a partner to us than a King, or shepherd. Of course we need to understand that Professor Cox has not just given us his peculiar ideas about God but has written a popular book which presents the ideas of many of his contemporaries. In addition, these ideas have been absorbed by the popular culture and are believed at least in part by the majority of people. Anyone can easily observe the absence of God in our society. Those of us who are older can easily remember times when things were significantly different. This does not mean that everything was perfect. God certainly was more of a factor in society than is the case now. This was especially reflected in the cultural norms and even the laws which have since been repealed or struck down by the courts. We have to ask ourselves whether or not we can go along with the secularization of society. Do we accept the theological ideas which are the basis and justification of secularization? Even if we do not accept them in our minds, yet we are still under their influence because of the secular culture in which we live. If we are not continually fertilized with Christian truth which nourishes our lives of prayer, penance, and action, our lives of faith could easily weaken and even die. 

This brings us back to Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. He saw in the 1960’s, around the time that Harvey Cox’s The Secular City was written, the dangers which were rapidly advancing both in society at large and in the Church. In the preface to the 1968 edition of Introduction to Christianity we read: “The question of the real content and meaning of the Christian faith is enveloped today in a greater fog of uncertainty than at almost any earlier period in history. Anyone who has watched the theological movement of the last decade, and who is not one of those thoughtless people who always uncritically accept what is new as necessarily better, might well feel reminded of the old story of `Clever Hans’. The lump of gold that was too heavy and troublesome for him he exchanged successively, so as to be more comfortable, for a horse, a cow, a pig, a goose, and a whetstone, which he finally threw into the water, still without losing much; on the contrary, what he now gained in exchange, so he thought, was the precious gift of complete freedom. How long his intoxication lasted, how somber the moment of awakening from the illusion of his supposed liberation, is left by the story, as we know, to the imagination of the reader. The worried Christian of today is often bothered by questions like these: Has our theology in the last few years not taken, in many ways, a similar path? Has it not gradually watered down the demands of faith, which had been found all too demanding, always only so little that nothing important seemed to be lost, yet always so much that it was soon possible to venture on the next step? And will poor Jack, the Christian who trustingly let himself be led from exchange to exchange, from interpretation to interpretation, not really soon hold in his hand, instead of the gold, with which he began, only a whetstone that he can safely be advised to throw away?”

Professor Ratzinger then goes on to admit that, while modern theology as a whole has not taken the “Clever Hans” path, there is widespread support for this very path. He then gives the aim of Introduction to Christianity: “its aim is to help understand faith afresh as something that makes possible true humanity in the world of today, to expound faith without changing it into the small coin of empty talk painfully laboring to hide a complete spiritual vacuum.” Unless we are happy with the way the “secular city” in which we live is shaping up, we need to fertilize our faith with reading which Joseph Ratzinger and other faithful authors can provide us.

 -- Jim Nugent