Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Der Gottlose der Modern; 3 Typen; Akademie, Markplatz, Politiker

Kurzinhalt: It reveals two types of the godless man. First ... Academy ... Marketplace

Textausschnitt: 86b Given the exigencies of space, I must now rise, more reluctantly than Dr. Johnson, to the "grandeur of generality" and state a proposition with regard to the modern age. It reveals two types of the godless man. First, there is the godless man of the Academy, the bearer of the aristocratic atheism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The dynamic behind his atheism was the will to understand and explain the world without God, meaning by "world," nature, man, history, society. Second, there was the godless man of the Marketplace, the bearer of the bourgeois atheism of the nineteenth century. The dynamic behind his atheism was simply the will to prosper in the world without God. (Fs)

86c I hasten to add that this is much too simple a view of the historical matter. It leaves out, for instance, the whole political dimension. The aristocratic atheism of the French Enlightenment also embodied a political will. The attack on religion-more exactly, on the Catholic faith and on the statute of the Church in public life-had as one of its important purposes to undermine the status of the king, to clear the way for a direct attack on the absolute monarchy, which was supported by the authority of the Church. Similarly, a political will lay behind the bourgeois atheism of the nineteenth century. Across its hostility to religion ran the intention of eradicating the remnants of feudalism-the power of the Restoration monarchies, the privileges of the nobility, the wealth of the great landowners-which, again, stood in close relation to the ecclesiastical order. In the seventeenth and eighteenth and even in the nineteenth centuries, you could not touch religion without touching politics and vise versa-just as then and later you could not touch metaphysics without touching religion. Upon the dissolution of the fragile and impermanent medieval synthesis, there had supervened a vast confusion of disciplines of thought and realms of action. In a lamentable way the history of modern atheism is intertwined with the history of the modern liberties, as they were called. Perhaps it need not have been so, but so it was. In any case, the political dimension of the problem of atheism is too complicated for any brief investigation. Furthermore, it is, I believe, adventitious, the product of contingent historical circumstances. It does not illuminate the basic problem which is essentially of the religious and intellectual order. If there had never been a union of throne and altar, the godless man of modernity would have arisen anyway. (Fs) (notabene)