From Monk to Modernity, Second Edition: The Challenge of Modern Thinking

From Monk to Modernity

The Challenge of Modern Thinking

Second Edition

Dominic Kirkham

From Monk to Modernity

The Challenge of Modern Thinking

Copyright © 2018 Dominic Kirkham. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7197-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-7198-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7199-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

February 26, 2019

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface to the Second Edition

Prologue

Chapter 1: Before The Beginning

Chapter 2: From Womb To Word

Chapter 3: Creating A Creation Myth

Chapter 4: Bamboozled By The Bible

Chapter 5: Discovering New Depths To Life

Chapter 6: Regarding Nature Anew

Chapter 7: Daring To Look At Reality

Chapter 8: Changing Time

Chapter 9: The Ghosts of Tyntesfield

Chapter 10: What It Means To Be ‘Modern’

Chapter 11: Moving On

Chapter 12: Reclaiming Christianity From Colonialism

Chapter 13: In Need Of A Story

Chapter 14: Patterns In The Mind

Chapter 15: Moral Vacuums And How To Fill Them

Chapter 16: Spirituality and Sensuosity

Chapter 17: Ancestral Presences

Chapter 18: Life’s Mystery

Chapter 19: A Weird World

Chapter 20: Credo—A View of Life

Bibliography

To the memory of George Tyrrell,

a victim of the Modernity.

And to

Celine and all the Friends

who have made my life possible.

Preface to the Second Edition

This is a revised edition of my book From Monk to Modernity that was first published in 2015 at the invitation of the trustees of the Sea of Faith Network UK. The network sprang up spontaneously in response to a celebrated TV series in 1984 in which the Anglican priest and philosopher Don Cupitt reflected on the way in which our understanding of orthodox Christian belief had been challenged in modern times with the growth of secularization. The title of the series, ‘Sea of Faith’, was taken from the poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold in which he refers to the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of The Sea of Faith.

At the time I had been living a monastic life for over a decade during which time I had been ordained a priest. Though I found the series interesting it also seemed rather academic and remote from the world which I inhabited and I didn’t give the matter any further thought for another decade. Though dramatic conversion experiences make good stories and are often used in the cause of proselytization more often changes in thought and belief take place slowly and are hardly noticed at the time. This is an entirely natural process — rather like the ebbing of the tide.

The Sea of Faith Network now provides a forum for the sharing of ideas particularly through its quarterly magazine Sofia. Like many others who write for Sofia I found it an opportunity and encouragement to explore my own changing understanding of the religious faith in which I had grown up. This is something of a personal odyssey, which now spans a lifetime of over six decades and is still ongoing. Over the years I submitted numerous articles to Sofia some of which the editor, Dinah Livingstone, has thought fit to publish. It was Dinah who suggested putting some of these together in book form and even provided the inspirational title. The presumption of the book is that this is of more than personal interest because the subject affects everyone; my personal journey will no doubt reflect that of many others.

Like me, many if not most, members of the Sea of Faith Network have had a lifelong and professional interest in the practice and nature of religious faith in the modern world. Though sometimes dismissed as little more than a form of atheism, humanism, or post-Christian secularism in fact the Sea of Faith is none of these. Rather it is an attempt to understand religion in the context of our times as a human creation, but none the less significant for that. In contrast to the confrontational alternative of religious fundamentalism, which views all cultural accommodation as apostasy, it provides an irenic platform for discussion and reflection across the whole spectrum of religious belief. I hope that something of this outlook will be reflected in what I write and also provide a help to those also seeking to chart their own passage across the sea of faith.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the interest many have shown in what I write. In particular I would like to thank David Lambourn, the former secretary to the Sea of Faith, and Tom Hall, a former proof-reader for Polebridge Press, for invaluable help in preparing the text for publication. Initially it was Polebridge Press of the Westar Institute for Religious Studies that had expressed an interest in publishing a revised version of my book for the American market but the press was terminated before this could happen. I am therefore grateful to the publishers Wipf and Stock for providing an alternative opportunity. I hope that all involved in getting to this point will feel their efforts on my behalf have been worthwhile.

Prologue

A Personal Journey From Monasticism To Modernity

I write as a victim—Ah! how the world loves a victim—though not a victim in the ordinary sense; rather as a victim to modernity. But, then, as change is forced upon us and accomodations have to be made, aren’t we all, to some extent, victims of modernity?

