The Great Forgetting and the Crisis of Modernity

Many years ago, a man, who was hiking along the arduous path of life’s journey to reach the high summit behind which the sun cast its bright rays, came upon a wooded area where he stopped to rest. Reclining against a tree, and having taken a brief repast, a creeping thought weaseled its way into his mind, until before long, he could think of nothing else. “Perhaps,” the thought nagged him, “the path upward is in fact a man-made trail, cruelly constructed over many years to deceive men to exert themselves to exhaustion toward their goal, only to fall short before ever reaching the summit.” The more he resisted the thought, the more he began to believe it, inviting the sneaking suspicion that he had been duped into thinking he could reach the summit. Indeed, he began to wonder if there was a summit at all. Since from his vantage in the trees, he could no longer see it. Before long, guides were sent from the summit to look for him. But when they came to help him find his way back onto the path, he scorned them, sending them away. For having grown weak from so much rest and so little activity, he had become convinced that no man, even if he tried, could move an inch more up that old dubious trail. Instead, he was now assured that his true destination would be revealed to him after he died, and that his energy would be better spent building a comfortable dwelling here in the forest, optimizing it for his and his offspring’s material happiness, and awaiting for that glorious day beyond this life when he would be plucked from the forest and placed atop the true summit, toward which no real progress could be made while living.

After many years, the trail was overgrown and forgotten, and all men were born into the wooded region, ever applying themselves to its perfection. They aimed at making it more efficient, molding it to better meet their needs for material satiation. The belief that another world existed beyond their deaths persisted amongst a small few, but most men no longer believed this, seeing no need for such silly fantasies. Man was happy and fat and entertained in the forest he’d worked so hard to shape.

For some, intimations of a distant and vague memory persisted; visions of a world beyond the forest, where an arduous and long path led to some glorious summit. Before long, though, they, too, were distracted by the immediate pleasures of a full belly and a soft couch, forgetting that strange idea of that old path that led to God.

Martin Luther stepped off the trail when he rejected the mediation of virtue in favor of the immediacy with God he was afforded through his own mind. The high medieval synthesis, represented most clearly in Dante, presented the world as a continuous cosmos, a kind of trail, with an endpoint in God from which and to which all things came and went. Man’s journey toward God began in his lifetime, as he ascended the path to God through the cultivation of virtue. While it was only due to God’s revelation and intercession that man could reach his ultimate end, he still had an active part to play in his journey to God. With the justified suspicion—historically speaking—that man relied too much on the overgrown mediation of the church to ascend to God, Luther overcorrected the problem and threw the baby out with the bath water. Whether to protect the sovereignty of God’s will against man’s knowledge, or to justify his growing conviction of his own inadequacy, he disregarded all mediation that required human action, severing the cosmological hierarchy, and distrusting the path that starts on this side of life. 

Two problems accompany the discarding of the old reliance on mediation, whether through virtue or received tradition of truths. The first problem is that the path toward man’s summit—the cosmology of continuity from the lowest rung of reality to the highest—has been severed. In other words, the purpose of man’s life on earth, what he should be doing with his time, is now obscured. He is no longer starting the journey in life that will be fulfilled after death. Rather, as long as God is “the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man’s understanding,” all that man can do is trust in God’s faithfulness to his promise to grant man salvation. Anything man can do in this world to participate in his transformation would mean part of God’s will is comprehensible to man, compromising God’s sovereignty. Man’s salvation is secured by faithful assurance of God’s promise; whatever he should be doing in the waiting room of life has no impact on his gaining salvation. The second problem is how to ground certainty. Leaving the path behind meant leaving mediated knowledge behind, for fear of its corruption. The old grounding of knowledge, like lived virtue, tradition, and Aristotelian final causes, was rejected. It was someone’s job to find a new grounding.     

Descartes, born into Luther’s forest, was up for the task. Descartes turned inward in pursuit of an immediate, certain knowledge. After discarding everything that required mediation, he found at bottom the “I…the thing that thinks.” Discovering certainty in the unmediated “I”, he confirms the type of knowing that is also unmediated by the senses and imagination: pure mathematics, since he “cannot refrain from assenting to these things,” even after he has withdrawn his mind from the senses. Man’s naked essence in the unmediated cavern of his mind is reduced to a passive receptacle of certain mathematical truths. While he has grounded the certainty man lost when he severed himself from the hierarchy, the newfound ground of man’s being, his essence, does not compel him to action. He stands on a precipice with nowhere to go and nothing to do – just like Hamlet.

Hamlet is the first great casualty of the modern world. While the hopes for how the material world might be shaped would soon dominate the intellectual landscape, Shakespeare sensed, with profound insight, the grave consequence Luther’s world would have on men. Hamlet’s by now cliché musing, “To be or not to be: that is the question,” is no existential cry of angst. It really is the question, the ontological predicament of being, now that man’s salvation—if he has any—is wholly limited to the next life. Indeed, without an end toward which man directs all his actions, what is he to do? Hamlet is not undecided because he possesses a fickle nature, but because without a clear principle for action in the world, it is necessarily impossible for him to act.

