A quick post today with some quotes I’ve been pondering.
First, from Carl Trueman’s excellent new book, The Desecration of Man, we have a thoroughgoing exploration of how a series of shifts over the centuries have fundamentally altered how we view the human person:
The old morality has not faded away. It has been overthrown in an instant. But such comprehensive change in social behavior indicates that there have to have been deep changes within the social imaginary. Now, the rapid change and violent transformation of social values may be shocking and sudden, but the underlying causes have been building for a long time. And the net result is that we now have a very different answer to the question “What is man?” than our ancestors did. The social imaginary has been completely transformed. (Kindle location 553)
The shifts have not only been intellectual, but technological:
Technology, more than anything else, has transformed the world into a place of dramatic flux and constant change. Ask me who I am and I will find it much harder to give an answer, for the only constants are those I have chosen for myself: my job, my partner, my location, my career. Yes, I have children, but I chose to have them. And even my own body now seems increasingly equivocal as a given: If I want to become a woman, why should I not choose to do so? My limits, my obligations, and my ends come down to my choice. I have to decide who I am. The “I” has been destabilized by forces beyond my control, because those limits, obligations, and ends have all themselves been destabilized. (Kindle location 781)
He specifically mentions the Methodist and pietist movements as part of the larger movement towards the internalization of the sense of self:
The rise of Methodism and Pietism, both movements with a strong experiential component, are also evidence of this inward turn toward emotion and feeling. With the church fragmented by the Reformation, the quest for religious certainty, like the quest for human identity, moved inward. The central importance of individual self-consciousness also continued in broader philosophical and cultural developments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example German idealism and Romanticism. As the outer world became more fluid, the inner space became more important as a source of stability and continuity. (Kindle location 831)
The book then traces how these shifts led to the artistic class seeing their mission as one of transgression and desecration, and what that steady cultural influence has yielded after a century or so. He explores the implications for our culture’s views of both sexuality and death. In both cases, he shows how the loss of a biblical anthropology and the fallen impulse to desecration has led us to where we are today. It’s a sobering but illuminating read.
In a somewhat related vein, I came across this quote from Abigail Favale, whose work on gender and feminism is excellent.
If the man has a primary role in preserving and safeguarding the dynamic of mutual self-gift and love between the sexes, in receiving the woman as a gift—the woman has a primary role in safeguarding the gift of the child, and protecting this dynamic of love from the threat of domination.
It is telling, perhaps, that the most damaging scandals of our time reflect a violent betrayal of both of these calls: the sex scandals within the Church reveal a perverse and total betrayal of the masculine mission to resist the temptation of dehumanizing sexual conquest; and the culture-wide embrace of abortion under the guise of protecting women’s rights is a betrayal of the feminine mission to safeguard the sanctity of hidden human life.
The idea of complementary and unique “missions” for each gender makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. This leads to the conclusion that we are most scandalized when men or women sin in ways that betray their particular missions. How could it not be so? For deep down we know that a man ought to protect the vulnerable, not abuse and exploit them sexually; and that women ought to love and nurture the children they conceive.
