Readers put me on to a very interesting book with this title by Robert Inchausti. He says in his intro that the the public perception of Christianity is that it
is inherently reactionary, unconsciously wedded to class, race, and gender prejudices, bound by foundational metaphysics and littered with outworn superstitions. . . . This book attempt to correct this error by taking a hard and sustained look at those macrohistorians, social activists, and avant garde novelists whose unique contributions to secular thought derive from their Christian world views. . . .
This new breed of theoretically savvy Christian humanists are not apologists for the status quo, but subversive–inherently suspicious of worldly power and actively working for a more just world. For them, the postmodern culture critics Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida got it only half right. Yes, the Enlightenment project was narrowly conceived, but that doesn’t mean that the best alternative to it is an even more theoretically self-conscious hyperrationalism.
He goes on to say that the writers he examines argue for a return to an eschatological perspective on human existence in which "myth–as the mode of simultaneous awareness of multiple causes and effects–remains at the heart of human self-understanding, and, properly understood, is capable of renewing our culture and transforming the Enlightenment disciplines from the inside out."
Long time readers of ATF will recognize these as precisely the themes that underlie almost everything that I write here when it comes to religion and culture. And like me, Inchausti is not just interested in the meaning of "subversive" only in the political sense, but more fundamentally in the epistemological sense. He argues, as I have been trying to do, that our fundamental experience of the world is profoundly distorted by the rigidified habits of mind formed by Enlightenment rationalism and the materialism that has followed inevitably from it. One’s politics follows from his or her metaphysics and epistemology, which everyone has, whether her or she is conscious of them or not.
Breaking this habit is the great theme of Barfield’s Saving the Appearances and is addressed by Inchausti in the first chapter where he discusses Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, and others who understand the problem and have struggled to find a way to solve it. As Barfield argues, Christians and other modern believers live in a world shaped by these materialist mental habits just as much as secularists do. The challenge, therefore, is not to make Christianity make sense on Enlightenment terms, which is always a losing proposition, that diminishes the mythopoetic power the Christian faith, but rather to subvert Enlightenment rationalism by shattering its materialist assumptions and habits of mind for which mythos as a mode of cognizing truth is an impossibility.
This is no easy task, but it’s something I’ll get into in a more developed way in the coming week, leaning heavily both on Barfield and Inchausti.
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