Why is it that we moderns are so confused about the sources of our identity? We cannot decide whether we are essentially bodies, and must obey the dictates of our biology, or whether our bodies are simply vehicles which we can use or abuse, as though nothing our body does really touched us.
The modern self is a solitary and solipsistic being. It regards itself as the only real thing, and is determined not to be interrupted and inconvenienced by anything or anyone not itself. The Christian tradition calls this attitude ‘gnosticism’. This is the belief that I am solely my mind, and that I am trapped in my body, and in this world. It asserts that my mind can know the world, and other people, entirely without their aid and begin to extract itself from the limits they represent. Gnosticism is a panicked attempt to escape my past, my present situatedness, and all the plurality and ambiguity of life. It views embodiedness as entanglement and misfortune. It is a permanent temptation to believe that we are to remove ourselves from what it regards as the entangling, disgusting materiality and complications of this world and set ourselves above them.
Modernity is not simply a new phenomenon. It is also a timeless temptation. But it is only properly identified as this by the Church disciplined by the full gospel. The whole Christian tradition is our very own corporate memory. From this bank of resources constituted of all previous Christian experience, we may select parallels to our present experience. From these parallels we can see the range of options open to us for dealing with the challenges of our situation. If we have less memory, we have fewer resources by which to understand our circumstances and fewer options for dealing with them. The grace of God provides us with these resources for the very purpose that we grow through them and are empowered by them. The Christian life and teaching is the grace of God mediated through the experience of previous generations of Christians. It allows to us grow and become a holy people, able to hold out to our society what it cannot receive from any other source.
The whole surrounding culture of modernity is a flight from embodiedness and situatedness. Without the Christian gospel mediated through the Christian life and teaching, our culture is obliged to construct for itself what it refuses to accept from God. It is under a harsh law, entirely self-imposed. Unable to receive its shaping with gratitude, it is then only able to perceive others as a threat. This appears in its belief that all previous experience is rendered redundant by time, and its insistence that we abandon our experience and we flee whatever we identify as ‘the past’.
No Lack of Love – the Fulcrum sermons of Oliver O’Donovan
