A Jesuit Speaks on Atheism and Modernity

My own proposition, derivative from the Bible, is that atheism is never the conclusion of any theory, philosophical or scientific. It is a decision, a free act of choice that antedates all theories.

-J.C. Murray, S.J.

Fr. John Courtney Murray (1902-1967) was one of America’s most distinguished theologians. In a series of lectures given at Yale University in 1963, he dealt with “the problem of God”—a phrase he considers “distinctively modern” (1). However, despite whatever looks of modernity it may have, the problem, Murray writes, “is as old as the oldest traditions of the Bible.” The issue is of utmost importance, as is implied in the introduction to this research project. Murray wholeheartedly agrees,

…the problem of God is primary among the fateful human questions that, as Pascal said, “take us by the throat.” The whole man—as intelligent and free, as a body, a psychic apparatus, and a soul—is profoundly engaged both in the position of the problem and its solution. (4)

I intend on focusing in-depth on Murray’s view of modern atheists, focusing mainly on two chapters in particular from his book The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today. The two chapters are “The Godless Man of Modernity” and “The Godless Man of the Post-Modern Age.”

THE GODLESS MAN OF MODERNITY

Murray believes that in the modern age there are two types of “godless man” (86). And by modern age he means what “first begins in the quattrocento with the rise of what Lagarde has called…the laicist mentality; ….through the nineteenth century.” The first sort of godless man is one of “the Academy, bearer of the aristocratic atheism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Murray writes that the “dynamic behind his atheism was the will to understand and explain the world without God, meaning by “world,” nature, man, history, society.” The second sort of godless man is the one of the Marketplace, “the bearer of the bourgeois atheism of the nineteenth century.”

Murray hypothesizes the origins of the modern worldview from three pivotal events that took place in the Middle Ages. The first event was “the transposition of the problem of God into a problem for the philosophical intelligence, a formally metaphysical, gnoseological, and linguistic problem” (88). Murray considers this something bold, because the “exposure of the problem of God to rational inquiry was an invitation to betrayal of the tradition of reason.” Such a betrayal happened when modernity decided to separate faith from reason after so much time in unity. Murray believes it “was by this choice that the way was opened to the atheist conclusions of modern philosophy.”

The second event “was the Thomist reception of Aristotle.” Now the universe “was a subsistent order of being” considered “radically distinct from God” and “endowed with its own proper autonomy.” Aquinas apparently would tergiversate the “biblical view of the world as an order of reality outside the order of the divine, revealing God indeed but not containing him” (89). Man was given more importance, giving some reason to the belief of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. This time, though, it came from the idea of man being “the image of God in virtue of his endowment with intelligence.” Now that the world was man’s to analyze rationally, “there lurked an invitation to betrayal of the tradition.” Then the betrayal happened when one exclusive form of rational truth was accepted, with “one method for its pursuit” and “one measure of the certitudes attained” (90). Further consequences of this event led modernity to consider Christianity a “religion of myths” (91) and to a scientism that “supervened upon rationalism” (90). God, like Christianity, was “relegated to the order of fantasy.”

The third event was “the construction of the problematic of creation” (92) which Murray describes as “the central problem of Christian philosophy.” This problem is two-dimensional because it deals with both a metaphysical and moral side. The focus here will be on the former. Metaphysically speaking, if “God is, and if God is what he is, how can anything else be?” The Scholastics did not manage the problem well, and part of the difficulty is as Murray writes,

Outside the infinite, necessary, eternal, absolute being of God there seems to be no room for another order of being that is finite, contingent, temporal, relative.

The issue led to an invitation to “betrayal of the tradition” yet again. Modernity “decided to consider the problem as a choice between alternatives that really are contrary.” Both alternatives were atheist ones: either God is all that is or the world is all that is. If the former were chosen, one would be advocating pantheism, which as Murray says “pantheism is atheism” (93) because it is “the denial of God as Creator, and if God is not the Creator, he is not God.” Murray writes that the modern will to atheism’s direction goes against “the Christian affirmation that God is the Creator of the world.” The second alternative, on the other hand, is just materialism, which is obviously atheist. Murray summarizes it eloquently in a brief passage:

The material universe, man included, is a self-sufficient, self-contained entity and order. It subsists by itself, and it always has been there—from eternity, even. Somehow or other it managed to originate itself, if indeed here be any sense at all in speaking of its origination. In any case, it serves to explain itself. Beyond this world lies nothing. There is, first and last, no God.