Since the publication of Hamlet precedes Descartes’ work by several decades, it is possible that Hamlet, the character, is performing the Cartesian experiment in pursuit of certainty before Descartes ever sat on that armchair in front of his fireplace. It is precisely on account of turning inward in pursuit of some motive that Hamlet finds no motivation to act in the world.

Nevertheless, Descartes does not leave man completely without motivation for action in the world; at least a certain kind of action. In fact, he thinks he has found the principle of action that will engender the creation of a new world, unlike anything yet known, grounded in certain knowledge. After discarding all the characteristics of a material thing that he ascertains through the mediation of his senses or imagination, all that remains is its extension, void of all accidental properties. To maintain the integrity of the certain knowledge he has of himself, he will only engage with the world through the vehicle of this knowledge, by which he has also confirmed the veracity of certain innate ideas, like mathematical principles.

Knowing mathematics to have a fundamentally functional nature, he realizes he can apply mathematics to manipulate the extended world, “which is the object of pure mathematics.” Since Descartes prioritized certainty, and specifically mathematical certainty, he could never have discovered man’s essence to be related to virtue, since virtue cannot be mathematically verified or tested. Insofar as man is in this world, he has been given certain knowledge to shape it for his benefit. Descartes effectively limited the material world to a feeding trough for the stomach rather than the training ground for the heart. The unintended consequence is such that while men’s minds are inflated and their stomachs are fattened, their seat of moral action, of which more below, is atrophied.

Descartes has made a decisive break with the ancient and medieval conception of happiness as transformation through virtue, precisely because he has officially discarded, like Luther before him, the part of man that can be transformed. John Locke put a proverbial nail in the coffin of this ancient conception of happiness, by eliminating the concept of innate ideas altogether. Virtues, or moral rules, he claimed, are only ascertained empirically. Although he concedes that “God…joined virtue and public happiness together,” defining the latter as “an aversion to misery,” he overestimates man’s ability to recognize virtue as a higher form of happiness than material well-being. The path is short to assuming pleasure is the sum of man’s happiness.

It is no wonder, then, considering the success of Locke’s empiricism, that John Stuart Mill would so confidently argue that “happiness is pleasure, and the absence of pain.” Mill draws Descartes to his logical conclusion, unambiguously conflating, at last, material pleasure with that pesky, homeless orphan Virtue. Subject to the forgetfulness that the distance from the old, mediated form of knowledge has inculcated, in addition to observing in society the ever-growing minimization of previously common material pains, his attestation that “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends” is historically defensible. Like Locke, though, Mill’s optimistic view of human nature is gravely mistaken. He believes that when men are educated about the higher happiness found in virtue, when they know the right thing to do, they will aspire to it. Yet man is rarely inclined to disregard the constant groaning of his stomach for the less concrete virtues of the mind, especially without the ontological foundation of man’s essence—his soul, say—being made for and able to be transformed by virtue, in pursuit of an ultimate end.

Luther rejected the Neoplatonic cosmology and its forms of mediation between man and God. To salvage an interpretation of salvation that exclusively prioritizes the mediation of Christ’s sacrifice, he denied the cosmological hierarchy that demanded his lifelong participation in his own salvation. When Luther stepped off the trail, he inadvertently created the conditions for the heart, the will of man, to atrophy. In denying the medieval cosmology, he denied the part of man—so pivotal for the ancients and medievals—that requires movement toward its end to grow. Descartes’ discoveries further alienated man from his heart, when he transferred the essence of man from his faculty of loving—his heart or will—to his faculty of knowing, his mind. As I have suggested above, the dismissal of the medieval cosmology resulted in the dismissal of man’s heart, creating the conditions for the conundrum of man’s moral life, as he battled a rebellious stomach with a weakened mind.

CS Lewis aptly diagnoses this problem in The Abolition of Man, when he asserts that man has lost his chest, the part of him that is inspired to action by loving, and seeking to reflect, some end. When the heart is ignored, the mind struggles against the unruly, and never satisfied, belly. Lewis describes the travesty of ignoring this central part of man, writing, “The head rules the belly through the chest…[it] is the indispensable liaison officer between cerebral man and visceral man.” Man will never be at home in this world as long as he denies he is being transformed by every action he performs in it. Moreover, his moral life will be characterized by rejection and acquiescence, as he recognizes the insufficiency of the world—its foreign character—through his mind, while surrendering to the tyranny of his appetites, which are fully at home. He will passively bear this world in hopes of someday reaching another.

