The Passing of Old Certainties

A few weeks ago, on our way back to Canada, I was driving through the rolling plains and hills of Michigan and Wisconsin and through long stretches, gigantic expanses of field and fen - water alternately clear and blue and green - ancient trees bending over me toward the sky - restless waters again - the horizon expanding as I stepped on the pedal - and seemingly endless miles once more.

We felt literally dwarfed by the enormity of God’s world. We did not need to lift our eyes to the skies or consider the heavens: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”  (Psalm 8:3,4). Earth alone seemed almost threateningly, impersonally overwhelming.

In a world so big and we so small, we have always sought comfort in certainties - things that are assumed to be always or almost always true. In our Western nations, ever since Christ and His Kingdom triumphed over the pagan glory that was Greece and the pagan grandeur that was Rome, these certainties were taken to mean a certain Christian way of life and morals, a Christian consensus to society and a broadly Christian way of doing things (even though society has always had non-believers, heretics and atheists).

We realized during our Christian centuries that under the unfathomable Wisdom of God, there are seemingly very small realities around us that are invested with the veritable weight of eternity - our family relationships, friends who are forever, love that binds man and woman, altruistic love (i.e. love that considers the welfare of the other more important than that of one’s own) and the unassuming aid of a neighbour. These “small” but weighty realities acted as a counterweight to the feeling of helplessness that we would otherwise feel when confronted with an apparently indifferent and enormous universe. Eternity was near us - and bigger than the stars.

For societies in historically Christian nations, there was the comfort of communities usually banding together for Baptisms, Weddings, Easter, Christmas, Funerals. Believer and non-believer alike felt obligated to partake in something that was assumed to be old and solid and unshakeable as the hills.

This was no golden age or time - just a different age, still recognizable to the elders amongst us.

The present, unsettling passing of historical assumptions and certainties will be seen as one of the chief defining characteristics of our time.

Literally none of the old certainties and comforts can be assumed to remain - family, friends, society, Church, community, even the unalterable nature of gender or the pursuit of scientific truth. In the pagan society that has replaced the historical Christian civilization of the West, a pervasive sense of futility and helplessness has taken hold and made our people feel at the mercy once more (as pagan societies still do) of the elements, the impersonal universe and random world events. A paralyzing emptiness haunts both our homes and our halls of government.

There is no doubt that this is an unprecedented crisis for our civilization (even secular historians are not in disagreement about this) - and it is unclear whether we will ever recover from the accelerated decline of the last sixty or seventy years.

But there have been similar crises of faith before in our Western nations with similar questioning of assumptions and somewhat similar questioning of certainties (but never approaching the breath and depth of the present abyss).

The Victorian era (19th Century Britain), fresh out of the convulsions of the era of the enlightenment and the reactionary Romantics, believed that progress was inevitable and that optimism in the destiny of man must be the order of the day. In most of this brilliant and remarkable era of progress for mankind (encompassing the discovery of electricity, the steam engine, the railways, the postage stamp, antisepsis, anesthesia etc. etc.), it was unconsciously assumed that the old certainties of God, faith, family, friends and fundamental Christian values would remain forever.

The first blows upon this citadel of Victorian faith came with the exhausting and bloody wars (including the very destructive Crimean war) of empire that Britain fought - usually by choice, sometimes out of self-defence. These forays and thrusts into the certain assumptions of the Victorians were like the initial probing of an army by reconnaissance missions - they caused no more than shallow cracks in the citadel, easily patched up and repaired.

And then came “The Descent of Man” - and Darwin’s challenge to such foundational assumptions as the Biblical account of the fall of man. In Darwin’s world, there was never a time where man walked with God, never a world where the disobedience and fall of man inaugurated the very imperfect world that we have inherited. And if man never did fall, then man did not need a Saviour. The Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection were thus also being challenged - and with this, the pillars and cornerstone of the Christian civilization.

Darwin and his followers were like thunderbolts flung with ferocious intensity upon the certainties of the Victorians.

The poetry of the Victorian era reflects this age of doubt. Tennyson writes tersely and movingly in “In Memoriam” of the seeming disparity between a loving God and a world, “red in tooth and claw.”

And in “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold calls his bride to the window of their hotel room (or home) that looks out upon the cliffs of Dover. It is a clear night and the diminutive lights of the French shore opposite could be seen in the distance, as they still can be seen on clear nights today.

For those of my readers not familiar with the English coastal town of Dover, one picture of the limestone cliffs will undoubtedly serve better than the proverbial thousand words:

Matthew Arnold’s poem that speaks of the age of doubt follows:

DOVER BEACH

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

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.

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.

My readers will note in the last stanza of the poem, that even in the very throes and depths of despair and doubt, there is a clarion call to the old reality and certainty of love - Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!

The Christian is an optimist - since Christ is the eternal “Yes.”  The Christian has also taken hold of the certainty that whilst events and phenomena and the unfeeling universe may seem overwhelming and have the intermediate word, Christ will always have the last word.

And as the unknown author states in “Desiderata:” “no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

The Gospel of Grace allows for a loss of faith - our faith. But He never loses His faith in us - else He would not have gone to the Cross for us; or given us life everlasting through His Resurrection.