This level touches on a line of pressure that runs by way of lots of my very own writing. I’m a Catholic author who typically criticizes the decadence of the late trendy world and urges it to rediscover dynamism and ambition. But when techno-capitalist ambitions are essentially Faustian, ought to a Catholic observer (or anybody else with related commitments) actually want for them to rise once more? Within the Bible, in any case, Promethean desires will not be at all times handled kindly: It’s the serpent who guarantees forbidden information, the bloody-handed Cain who founds the first city, the builders of Babel who’re scattered to the winds. Perhaps the Promethean spirit in America must be exorcised, not revived.
This critique has been raised towards each my political and private writings. Right here is Patrick Deneen’s review of “The Decadent Society” for an instance of the previous kind of criticism (you may learn my response right here). Perhaps extra strikingly, listed below are some comments from Noah Millman on my memoir about persistent sickness, “The Deep Locations,” which run alongside related strains.
A big a part of that memoir is anxious with the sheer effort concerned in making an attempt to get higher from a thriller sickness, the making an attempt and making an attempt and making an attempt but once more, the self-doctoring and experimentation, the mad-scientist side of the entire expertise. And Millman — who’s beneficiant to the e-book — comes away questioning if, regardless of the Christian components in my story, the religion it actually shows is extra “essentially Promethean, a perception within the human capability to grasp and overcome the fabric constraints of our world,” which is in some methods a “stunning place for a critical Christian to finish up.”
I believe it’s a little stunning in the event you contemplate Christianity to be a faith solely involved with bearing struggling within the current for the sake of the hereafter. However in truth, the — sure — dynamism of Christian cultures has normally mirrored the working-through of the tensions between that conception of the religion — name it ascetic, monastic, quietist, Mennonite — and the equally highly effective conception of Christianity as a faith of restore, reform, therapeutic, revolution. Which, I might recommend, can also be a pressure woven all through the Outdated and New Testaments alike, which current each a fallen world to be patiently endured and a fertile world that may be mastered and reworked.
The serpent offers Eve and Adam some kind of forbidden information, sure — but it surely’s earlier than that Fall, not afterward, that God tells humanity to fill the Earth and subdue it, and when Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden that mission carries on, simply freighted with extra struggling and ache. (As in Eden, so in Arizona.)