Dover Beach
Dover Beach
In the Greek city of Corinth, in the winter of the year now known as AD57, a man sat down to write what has been, by most measures, the most important letter ever written in Europe, perhaps the world. The man was the Apostle Paul, previously known as Saul of Tarsus, a Jewish scholar of the finest calibre yet steeped in the culture of the Greco-Roman world. The letter was addressed to ‘all who are in Rome, beloved of God,’ the nascent Christian church in the capital of the empire. After a brief introduction he lays out his stinging indictment of human life and culture, how mankind, having abandoned the knowledge of God – of His eternal nature and almighty power – so clearly perceived in creation, has been given over to foolish imaginations of the mind and bodily lusts, creating gods of their own imagining to worship and indulging in all manner of vice and wickedness. It was a picture of his own times and ours. Having laid out his indictment Paul goes on to explain the remedy, that God had in this time revealed the mystery of the ages, Himself, in the person of His Son Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the cornerstone and capstone of all creation, upon whom everything is built, in whom all things are held together and by whom all things will be made subject again to proper order under God. This message might seem arcane to our ears but through Paul and the other Christian leaders it launched a global revolution, not only in religion and morality, but intellectually, in how the entire universe could be understood as a rational, ordered, structured and predictable physical and spiritual entity. The arbitrary and whimsical world of ancient paganism was soon to be swept away in the light of this new understanding. Faith in one God who eternally ruled over creation with omnipotent power was becoming ‘the new norm’.
This new norm was to hold sway, unchallenged for another 1750 years. As the Roman empire crumbled away before his eyes in the early fifth century, the great theologian Augustine of Hippo could proclaim ‘credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe that I might understand.’ When Oxford University was founded in the twelfth century it took its motto from the 27th Psalm, ‘Dominus Illuminatio Mea,’ ‘The Lord is my Light.’ Four hundred years on and pioneering scientists such as Isaac Newton, the discoverer of gravity, calculus and author of Principia Mathematica could still proclaim that God reveals Himself through two books, the Bible and creation. Fast forward another three hundred years and back in Oxford, in 1944, the academic and author C.S. Lewis declared:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”
But by the time that Lewis wrote his words his opinion was no longer held by a great many of his Oxford colleagues, the faith in a universal divine being who created and upheld the world in order was a dying belief. Now, another seventy five years on, faith in one God is being driven from the public sphere, atheism is now the default position in academia and our government and laws are being re-built around it. How did we get to this place?
In 1851 the poet Matthew Arnold married and went on honeymoon to Dover, Kent. While there he wrote his famous poem ‘Dover Beach’, this is the third stanza:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
In which he reflects on the slow but steady retreat of faith before the onslaught of atheism and humanism. The world, once girdled in majesty by faith is being dis-robed to reveal its stark nakedness. It is, he seems to say, a final turning of the tide. With much regret he finishes the poem with a fourth stanza:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
He understands that the world now opening up before the rationalist gaze, might seem new, idyllic even, but it is a world devoid of comfort, full of struggle and ignorance. The enticing world he envisions with his beloved disguises a barren reality. One can imagine him wrapping his arm around the shoulder of his new wife, holding her close to protect them both from the chill winds of the new age, human affection the only barrier to the cold.
The new age which Arnold gazed upon, the ‘Age of Enlightenment,’ had its dawn some 60 years earlier with the French revolution of 1789, where King and Church were overthrown and Liberty literally became the new deity to be worshipped. Catholicism was banned in 1792 and echoing the story of the fall in the Book of Genesis, men took to themselves the right to decide what was good and what was evil. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris was turned into a Temple of Reason, where atheism was enshrined and services conducted to pay homage to a woman dressed as the Goddess Liberty. In 1793 the Terror was initiated, in which thousands of political opponents of the regime were rounded up and executed. By the end of the French revolutionary wars in 1815, by which the ideals of the French revolution were to be exported by force of arms, across Europe upwards of 5 million people were dead. By their fruits you will know them.