But what is modernity and when did it begin? Humans have always liked to define their place in the world by so-called ‘threshold’ events, such as the beginning of a dynasty, or B.C and A.D. (before and after Christ) or A.H. (after the Hejira). Perhaps even the French Revolution when the calendar was reset to the year zero—though not for the first or last time—and the point at which the modern world has often been said to begin. Now, we are told by scientists, that we have reached a new stage in planetary history and live in a new geological era: the ‘anthropocene’ or human epoch. Just as scholarly divines once assured us (in the seventeenth century) that the world began on Sunday 24 October 4004 BC at 9am.—for precision has always been a central part of human progress—scientists now tell us this new epoch began on 16 July 1945 5:29:21 (+/—2 seconds). On that day and time, precisely, the first nuclear explosion took place at Alamogordo in New Mexico: humans had become a force of geological proportions with the power to leave an indelible mark on the earth. Some even said, man had become God, the creator and destroyer of worlds (this nuclear event was codenamed ‘Trinity’—the title of the Christian Godhead!). Or was this simply hubris?

Another date for the starting of our modern age has been given as the 13 September 1830.¹ On that day, just before 3pm on a drizzly afternoon a steam locomotive pulled into Manchester’s new Liverpool Street Station, having completed the world’s first passenger trip on the opening of the world’s first public railway line. What was special about this event was not just that this was the first train service but it was pulled by a machine which transformed the world and epitomized the new age of steam power. It was steam power that had already made possible the cotton mills of Manchester that were the new phenomenon of their time. These were also notorious for reasons Fredrick Engels would shortly make clear in his seminal work on the Condition of The Working Class, a work that would help to substantiate the most potent ideology of modernity, communism. This was the first industrialized city and it was steam power that began the processes of industrialization that would transform the world, create the possibility of globalization and herald modernity.

Though these issues may be vast the specific dates and events associated with them have shaped my life, like those of so many others, in very personal ways. I always remember the 16 July because it is my birthday: I was born in Manchester on the very threshold of the age in which we all now live, this new anthropocene epoch. My paternal grandfather played a small role in expanding the ‘empire of steam’, as the Chief Engineer of the East India Railway Company, whilst my maternal grandfather was a cotton merchant in the city. Their ancestral presence has shaped my life in ways that still surprise me, particularly my maternal grandfather who became a convert to the newly invigorated ultramontane Roman Catholicism of the mid-nineteenth century. I grew up in Manchester, the city which once proudly claimed to be a workshop of the world and the place where the future began: What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow. It was here that the atom was first split. Later in mid-life I lived as a priest for fifteen years in a parish dominated by one of the greatest of the few surviving mills in Manchester, the Victoria Mill of Miles Platting. It is a mill I helped to save for posterity, together with the central historic complex of cotton mills in Ancoats (now a UNESCO World Heritage site). It was in the shadow of these mills I sought to persuade government ministers to support our community regeneration schemes and around which I accompanied Prince Charles. This is all part of the modern world which has also been very much a part of my life.

But what does it mean to be modern? How did we come to be ‘modern’ and perhaps more importantly, what will the future hold for us? These are questions that over the years have increasingly pre-occupied me, and which I attempt to address in this book. It is a book, which like the modern age has disturbing undertones. The book cover, with its engraving by Blake, is not accidental. It shows a scene from the life of the famous Italian poet, Dante, who wrote that on being expelled from the city of Florence in 1302 and in the middle of the pathway of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost. This also is our predicament today, not only as individuals, but as a species, as we wonder into what has been called the penumbra of the Enlightenment. It is into ‘the dark wood’ of modernity that this book, like my life, leads.

Though Dante would have had no means of knowing it, his world was destined soon to become a place of increasing darkness and terror. The Black Death would shortly make its presence felt in Europe. This, together with a sudden deterioration of climate, was an environmental disaster of catastrophic proportions which almost brought the whole edifice of European civilization crashing down. Ironically, the preceding period of the ‘Medieval Renaissance’, as it has been called, marked the period when Europe had just about managed to recover from the preceding environmental catastrophe of a thousand years earlier which saw the collapse of the Roman Empire and the end of Classical civilization.² The shadow of environmental collapse and the ominous consequences of climate change now threaten the civilization of modernity.

