In the past, especially in the peasant cultures, man was immediately dependent on nature and his life was intimately bound up up with the natural cycle of the seasons, of seed time and harvest, and this dependence on powers which lay outside his own control made him familiar with the conceptions of mystery and divine providence. Today mystery has been banished from man’s daily life. If things go wrong, he looks for help in the government or to science rather than to God and religion. No doubt this has freed mankind from the burden of superstition and irrational fear, but it has also left man at the mercy of his own inventions and has substituted the omnipotence of that man-made monster, the bureaucratic, technocratic state—the New Leviathan—for the mystery of nature and the power of God. When these new powers are developed to their full extent by the social organization of the mass media of communication and by scientific methods of psychological control, the secular state becomes almost automatically totalitarian, so that no room is left for man’s spiritual freedom.
Nevertheless the essential nature of the human situation has not been changed by the advent of science and technology. Modern man my deify these things and set up a religion of “Scientific Humanism” which offers the utopian prospect of unlimited progress. But all such constructions are inevitably fragile, since they are dependent on human will and passion as well as intelligence, and we have seen in our own generation how the irrational element in human nature may prove stronger than scientific intelligence, so that it perverts all the resources of technological civilization to lower and destructive ends.
Human nature always retains its spiritual character—its bond with the transcendent and the divine. If it were to lose this, it must lose itself and become the servant of lower powers, so that secular civilization, as Nietzsche saw, inevitably leads to nihilism and to self-destruction. If we look at the world today in isolation from the past and the future, the forces of secularism may seem triumphant. This, however, is but a moment in the life of humanity, and it does not possess the promise of stability and permanence. …
But we know not only from our faith as Christians, but from the dispassionate study of the history of human culture, that this is a transitory and exceptional state of things. Soon or later the tide is bound to turn and man will recover his sense of spiritual values and his interest in ultimate realities.
Nevertheless the essential nature of the human situation has not been changed by the advent of science and technology. Modern man my deify these things and set up a religion of “Scientific Humanism” which offers the utopian prospect of unlimited progress. But all such constructions are inevitably fragile, since they are dependent on human will and passion as well as intelligence, and we have seen in our own generation how the irrational element in human nature may prove stronger than scientific intelligence, so that it perverts all the resources of technological civilization to lower and destructive ends.
Human nature always retains its spiritual character—its bond with the transcendent and the divine. If it were to lose this, it must lose itself and become the servant of lower powers, so that secular civilization, as Nietzsche saw, inevitably leads to nihilism and to self-destruction. If we look at the world today in isolation from the past and the future, the forces of secularism may seem triumphant. This, however, is but a moment in the life of humanity, and it does not possess the promise of stability and permanence. …
But we know not only from our faith as Christians, but from the dispassionate study of the history of human culture, that this is a transitory and exceptional state of things. Soon or later the tide is bound to turn and man will recover his sense of spiritual values and his interest in ultimate realities.
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