Agnology - a study in human ignorance

The satirist occupies an unenviable position. His vocation sets him at odds with popular opinion; his literary appetite is satisfied only when it has managed to devour some new progressive ideal and then regurgitate it in front of a disgusted audience. He is like the little boy in the fable who points out that the emperor is parading through town stark naked; one imagines that very few of the townspeople were too pleased or comfortable with the little boy and his revelation. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish priest and king of English satire, had his own naked emperor in view: modernism—particularly the scientific modernism of the Baconian project.

A Vile Dystopian Stench

Swift’s age saw the remarkable rise of modern science, which took on an almost religious quality. Francis Bacon’s scientific project, stated in his New Organon and New Atlantis, allowed the scientist to assume—quite literally at times—a priestly mantle. Bacon’s Atlantean fictional utopia was ruled by a class of ruler-scientists called “Solomon’s House.” This hopeful vision for the future of Europe was in many ways “the imaginative forerunner of the Royal Society” founded in 1660, as Ronald Knowles argues. The West at the turn of the 18th century was nothing if not enthusiastic and optimistic about the possibilities of science as the new panacea for the world’s ills.

This, of course, was an open invitation for a satirist like Swift. His crowning work, Gulliver’s Travels, is an extended critique of the Enlightenment. Particularly in his third part—Gulliver’s stay in Laputa, Balnibarbi, and Glubbdubdrib —Swift draws out several clear parodies of the scientific spirit of his time. Many critics have argued that this section of the work is Swift’s weakest, as it is his most obvious and least-engrossing satire. The merits of this argument go beyond our present scope, but the satirical transparency of the Laputan journey will at the very least aid in ease of analysis.

In 1969—what some consider the high-watermark of modernism --sociologist Peter Berger wrote, “we have come a long way from the gods and from the angels. The breaches of this-worldly reality which these mighty figures embodied have increasingly vanished from our consciousness as serious possibilities.” But not yet entirely, Berger allowed. He went on to tell of a priest working in the slums of a European city who was asked why he continued to work in such a place. The priest gave the answer: “So that the rumor of God may not disappear completely.” Of course, one might argue this rumor of the supernatural was one of the worst-kept secrets of the modern age. In fact, the observations of supernaturalists like Waugh, Greene, and Percy amount ultimately to a very simple conclusion: God is there, and He is not silent.

This simple statement of dogma carries with it a malicious whisper, though: if God is there, if He is not silent, what will He say concerning our modern project? He has cast down towers before. He has babbled tongues and afflicted kings with plagues, madness, and worms of the stomach. Apparently, He is a God who works His judgment in life as well as death. Is there cause to fear? Will we be judged?

The particular geniuses of Waugh, Greene, and Percy can sometimes be lost on some readers for the simple reason that their worlds often seem devoid of hope. Of course, very few Old Testament prophets were honored with ticker tape parades. But each novelist, in some ironic way, does offer some cause for hope.

Modernism would have us distrust all authority not contained in the individual conscience or the State magisterium. But all three novelists would have us turn instinctively to the Church [for authority]. For them, the rituals, the transcendent morality, and the sacraments which the Church offers are the means by which the West can escape the floodwaters rising on all sides. The material “things” and blessings which the Church has the authority to dispense are Christ to the world. The service of its ministers, the food and drink of its table, the waters of its baptismal fonts—all these things are the Son of God made flesh. Even Graham Greene during his darkest years of apostasy retained an instinctual trust in the elements of the Eucharist.

This trust in the incarnate, bodily nature of faith is not something reserved only for Roman Catholics, however. Evelyn Waugh, as traditional a Catholic as he was, allowed that the nature of modernism had realigned the battle-lines so that the fight was no longer between Protestant and Catholic, but between Christianity and chaos. The total breakdown of historic morality and aesthetics is all that can be expected when “the supernatural basis” upon which they rest have been denied for so long. The Protestant and the Catholic both have a moral imperative to proclaim the incarnate Word to a world which has become blind to the divine glory which surrounds it.