Third Millennium - Reflections on Faith and Reason

249 Pages·8.27 MB·English

by  David Walsh

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
REFLECTIONS
ON
FAITH
AND
REASON
DAVID WALSH
The Third Millennium:
Reflections on Faith
and Reason
David Walsh
Georgetown University Press / Washington, D.C.
Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. 20007
©1999 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 987654321 1999
THIS VOLUME IS PRINTED ON ACID-FREE OFFSET BOOKPAPER.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walsh, David, 1950-
The third millennium : reflections on faitb and reason / David
Walsh.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87840-749-9 (cloth)
1. Civilization, Christian. 2. Faith and reason—Christianity.
3. Christianity—Influence. I. Title.
BR115.C5W27 1999
230—DC21 99-18234
CIP
To His Holiness, John Paul II
Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Christian Enlargement of Reason 29
2 The Schizophrenia of the Modern World 67
3 Christianity as the Limit of Differentiation 111
4 Common Center of a Pluralist World 151
5 Christ as the Heart of Civilization 193
Index 233
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to record here my gratitude to those whose assis¬
tance has made this book possible. Financial support was provided
by the Earhart Foundation as part of their funding of my larger
project on “The Transparence of the Modern World.” I benefited
greatly from the careful reading that Brendan Purcell provided at
an early stage of the manuscript. Steve Millies was an able and
congenial research assistant, and Bill Byrne kindly undertook the
compilation of the index. I am grateful to John Samples, Director
of Georgetown University Press, along with Gail Grella and Ivan
Osorio, for the efficiency with which they brought the work to
publication. Copyediting was skillfully provided by Northeastern
Graphic Services.
The book is respectfully dedicated to Pope John Paul II, who has
led the world in celebration of the jubilee year of the birth of
Christ, and whose Fides et Ratio has shown the way toward the
deepest convergence between faith and reason in our time.
Introduction
The millennium is the most momentous calendar event any of us
will live through. Yet despite the attention lavished upon it, noth¬
ing is more certain than that its true significance will be missed.
This misperception is itself evidence of the intellectual fog under
which we labor. We are incapable of apprehending the meaning of
the most massively obvious events. How can our public celebra¬
tions bear any meaningful relation to the knot of time through
which we are passing, if we have no credible sense of what is being
marked.^ Are we celebrating a merely empty numerical sum? Or
does something of more consequence lie behind that intriguing row
of zeros? We know how to celebrate the new year, the new decade,
even the new century. But a new millennium? There we are in
unfamiliar territory, and the impending arrival is more than a little
intimidating. No proximate generation will have such a moment
to inaugurate.
What if we are not up to task? For more is at stake than throwing
the party of a thousand years—an unnerving enough idea. It is what
we must do afterward that is most sobering. This generation is
charged with beginning a new age. We have been granted the
opening of the third millennium of our history, thereby stamping it
with a character that will remain more visible than the imprints of
many less strategically placed cohorts. Thus, it is not the celebra¬
tion that is so daunting, but its aftermath. How will we enter upon
the third millennium? A peculiar detachment seems to characterize
2 ••• THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
our mood of drifting toward the calendrical pivot. Business as usual
reassures us that life will continue pretty much as it has. Little of the
apocalyptic excitement we know from the beginning of previous
millennia seems to be in the air. Or perhaps it is merely building
subterraneously to be unleashed in a volcanic eruption. An eerie
calm seems to characterize our lack of preparations. Sooner or
later, however, that will be shattered as we are gripped by the
stature of the historical shift we are entering. The advent of a new
millennium cannot be overlooked forever, and eventually it will
take us into its grip. Then our disorientation will be complete. How
will we be able to sustain our precarious entry into a new era if we
have lost our sense of what the transition means?
Of course, there will be the voices of pragmatic reason reassur¬
ing us that nothing of such cosmic import is transpiring. They will
point out that it is just the beginning of another year, no different
than any other. Our greatest problem is how to reprogram all the
computers that had so confidently been constructed to accept all
date combinations except a double zero. Surely there is something
a little disturbing in this demonstration of human nescience. It is
almost as if we were ready for every prospect except the void. Even
the most practical level seems to remind us of our reticence before
the abyss. Why were our computers programmed to so blithely
ignore a year in which everything came up zero? Then we remem¬