Modernity, thus, is trapped in atheism either way for Murray when it comes to the metaphysical issue of creation.

As for the second sort of atheism, that of the Marketplace, Murray dedicates only a little to. It is worth reading basically the entire definition of it as seen by Murray:

In the Marketplace, said les gens de bien…, we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist. The project of these men was not to explain the world but simply to make a living in it. To them the sole realities of life were economic. The business of business is business, they might have said.... And to the business of business, God is irrelevant. He is not needed for the success of the economic enterprise, which is the only enterprise that matters. (98)

Murray refers to it as “atheism of distraction” and claims that it “served to prepare the way for the later proletarian atheism” and their “atheism of indifference” (99).

THE GODLESS MAN OF THE POST-MODERN AGE

Murray’s idea of post-modern is not the typical one. For him it basically means anything from the time of Marx on. Generally, for someone in our age, by postmodern we mean something else. Post-modern was simply the label Murray gave the present (which is now over forty years ago) due to its new atheisms. Notwithstanding minor clarifications, he believed in two godless men of post-modernity: the one of the communist world revolution and the one of the Theater.

The godless man of the communist social revolution is not an individual per se. Murray uses the term party instead (101). Murray explains and then defines the aim of a man in that party:

The new Marxist man wills to transform the world. By “world" he means all that Marx meant by “nature,” that is, the total system of material production and human relationships that the labor of man has brought into being throughout history. The world is the industrial world, the world wrought by man’s industry. (101-102)

These people are, in a sense, in search of freedom on earth alone.

As for the godless man of the Theater, unfortunately it was too recent a concept by the time Murray gave his lecture. Regardless, by Theater he meant “the world of the public imagination, common impressions, generally shared feelings about things” (102). The man of the Theater is, in some sense, not philosophical. He is interested in man’s “situation” and has an “ethic of the situation” as well. Murray writes,

His postulate is that man has no nature; man is not an essence. Man is only a presence, a sort of process, or , if you give the word something of its primitive Hebraic sense, an existence, a continual “standing forth,” an actual “being-there-in-the-moment” in action and in freedom.

The will of the godless man of the Theater is not that of his predecessor of the Academy—the will to understand and explain the world without God. For him the world is absurd. Still less does he will to change the world; for it would still be absurd no matter what the change. His project is simply to “exist” the godless word…Even more exactly, his project is to “exist” himself, the man who wills to be godless in a world that he sees to be godless through his intention that it should be godless like himself. He wills the absence of God. (103)

Both types of men are very different. However, they do have some similarities. Murray describes six characteristics in detail. For reasons of brevity and time, it is most prudent to simply list those six characteristics:

1. They “share a common problematic” dealing with the issue of evil in the world.

2. They both accept Nietzsche’s (mythical) belief that God is dead. History now becomes only man’s playing field.

3. Both new atheisms are postulates and not conclusions.

4. God is considered not only some “needless superfluity” (106) but a “positive menace to be actively combatted and done away with.”

5. Their active antagonism to God is based on the idea that He opposes man’s freedom

6. Both have a “highly concrete concept of freedom” not based on legalism and the like.

In this same content-rich chapter of Murray’s book, he also offers his conclusion. For the Academy, the big deal was “the intelligibility of God, as allied with issue of the intelligibility of the world” (119). For the post-moderns, though, God is dead, and thus those issues do not matter. Furthermore, for the post-moderns, “the problem of God has come back in its biblical mode of position.” This is so because:

The problem of God today is not posited simply in the order of ideas and affirmation where the terms of argument are essence and existence. Its plane of position is the historical-existential order, where the terms of argument are presence or transparency and absence or opacity. This is the plane on which the problem was posited by the Lord God of Israel when he visited and redeemed his people. This, too, is the plane on which it has again been posited by the man of the Revolution and by the man of the Theater, who have come to visit, if not redeem, us. (119-120)

Murray thus gives an excellent history of the rise of atheism from the modern age to the time of his book. One can say that Murray, though he claims he is not trying to persuade or prove anything (3), does seem to have more sympathy towards the new atheism (amongst the atheisms) since it seems to bring us back to our biblical roots. Now it is just a matter of what is better—knowing God or ignoring him (121). That is where we are at, and we better make a decision (atheism, Murray reasonably believes, is a decision) because this is certainly of great importance.

**I would cite the work in detail if I had the information**