This point touches on a line of tension that runs through a lot of my own writing. I’m a Catholic writer who often criticizes the decadence of the late modern world and urges it to rediscover dynamism and ambition. But if techno-capitalist ambitions are fundamentally Faustian, should a Catholic observer (or anyone else with similar commitments) really wish for them to rise again? In the Bible, after all, Promethean dreams are not always treated kindly: It’s the serpent who promises forbidden knowledge, the bloody-handed Cain who founds the first city, the builders of Babel who are scattered to the winds. Maybe the Promethean spirit in America needs to be exorcised, not revived.
This critique has been raised against both my political and personal writings. Here is Patrick Deneen’s review of “The Decadent Society” for an example of the former sort of criticism (you can read my response here). Maybe more strikingly, here are some comments from Noah Millman on my memoir about chronic illness, “The Deep Places,” which run along similar lines.
A large part of that memoir is concerned with the sheer effort involved in trying to get better from a mystery illness, the trying and trying and trying yet again, the self-doctoring and experimentation, the mad-scientist aspect of the whole experience. And Millman — who is generous to the book — comes away wondering if, despite the Christian elements in my story, the faith it really displays is more “fundamentally Promethean, a belief in the human ability to understand and overcome the material constraints of our world,” which is in some ways a “surprising place for a serious Christian to end up.”
I think it is a little surprising if you consider Christianity to be a religion exclusively concerned with bearing suffering in the present for the sake of the hereafter. But in fact, the — yes — dynamism of Christian cultures has usually reflected the working-through of the tensions between that conception of the faith — call it ascetic, monastic, quietist, Mennonite — and the equally powerful conception of Christianity as a religion of repair, reform, healing, revolution. Which, I would suggest, is also a tension woven throughout the Old and New Testaments alike, which present both a fallen world to be patiently endured and a fertile world that can be mastered and transformed.
The serpent gives Eve and Adam some sort of forbidden knowledge, yes — but it’s before that Fall, not afterward, that God tells humanity to fill the Earth and subdue it, and when Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden that mission carries on, just freighted with more suffering and pain. (As in Eden, so in Arizona.)