The Idol of Our Age

The Idol of our Age: How the Religion of Humanity subverts Christianity

by Daniel J. Mahoney

Encounter Books; New York and London 2018

The Antichrist!  – how often his specter had haunted artists, philosophers and others “spiritually perceptive” since the consolidation of the modern world! It seems a widely shared perception that he cannot be far from an era of religious collapse and ideological fraud. In more recent years, the radical break with Christian morality of the Western establishment, coupled with the growing acquiescence of the Christian churches in their own liquidation, has made the issue more topical than ever. Chilton Williamson, reviewing the recent “religious” service in the Washington cathedral, commemorating John McCain and castigating President Trump, declared that the only god of the American establishment is themselves. Yet the self-understanding of said establishment is still that of a benevolent universal ruler, dispensing prosperity and liberation throughout the world.

Prof. Daniel Mahoney summarizes the findings of thinkers who have confronted one aspect or other of this transition from Christianity to a humanistic cult or better stated,  the merger of the two. Professor Mahoney is well acquainted with subject matter – he recently written an introduction for a new translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s diaries – written after he came to the West in the 1970’s. Prof. Mahoney has assembled a set of witnesses, some well-known, others less so, some stern prophets of disaster, others enthusiastic heralds of a coming transformation of the world. The common theme is the dawning of a new age and a new religion where man alone is god.

Prof. Mahoney draws on the insights of Aurel Kolnai to frame the discussion.  Kolnai wrote of the negative nature of humanism and of  its absolute incompatibility with Christianity, of the “primordial contrast” between humanitarian and Christian morality. And he wrote these thoughts in an essay published in 1944, when the new regime was, by  its own estimation then and now, on the verge of celebrating its greatest triumph. Prof. Mahoney helpfully reprints that essay in this book.

Orestes Brownson is perhaps unfamiliar in this context, but he personally lived out an early version of the humanist ethics in an early predecessor of a “hippy” commune! August Comte, in the same era, also describes the possibility of creating a humanist society, but writes as an avid advocate of it. He is fascinating because his system explicitly acknowledges “humanism” as a substitute religion.

A high point of this book- or of any discussion of these matters – is Vladimir Soloviev’s incomparable A Short Tale of the Antichrist, an allegory of the advent of a humanitarian Antichrist. Soloviev,  the “Russian Newman,” strove to overcome the division between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. His Antichrist is a mild bringer of terrestrial ease and happiness. He is able to seduce most of the Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christians by offering them, in exchange for submission to the world and to him, the secular goods they secretly desire. Soloviev’s tale builds toward a dramatic, appropriately apocalyptic climax.  A Short Tale of the Antichrist is a part of Soloviev’s Three Conversations which is also remarkable for a parable justifying war (and, we might add, capital punishment) both of which remain anathema to the modern humanist ethos.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is cited mainly for his criticism of Tolstoy – in his day, at least in some respects, a humanist hero for his advocacy of nonviolence, the return to the land his disdain for traditional Christianity.

Prof. Mahoney now turns from the past to consideration of the present. For is not the regime of the American and Western European establishment the preeminent modern manifestation of modern humanism? And isn’t Pope Francis the exemplar of such humanism masquerading in pseudo- religious trappings?

“As we have noted, the present pontiff, no Antichrist to be sure, is half-humanitarian” Prof. Mahoney assures us. (surely a historic low point in papal apologetics!) But hasn’t our author squarely raised the issue himself  by juxtaposing in this book Soloviev’s vision of an Antichrist of mercy with a discussion of Bergoglio, the “Pope of mercy?” And, in all honesty, isn’t what Mahoney says about this topic the real interest of this book?

Prof. Mahoney compiles a catalogue (or is it an indictment?) of Pope Francis’s “humanitarian ” statements and actions. The pope and his acolytes  “sow confusion among the faithful and give into the pressures of the secular world.” Francis’s “discussion” of marriage is “marred” by a tendency to redefine Christian family life in terms of “values” that the Church presents to the world.  The Church’s teaching is presented as an “ideal” as to which most people “will fall short.”  The pope sometimes confuses Christian charity with “secular humanism.”  Prof.  Mahoney devotes more space, it must be admitted, to critiquing the pope’s attacks on capitalism, technology and America. He is disturbed by the pope’s affinity for socialist and despotic regimes. Here our author reveals his “neoconservative” roots.

Regrettably, in the case of Roman Catholics, academics and especially Roman Catholic academics,  difficulties arise when dealing with those currently holding ecclesiastical, political, and economic power. The tone grows “nuanced,” the criticism is “balanced,” the prophetic voice is muted. Accordingly, Prof.  Mahoney speaks of the “admirable Christian witness” of Bergoglio. One allegedly must be “moved by the poetic theologizing about the created order that informs the first parts of Laudato Si.”  Francis is a “poet and theologian of charity.” Much of Amoris Laetitia is “beautiful,” “luminous,” “insightful and lyrical.”

