A Tale of Three "Isms"
Is this “tale of three isms” just a fortuitous merging of interesting philosophical or religious streams of thought that Christian’s should understand? Or are we witnessing a powerful urge to reconstruct the world that existed long before the sway of the Biblical worldview? Is the threat of secular humanism not a brand-new system of religious thought but rather a modern embrace of the ancient spirituality of the pre-Christian world? Has the reconstruction prepared by the deconstructive effects of postmodernism led to a revival of the age-old religions of Gnosticism and polytheism? Certainly this deeply religious occurrence explains many of the surface changes in cultural ethical norms, for example, in marriage, childbirth, and sexual expression. These changes are not driven simply by Hollywood producers who push the envelope for box-office success. They are the inevitable results of a radical reinterpretation of the very nature of human existence. We can reasonably speak of the recent appearance of a pagan “apocalyptic” worldview that now claims to the spiritual culmination of the long flow of Western history.
This is indeed the vision of the brilliant pagan philosopher Richad Tarnas. He senses the arrival of a “powerful crescendo” as “many movements gather now on the intellectual stage as if for some kind of climatic synthesis.”
In Tarna’s vast view:
Platonic and Presocratic philosophy, Hermeticism, mythology, the mystery religions, … Buddhist and Hindu, … Gnosticism and the major esoteric traditions, and …. Neolithic European and Native American spiritual traditions … have re-emerged to play new roles in the current intellectual scene … for some kind of climatic synthesis. … A powerful crescendo can be sensed … uttered by the West’s great thinkers and visionaries concerning an imminent shift in the ages.
This syncretistic view certainly included Gnosticism and polytheism. And now the occultic mystical Romantics of the present time have come out of left field to include modernity and postmodernity in their unifying vision. Ken Wilber, another powerful thinker in today’s monist camp, states that “the Enlightenment did not fail but is merely incomplete.” He congratulates the modernists for having pioneered the achievement of “autonomy” – autonomy from what he does not say, but it is clearly autonomy from God the Creator, now considered an ancient, unbelievable myth. And now he invites them to go deeper into a holistic, religious understanding of everything. In the same way, Tarnas find a place for postmodernism, explicitly arguing this this “imaginal intuition” of contemporary holistic spirituality “incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it.” Both Wilber and Tarnas see autonomous modernity, and its offspring, postmodernity, as necessary steps in the evolution of consciousness, leading humanity out of dependence on a “pre-rational, anthropomorphic, mythic God figure” (that is the transcendent Creator God of Scripture, for whom they have no place in the synthesis) into a freeing union of the self with spiritualized nature.
These influential authors, and many faculty in higher education, argue that ultimate authority will come from the “primordial tradition” showing us our place in nature. In other words, ultimate authority will arise from the pagan Perennial Philosophy. In 1982, the American Humanist Association, understood that his new religious movement should be promoted in the classroom, they write:
The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of … divinity in every human being. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity … and the new faith of humanism.
At the end of his massive work The Passion of the Western Mind, Tarnas concludes, with the eloquence of a scholar and the ardor of a believer: “For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being.”
Before we move on:
- How are changes in cultural ethical norms a reflection of the growing power of polytheism to reconstruct the world once postmodernism has deconstructed it?