Kant and Kierkegaard are both confined to this severed, stationery world. They both reject the world, by ultimately acquiescing to it. In Lutheran fashion, they depend on recognizing an inaccessible higher law that exists outside the world they inhabit, which they believe in faith. According to Kant, the consequences of actions within the world have no bearing on the morality of man’s actions. He admits that man’s instinct aims at “preservation…prosperity, in a word its happiness,” while reason aims at achieving “a good will [which] is good not because of what it effects, or accomplishes…but good just by its willing.” To be moral, man must believe he has access to the real world, “the world of understanding,” which he will never have eyes to see. He accepts this real world of understanding—the ideal world—in faith, while acquiescing to the phenomenal world of instinct, the observable actions within which have no real bearing on his moral life.

If Kant’s view is pessimistic, Kierkegaard’s is even more so. For it is only by accepting the world as absurd that man can dwell within it. Kierkegaard’s world is the apex of nihilism, when man has journeyed so far from the cosmological perspective—wherein the world is intelligible—that he finds solace in its unintelligibility. Kierkegaard is the apotheosis of the Lutheran problem. He recognizes a higher calling within him, sees that the inhabited world is suited to feed his belly rather than this higher calling, which he perceives with his mind, and thus accepts his severed state. After realizing his home lies elsewhere, he makes the first step of faith, “resigning everything infinitely,” rejecting the material world as insufficient for his higher aims.  

Without the cosmology that inspires him to begin transforming himself in virtue, he must see the world as a temporary prison, and thus ultimately accept his lot, believing in the momentary breakthroughs of God’s faithfulness—always moments of absurdity against the logic of this world. Kierkegaard defines this second movement as “[taking] everything back on the strength of the absurd.” In other words, man will become comfortable in the world as it is, living ordinarily, even to the point of being mistaken as one of the “bourgeois philistines.” These are solutions of pessimistic acquiescence to the severed state of man’s being.

Nietzsche, like Lewis after him, correctly identifies this problem. When man is not at home in the world, he becomes less and less man. Without his chest, man will either have a fattened stomach or an inflated mind, or both. And his mind, without the mediation of his chest, will almost always fail to reign in his appetites. Nietzsche was raised in this empire of decadence, recognizing correctly that unless man accepted this world as his home, he would necessarily arrive where his great teachers, Schopenhauer and Wagner, arrived, namely, in resignation. Morality, for them, is in an attempt to save man from this decadent world, inevitably ending in “impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness.” Nietzsche believed a world existed beyond the forest, where man—all of him, including the part he had lost—would be at home. He left the forest, but he did not seek that old path to God, the medieval cosmology, which would have provided the missing piece to man’s broken being. Only within the rays of man’s eternal horizon, the path that leads from this world to the next, can his chest be ignited to virtuous action, having become resynchronized with the head and stomach. When Nietzsche departed Luther’s forest, but ignored the ancient path that extended to God, he found only an abyss, discovering no end by which to direct and shape his virtuous action. In a terrifying way, Nietzsche rejected man in his entirety.

Man would find his heart if he left the forest in pursuit of that old path that led him to God. He would have to believe, as Marcilio Ficino once did, that his essence, his chest, is made up of and built up by love, which grows as he ascends the mountain of life toward his summit in God. Believing man has a higher calling is one thing; “wishing and trying to become God instead of man…as the lover wishes to transform himself into the person of the loved one” is a wholly different thing. The man who wishes to “exchange his humanity for divinity” will not wait until beyond his death for this transformation. He will leave the forest behind and begin hiking up the path of virtue, even if the path is at first difficult to find and in great disrepair. While he will not discover a Cartesian certainty, his ascent up the trail will be proved “as his soul manifests itself in a most noble kind of beauty in words, actions, and deeds.”

It will take a Petrarchan man to leave the comfortable forest. Most men have forgotten that this life is the beginning of the path to God, and that they are all called to ascend it. Petrarch knew that “man whose pleasures uninterrupted has forgotten himself, and is never led back into virtue’s path.” But he also knew that man is sometimes given the occasion for his remembering, as “he who amid his carnal delights is sometimes visited with adversity will come to the recollection of his true condition.” The question is whether he will leave the forest in faith of discovering the more ancient path, the more complete image of man. The Petrarchan man will respond to Lewis’s diagnosis with courage, leaving the forest of his condition behind to begin the slow, hard work of healing his atrophied chest on the path of virtue.

And after he is well on his journey, perhaps he will one day take a brief respite from his hike to visit those who still dwell in the forest. Upon his appearance, they will recognize him as a god amongst men, standing high above them, with gleaming eyes, a bulging chest, and a tight stomach. They will fear him and worship him as a strange god, even while he looks vaguely familiar, the intimation of a dream, a memory, they once had of themselves. But then the wine will be poured, the dinner will be served, and they will quickly forget the stranger at the sight of such a feast. And while they sate their bellies, waiting for their salvation in death, the virtuous man will resume his hike up the trail toward God.

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