ber that it is only a number and that we can easily accommodate
ourselves to it. Besides, we recall that the start of the third millen¬
nium is itself in dispute. A good case can be made for its inception
in the year 2001 rather than the numerically more ominous 2000,
or it might be 2003 or even 2033.^ Other calculations have their
justifications as well, and, as we reflect upon them, we find our¬
selves back in the familiar territory of our irresolvable debates. It
is a land in which the very multiplicity of perspectives assures us
that everything is relative and that it is up to us to make of them
what we will. There is nothing whose objective reality provides the
measure for our own. We are in charge. Yet “the millennium”
shakes free from all our efforts to corral it. Somehow it remains
INTRODUCTION ••• 3
bigger than us. It forces itself upon us irrespective of our choices
and efforts to subsume it. We are not moving through the millen¬
nium, the millennium is moving through us. This is what is finally
so unsettling about the event. It reminds us that time is not a
medium at our disposal, but that we are subordinate to the struc¬
tures that emerge through time. History is what makes us. We do
not make history
The millennium imposes itself on us because it reminds us of
what we can usually forget. We are part of a cosmos whose cycles
include and embrace our existence. Our mastery is a limited pur¬
view over the domains that the order of the cosmos permits. We
are not absolute. We are not in charge. It is the rumble of time
itself that eventually rolls over us, and if we want to live we must
accommodate ourselves to its inexorable rhythm. That is why the
turn of the millennium remains so fascinating to us. We are still
subject to the unfolding of the cosmos. The casual debasement of
new year rituals, reassuring us of our blissful superiority to the
vicissitudes of existence, cannot so easily be sustained in the face
of such a signal turning point. Despite it all, we remain susceptible
to awe. The proportions of the cosmos overshadow us, and we are
held in reverence of the mystery in which we participate. Even the
most blase among us cannot remain unaffected by the promise of
a new beginning contained in the millennial opening. It is as if we
are back in that most magical first day of creation. We have leapt
into a qualitatively different time, and unlimited new possibilities
open before us. Of course, we still know that really nothing will
be changed. It is just that we cannot resist the pull to believe in
new birth when the cosmos itself seems to be drawing us so
strongly toward it.
The magic of the millennium works its inexorable effect. It is the
fertile source of the excitement that increasingly pervades the air
with expectations of novelty. Once we subject our intimations to
examination, however, we realize that the cosmic stretch is only
one dimension. Of more importance is the extent of history that
reaches out behind and before us. We no longer live simply within
4 ••• THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
the rhythms of the cosmos. Our time is the open horizon of history
in which singular events structure lines of meaning in various
directions. This is, after all, the focus of our interest in the millen¬
nium. Cosmic revolutions may be the prereflective context from
which we begin, but the foreground is firmly occupied by the
historical revolutions that create our world. Our attention is cap¬
tured by the sense of a new historical era. The moment may derive
some of its magic from the coincidence with the cosmic return, but
its substance consists of the actions that shape the world in which
we live. Although created by history, we too take a hand in
shaping that history. Now the question becomes more intractable:
What is the meaning whose historical beginning will shape the era
of the third millennium?
At this point our minds draw a blank. Beyond the cosmic magic
of numbers, we have difficulty defining what the significance of the
millennium is. What is it the millennium of? Everyone knows it is
the third millennium of the birth of Christ, but how are we to
regard a date whose principal validity is confined to Christians?
What is the significance of the third millennium for a world that
has politely altered the Christian demarcations of B.c. and a.d. to
become “Before the Common Era” and the “Common Era”? Can
we celebrate the third millennium of our common era? No wonder
we sense the hollowness lurking behind the contrived jubilations.
Are we to toast the arrival of the third millennium of universal
calendar convenience? This is surely a utilitarian cleansing of the
magic of numbers. But then we are struck by an odd realization.
Despite the most single-minded efforts to evacuate all Christian
reference from our periodization, we still live in a historical time
that is structured by the advent of Christ. Without noticing it, we
live in an anonymously Christian world, a world that is perhaps
more pervasively Christian by virtue of its very anonymity.
These are rather strange suggestions, but I hope to show in this
book that they are not as far-fetched as they appear at first glance.
On the contrary, they point us toward the central meaning of
the millennium we celebrate. We do, after all, need some starting