A few years after Arnold wrote ‘Dover Beach’ two books were written that changed the course of world history, Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859 and Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ in 1867. Darwin’s theory seemed to do away with the need for a divine Creator by positing that different species developed and changed through time, from primitive beginnings to complex organisms, by a process of competitive struggle he called evolution. That Darwin went on, in a second book ‘The Descent of Man,’ to apply his theories to human evolution and predict the extermination of black humanity by white European humanity seems not to have tempered enthusiasm for his ideas. The second book, Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’, gave an alternative explanation for the sufferings of mankind and the injustices of society as a result of class oppression, and with it a road map to a fairer, more just society, by class revolution. History shows how the implementation of these ideas in Communist revolutions and governments has led to the systematic oppression and impoverishment of nations. Again, the obvious and repeatedly tested deficiencies of the theory in practice, has not led to a diminishment in enthusiasm for them in some quarters. Together these two books, giving an alternative causation of the world around us and an alternative route to a just society were for many the final nail in the coffin of Christianity. Though faith might linger in popular culture it no longer had, it was deemed, the necessary intellectual and philosophical credibility to sustain a coherent world view, atheism was the way ahead into a brave, new world.
Darwin and Marx not only legitimised a new godless way of thinking about the world, they also promoted a new and violent understanding of the nature of progress. Where Christianity placed a redemptive strategy at the heart of the divine’s relationship with the world and progress towards a future heaven, Darwin and Marx placed struggle; ‘nature red in tooth and claw.’ Progress now was ‘the survival of the fittest’ in nature and the elimination of the capitalist class in society. It is perhaps no surprise then that the twentieth century turned out to be the bloodiest century ever, with an estimated 187 million killed by warfare (Historian Eric Hobsbawm) and an astonishing 262 million killed by the oppression of their own governments (Political scientist, R. J. Rummel). Could it be that ‘The Enlightenment,’ by removing God from our understanding of the world and insisting on reason alone, may not be giving us a clearer picture of the universe as it really is, or a route to a better world, but be more akin to stabbing oneself in the eye, reducing us to monocular vision? One hundred and fifty years on and we have sufficient historical perspective for these two thinkers and the atheist world view they established to be properly evaluated.
Theism postulates an absolute first cause, from which all things proceed in an ordered manner. From this understanding the theist can perceive structure and truth, discovering it within creation. Conversely the atheist dismisses any first cause and relies on an infinite regression of cause and effect - aeons of time and multiplicities of universes - as the reason for the illusion of structure and order which his conscious perceives, or rather imposes upon it, while schizophrenically believing life is ultimately meaningless. With no objective ‘out there’ to anchor one’s existence, the atheist is left with only the subjective self as a reference point by which to attempt an understanding of the world. When reason further tells you that your very thoughts, your consciousness and sense of self are merely the by-product of the random firing of synapses in your brain, even the innate sense of self is reduced to meaninglessness. For the theist the universe tends naturally to law, order and construction, for the atheist the long arc of the universe bends inexorably to lawlessness, dissolution and chaos - a spiritual, moral, scientific and increasingly political chaos which is being evidenced around us. Reason alone, the cold, human faculty of logic, devoid of values, feeling and morality, is the false god at whose feet the atheist worships.
Further back in time than Paul, a full 1300 years before, stands the Prophet Moses who, by his faith in one God, delivered the Hebrew people from enslavement by the Egyptians. Having delivered the Hebrews out of Egypt into the wilderness to worship, Moses ascended Mount Sinai and came back down bearing 10 commandments written on tablets of stone. The first commandment engraved read thus:
‘I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Though shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them…’
It was the commandment that Paul was referencing when he gave his indictment of human society in his letter to the church in Rome. The modern day prophets of Darwin and Marx promised to lead the people out of bondage to ignorance and superstitious faith but they have only led the people into the wilderness and the hollow worship of self. There is no road or route map to a Promised Land, only the chaos of nihilism. It is time to pick up again the tablets of stone and acknowledge that one God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, is to be worshipped, and Him alone.
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