Eyes of Mud and Spit — A Study in the History of the Divided Religious Mind (II)
“For we never have naked and empty symbols, except when our ingratitude and wickedness hinder the working of divine beneficence.”
John Calvin
II — The Saeculum and the Religio — The Triumph and Dividing of Christian Society
Introduction
In a recent interview historian Tom Holland, who has written much about the history of Christianity, was asked how he relates to it personally. He responded that his own view of faith often resembles those magic eye images that can look like a rabbit or a duck: sometimes he is inclined to believe wholeheartedly, sometimes it seems to be unavoidably untrue.
This inability to exist seamlessly in a landscape of religious belief is one that defines the religious attitudes of much of the modern world. We seem to exist between fundamentalism or atheism in a kind of space of listless apathy, grazing on spirituality or quasi-religious worldviews to fill a vacuum we don’t seem to entirely know how to make sense of.
Some time in the early eighth century the ecclesiastical scholar Bede wrote an account of the life of St Cuthbert. In it Bede recounts miraculous stories of the deeply renowned saint, written apparently from witness testimonies drawn by Bede first hand. For Bede, and indeed for most of this era, the idea of the miraculous was not some sensational proof demanding claim but a seamless part of the world.
Between these spheres of the miraculous religious world and the divided religious mind lies a history we have come to narrativise through an enlightenment myth of progress. In this myth we move from a primitive past, a “dark ages”, in which the triumphs of the world of Greek philosophy were snubbed in favour of superstition until enlightenment intellectuals appeared and so dawned the world of secular science, renewed religion-free philosophy and the flourishing modern world we take for granted.
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