Kolnai and Soloviev affirm that the humanitarian temptation is inherent in the modern world and, though perhaps adopting a Christian mask,  remains essentially  incompatible with Christianity. Yet in the case of the bishop of Rome, Prof Mahoney creates separate lists of  “good” and  “bad” statements and seeks to excuse the latter,  suggesting Pope Francis is “confused”;  that the remarkable resemblance of his thought to secular humanism is “unintentional.” Is this relatively inconclusive  assessment of Pope Francis, in a sense, a test case of Prof. Mahoney’s critique of “the religion of humanity” as applied to actual recent developments? If so, one is tempted to ask, as in the case of so many other products of conservative thought: what was all the fuss about ?

We can say much the same of Mahoney’s remarkably mild conclusions regarding  the thought of Jurgen Habermas. If Pope Francis is the chaplain of the Western humanistic establishment, Habermas is its court-philosopher. Prof. Mahoney critiques Habermas’s apolitical “emancipatory cosmopolitanism” – yet he alleges this to be counterbalanced by Habermas’s “fundamental decency,” lauds Habermas as a man “of peace and reason” and applauds his praise of Jewish thinkers.

I have reservations about Mahoney’s judgment in other respects as well. He speaks of the American “experiment” and its  “proposition” that “all men are created equal.” He writes warmly of Churchill, Adenauer and especially Charles de Gaulle – yet wasn’t the current reign of modernity in Western Europe established under them? Pope Benedict is a special favorite of Prof. Mahoney; yet didn’t the  “pope emeritus” in his address to the German Bundestag (much admired by Prof. Mahoney) studiously avoid any reference to Christ? And hasn’t Pope Benedict spoken of the beneficial effects of the Enlightenment on Western Christianity? Also muffling the impact of Prof. Mahoney’s book is his reliance on a repetitive, academic diction in which adjectives such as “rich,” “ample “and “capacious” constantly recur.

A year or more has passed since the publication of this book.  In that time, Pope Francis has carried the fusion between Christianity and the contemporary “humanitarian”  ethos to unheard-of lengths.

Starting in Abu Dhabi, Francis  has launched an ideological and educational initiative couched in entirely humanistic and syncretistic terminology. In the “Amazonian” synod (and in additional interviews with his old dialogue partner Scalfari) the Pope has moved still further away from previous understandings of Christianity ( or at least those prevailing officially in the Roman Catholic Church). This new “Amazonian” faith seems to reduce Christianity to a mere restatement of the ideological norms of the Western European establishment – with Latin American liberation theology thrown in. The tension Prof. Mahoney discerns between Pope Francis’s “humanitarianism“ and his Christianity seems to have been resolved entirely in favor of the former.

Sandro Magister has analyzed recent papal initiatives, also turning to Soloviev’s parable of the Antichrist. 1) Anything but an extremist, Magister is nevertheless compelled to acknowledge traces of the Antichrist in Bergoglio’s papacy. “The novelty of the initiative of Francis consists precisely in the fact that it is the first time a pope has claimed on his own and put himself at the helm of such a radically secularized global educational pact. because in reality a ‘new humanism’ without Christ is not an original, but a constant in the thought of the West of the last two centuries.” And Magister cites extensive passages of a chapter of a book  – also referenced by Prof. Mahoney – in which the late Cardinal Giacomo Biffi “took up the account  of the Antichrist written in 1900 by the Russian theologian and philosopher (Soloviev) and applied it to the Church of today.” And in his wonderfully “brief and blunt” article “The Amazon Synod is a Sign of the Times”  2) Douglas Farrow, referring to the recent synod,  states:

“The kairos, the culture of encounter, being lauded in the Pan-Amazon Synod is a Bergoglian kairos and culture. The church “called to be ever more synodal,” to be “made flesh” and “incarnated” in existing cultures, is a Bergoglian church. And this church, not to put too fine a point on it, is not the Catholic Church. It is a false church. It is a self-divinizing church. It is an antichristic church, a substitute for the Word-made-flesh to whom the Catholic Church actually belongs and to whom, as Cardinal Müller insists, it must always give witness if it means to be the Church.”

We can only emphatically agree that although we may not yet be at the point of encountering  the personal Antichrist,  today’s Church and society are most definitely “antichristic.”  Although I do not agree with some of his conclusions,  nevertheless Prof. Mahoney has done us a service by opening more people’s eyes to the gravity of this crisis.

1. “Everyone to the School of the Antichrist: but One Cardinal Rebels”http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2019/09/19/everyone-to-the-school-of-the-antichrist-but-one-cardinal-rebels/
2. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/10/the-amazon-synod-is-a-sign-of-the-times