The modern world has also been led from the hope of Enlightenment—with its dream of reason—to a place of increasing darkness. In fact this seemed implicit almost from the outset. It was reflected in the apocalyptic vision of ‘dark satanic mills’ of the visionary William Blake: mills which not only ground out goods and ground down people, but mills of the mind which dreamed up new ‘demonic’ plans. And it was indeed an apocalyptic age for, in one of the many paradoxes of modernity, the ‘great acceleration’ of progress has led us to the brink of catastrophe. It was at this point of our history, early in the nineteenth century, that the natural ‘footprint’ of Britain began to exceed its sustainable carrying capacity and that carbon emissions began to escalate remorselessly. The carbon emissions of those belching mills now linger over the planet in gathering plumes threatening a climate change which could end life on this planet as we know it. In fact such a transformation of life is already happening with the greatest collapse of species and eco-systems since life emerged from the sea to colonize the land 300 million years ago. This has been called ‘the sixth extinction’—a humanly induced biological collapse after five such previous geological events.³ This also has been seen as the harbinger of a new age, alternatively called (by the dystopian prophet and philosopher John Gray) the Eremozoic, the era of solitude, in which little remains on earth, perhaps not even mankind itself. ⁴

Not only has our species threatened the destruction of all other species in this anthropocene age, it threatens itself. Its utopian dreams, exponential growth and insatiable consumption require more than one earth—in fact it has been estimated we already need two and half earth’s to carry on living in the way we do. The fantasy entity necessary to support human ambition has even been given a name (by environmentalist Bill McKibben), ‘Eaarth’—a bigger earth, which we do not have even though people live as if we do. Meanwhile, on the earth we do have, as well as destroying other species we have been busy destroying our own. New words have appeared for new events: ‘holocaust’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’, in which whole peoples and cultural groups have been threatened with extinction. World War and the totalitarian ideologies of modernity have seen even civilized people reduced to foraging as hunter-gatherers in the forests of Europe—such as the Bielski partisans of 1943—whilst in Asia, as in the killing fields of Cambodia, whole societies have been reduced to a new Stone Age. Welcome to Modernity!

Modernity has its problems and challenges for traditional ways and modes of thought. This is particularly true for religion and the religiously minded. As one who was brought up a Roman Catholic, received all my education in Catholic institutes becoming a teacher and then—after seemingly interminable years at a seminary—being ordained as a priest, and spending nearly thirty years in a religious order, the challenge of new ways of thinking, and the changes that were introduced into the church as a result, have been an ongoing concern and constant undercurrent of my life.

For much of the twentieth century the ultimate threat to the Catholic Church was seen to be ‘Modernism’, declared to be, by Pope Pius X in 1907, the ‘synthesis of all heresies’. It was deemed all the more pernicious for being insidious, difficult to identify and pin down, not only just in what it said but the way it said it; always, as the famous Benedictine Abbot Vonier once wrote, referring everything to ‘experience’ as if this were the highest court of appeal and final justification. Ironically, in so far as ‘isms’—those great nebulous systems of thought—are a hallmark of modernity and the way in which it expresses itself, Pope Pius was showing himself also to be very modern. The social theologian Gregory Baum captured this irony in his perceptive comment, Whenever a religion vehemently rejects a modern society, it integrates certain elements of modernity into the new formed orthodoxy. ⁵ We see this happening currently among radical Islamists, with their hatred of modernity and obsession with tradition but addiction to modern technology. Regardless of this, the pope went on to denounce anyone suspected of compromising the traditional deposit of faith (as he saw it) with modern ways of thinking. The effect of such a pronouncement was to create something akin to a modern witch-hunt—very much after the manner of McCarthyism in America of the 1950s—which grew to frightening proportions, ruining numerous lives and careers.

One early and famous casualty of the ‘war on Modernism’ in England was the prominent Jesuit theologian and popular writer, George Tyrrell. Now, largely a forgotten figure, he sought to reappraise traditional belief in the light of the modern world and modern thinking. His efforts led to his excommunication (though this was never formalized) from the Church even though he vigorously defended himself decrying the Church for its ‘Medievalism’.⁶ His career now terminated he continued to pursue his thoughts until an early death and he was buried as an apostate in an Anglican churchyard in the remote Sussex village of Storrington. It is interesting to speculate what he may have thought of the recent criticism of the Vatican curia by the present Pope Francis, that it is suffering from ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’!—a pithy remark that succinctly expresses the central critique of Tyrrell’s writings.

