The Middle of Every Human Heart
By David Deavel|April 4th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christendom, Christianity, David Deavel, Senior Contributors
In the long battle for the human soul, there are finally only two alternatives laid out long ago by God: life or death. What we need, theologian Philip Rolnick says, is “the gospel that has never ceased offering its life-giving alternative.”
The Long Battle for the Human Soul, by Philip A. Rolnick (171 pages, Baylor, 2021)
One of the most chilling and yet strangely familiar quotations in Philip A. Rolnick’s The Long Battle for the Human Soul is from Robespierre’s associate Sainte-Just: “You have to punish not only the traitors but also the indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the Republic and does nothing for it.” Chilling in its totalitarianism, it is familiar insofar as we have all heard today that “silence is violence” and that there is no such thing as being “not racist.” If one does not embrace the destructive ideology known as “antiracism,” one is by default a “racist”—whether or not one has been just to all regardless of race, color, or nationality. In fact, equal treatment is itself racism since the concept of equity requires that we favor those part of officially designated oppressed groups and disfavor those designated oppressors. Even if we are not involved in doling out such identity-based rewards and punishments, we must applaud the justice involved in them. If you want to succeed in today’s corporate, academic, or government world, remember to never stop clapping for Ibram X. Kendi. The false gods of the modern progressive left are every bit as jealous as the God they have replaced, but they have no concept of forgiveness or redemption.
Dr. Rolnick’s volume, the first of a projected trilogy titled A Post-Christendom Faith, does not treat our own near-totalitarian moment and its revolutionaries and hucksters. For anybody who has any sense of current events, however, it does not have to. Faulkner’s oft-quoted dictum about how the past is neither dead nor even past came to mind several times while reading this brief survey of our civilizational journey from a world in which Christian belief provided a bond of unity and a common set of assumptions (even for those who did not have a living faith) to our world of “hyper-pluralism” that Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “free-for-all.” Almost all the depressing, dizzying, or terrifying aspects of this moment flow from and repeat the mistakes of the last five hundred years.
Dr. Rolnick, a theologian who is an adult convert to Christianity and a Catholic for the last decade, begins with the Reformation, but does not simply damn Luther and Calvin. He notes, accurately, that the problems that broke out in the sixteenth century had been festering since the twelfth. The Catholic Church’s political involvements often diverted her from more important things. Popes and bishops immediately preceding Luther’s time “failed to recognize the sacred responsibility of their office” and indulged in, quoting historian Brad Gregory, “venality, luxury, and blatant violations of Christian morality at the papal court.”
Whatever the case for Luther’s side, his “criticism” became a “revolt against church authority” that led to “at least at first, involuntary shattering of the church’s unity.” While early Protestants believed such unity could be restored by scriptural authority or claims to inspiration by the Holy Spirit, there was no agreement on the meaning of Scripture and little chance any would simply agree that the Holy Spirit was inspiring others. “The dissonant multiplicity of truth claims,” Dr. Rolnick says, “led some to question if any of the claims were true.”
This first of what Dr. Rolnick calls the “critical turns” led to the Enlightenment, or perhaps more accurately “Enlightenments,” since not all the figures made the same criticisms or took quite the same approach to questions of ultimate meaning. Descartes believed God’s existence was certain but advocated a method of knowing that had nothing to do with him. Spinoza thought God was simply nature, a position that can probably equally be called pantheism or atheism, since such a “God” is neither Creator nor personal. Kant’s critiques of religion were “moderate in tone but radical in substance.” Religion became morality; the emphasis became what human beings could do.
But if different in details, what all these figures agreed upon was that a narrow reason was the ultimate and indeed only criterion for truth. Tradition? Who needed it? God? Who really needed him? For a time, the shifts in thinking produced good results. Dr. Rolnick concludes, “In some ways, the Enlightenment achieved a commendable form of humanism, as the emphasis on reason led to improvements, at least for a time, in the quality of life in everything from science and technology to music, government, and education.” Some of these benefits have accrued to us even today, but it soon became apparent that the critical turns away from God and tradition had their dark side.
The Age of the Enlightenment gave way to the Age of Revolutions. Some were largely political (e.g., the American), but the big one—the aforementioned French Revolution—began in hopefulness and ended in massive bloodshed. Dr. Rolnick calls it the “harbinger of Leninist-Stalinist, Maoist, and Hitlerian things to come.” The modus operandi was no longer simply to reinterpret the world and the sacred in terms of a narrow reason. Instead, the goal was to destroy any hint of transcendence, replace Christianity, and rule the world in the name of the exclusively human. The moderate humanism of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on each individual daring to use reason, had been replaced with Robespierre’s ominous warning that what was called for was “a single will.”
The nineteenth century, so laudable in so many ways, was nevertheless intellectually and spiritually a “descent into darkness.” Dr. Rolnick surveys Romanticism, Atheism, Nihilism, and Marxism, finding in each a further turning of the screw of rejection of God. All these movements continued the path of working at “exclusive humanism”—a rejection of God and the transcendence he offers. Dr. Rolnick shows how even the least noxious, Romanticism, displayed an inhumanity and a hatred for life that was manifest not only in its literary legacy but in the life of its proponents, such as the mad, bad, and dangerous” Byron. Atheism, while promising the brotherhood of man, could not fulfill this without the fatherhood of God. In fact, as one of the pillars of Marxism and Nihilism, one might say its only true boast was the equality of the mass grave.
Dr. Rolnick takes two particular detours at the end of this short book: one into the “positivism” of August Comte and another into the transvaluation of values of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both understood important things about being human. The author says, “There is something in Comte’s teaching that always seems to live next door to the truth.” Nietzsche bravely attempted to bring back the valor of the ancient world. Yet both, under even a fair and charitable evaluation, are shown to have brought our society to the brink of hell and insanity. Dr. Rolnick cites Henri de Lubac’s evaluation of the former: “The positivist formula spells total tyranny.” Of the latter, the author notes that Nietzsche would likely have not approved of his Third Reich admirers he gained, but the denial of transcendence will always mean a “gravitational implosion” even if the denier meant to unleash the glory of the “eternal return.”
What has been left in the wake of all these turns, revolutions, and descents into darkness is a world that is not very rational, does not have a single will, and is not united in any sense. Mere anarchy, as the poet says, has been let loose upon the earth. It is brutish, banal, and inglorious. It is manifest in the confused and confusing petty totalitarianism with which this review began—punishing those not actually racist because they have not joined in with the “antiracist” Jacobins. The punishment is currently (mostly) of the mild variant Alexis de Tocqueville predicted despotism would take in America, but there are signs of the colder, harder, and violent forms that plagued the twentieth century. Is there any hope?
The final chapter sums up the lessons we ought to have learned. The attempt to cut off eternity from history, transcendence from immanence, God from Man, has not dignified man but instead taken away human dignity and meaning. The deaths so often inflicted in the west are from despair. And no wonder, for if the modern tyranny is a judgment without forgiveness or redemption, who can stand?
In the long battle for the human soul, there are finally only two alternatives laid out long ago by God: life or death. What we need, Philip Rolnick says, is “the gospel that has never ceased offering its life-giving alternative.”