I mention all this because, by coincidence, the monastic cell, of the religious order which I joined as a young man and where I lived for twelve years, overlooked this churchyard and his grave. Occasionally visitors would come in search of it and for some insight into his background. I learnt that he had been treated kindly by the Prior of the monastery—himself and his community recent refugees from Provence in the bitter conflict with modernity then raging in the Third French Republic—and that he would spend long hours in thoughtful prayer in the monastery church. For a time he lived in the monastery. Sometimes, on a summer’s evening I would sit among the wild flowers of the glebe meadow that adjoined the monastery and graveyard, with its isolated plot surrounded by an evergreen laurel hedge, and as the sun set would reflect on lives long past, of destinies frustrated and dreams dashed.

As my own career unfolded I too became more and more challenged by modernity and the church’s response to it. The Vatican Council of the 1960s had been a watershed moment for the Catholic Church in an attempt to respond to the challenges of modernity. Pope John XXIII was the first pope to stop deploring the modern world and, instead, speak positively of its achievements; he wanted to throw open the windows, let in fresh air and break out of what had become a stifling, schizoid institution—one that moved in a world which had become completely alien to its way of thinking. Despite its universalist pretentions the Roman Catholic Church was, as the name implies, the product of a distinctive European cultural tradition; Pope John’s council was the first to move beyond token gestures and become a global event in its attempt to engage with the whole world and create a truly global—as distinct from Eurocentric—Church. Its leitmotif would be, how to read ‘the signs of the times’.

A central issue was the understanding of authority.⁷ It was really quite simple. For Catholics the authority of the clergy was absolute and unconditional obedience expected: there was a teaching ecclesia docens and a passive ecclesia discerns; an official magisterium which was infallible and inerrant and then the laity who just did as they were told (or were supposed to). Even the right of conscience to dissent had really no status for, in the words of the well-known dictum, error has no rights. Sometimes issues might arise that caused controversy—the treatment of Jews, Galileo and scientific thinking, the Chinese Rites, spring to mind—but potential criticism of the Church could always be deflected by blaming deviant individuals or defective procedures. The church, in essence, was always pristine and perfect.

This depiction of the Church, focused on an over-centralized hierarchy that expected an entirely ‘docile’ laity, is what Tyrrell had called the ‘Vatican heresy’ and it had been at the centre of his dispute with the church authorities. He thought that it did not reflect the true nature of the Church in its origins and he contrasted this hierarchical elitism with the earlier inclusive view in which the seat of authority was the Church as a whole: the consensus fidelium or community of the faithful. These differing views of the seat of power mirrored the wider tensions in the modern secular world with the emergence of democratic and liberal ideals after the French Revolution in the struggle to assert ‘the will of the people’. In 1864 Pope Pius IX denounced this trend in his notoriously reactionary Syllabus of Errors as the struggle with modernity got under way.

It was the ferment of the new thinking and ideas associated with the Vatican Council as it attempted to break away from the past and the great sense of excitement they generated that prompted me to take a greater involvement in the life of the church. At this time, in the vibrancy of the 1960s, there was a feeling which was also reflected in the excitement that the Church was at last responding to ‘the signs of the times’ in a positive way: as one up-coming theologian named Jospeh Ratzinger put it, Something of the Kennedy era pervaded the Council, something of the naïve optimism of the concept of the great society. This could be seen in the way Pope John had designated that his council would be a ‘Pastoral Council’ that by its very nature would be an open affair with many officially invited ‘observers’. It was a sign of the desire to move on beyond the old confrontational and centralized church to a more fruitful and embracive conversation with the modern world. New concepts began to emerge such as ‘collegiality’, ‘subsidiarity’ and ‘inculturation’ which emphasized the collective nature of the church and the decentralizing of power; others such as ecumenism and conscientization were difficult to pronounce let alone comprehend. People wondered what it all meant: challenging times indeed!

The changes proved traumatic and destabilizing for many. Whether this was a direct consequence of Vatican II or, as the theologian Yves Congar argued, it was an aspect of the socio-cultural mutation (of modernity) whose amplitude, radicality, rapidity, and global character have no equivalent in any other period of history is one that can be debated. For a time it felt as if the lid had blown off a pressure cooker with ensuing confusion. Ultimately it led to a conservative