The famous Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin argued that a process of cultural convergence would lead the human species into a single interthinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought or “noosphere”. As Julian Huxley explained it in 1959: “Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called ‘point Omega‘, as opposed to the Alpha of elementary particles and their energies.” Chardin’s theological take on this was that humanity would ultimately merge with the Divine, an idea that generated much controversy.

The early twentieth century, even before the horrors of World War 1, experienced a crisis of identity and of culture generally. For Paul’s essay on this age of anxiety see attached file from my website dpcrook.wordpress. com.

Cultural Crisis in the West

Dorothy Sayers played down the deadly sin of Lust, which she saw as much less important than the Six Other Sins (such as Greed, Avarice and Envy, the “respectable sins”}. Too many people laboured under the delusion that for Christians matter and the body were evil: “For this misapprehension, St. Paul must bear some blame, St. Augustine of Hippo a good deal more, and Calvin a very great deal. But so long as the Church continues to teach the manhood of God and to celebrate the sacraments of the Eucharist and marriage, no living person should dare to say that matter and body are not sacred to her. She must insist strongly that the whole material universe is an expression and incarnation of the creative energy of God… For that reason, all good and creative handling of the material universe is holy and beautiful, and all abuse of the material universe is a crucifixion of the body of Christ”.

[Creed or Chaos, 1947]

“If man’s fulfillment of his nature is to be found in the full expression of his divine creativeness, then we urgently need a Christian doctrine of work, which shall provide not only for proper conditions of employment, but also that the work shall be such as a person may do with their whole heart, and that they shall do it for the very work’s sake. But we cannot expect a sacramental attitude to work, while many people are forced, by our evil standard of value, to do work which is a spiritual degradation – for example, a long series of financial trickeries or the manufacture of vulgar and useless trivialities”:

[Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos, 1949]

“It would not perhaps be altogether surprising if, in this nominally Christian country, where the Creeds are daily recited, there were a number of people who knew all about Christian doctrine and disliked it. It is more startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what it is…. they simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting, and so dramatic can be the orthodox Creed of the Church”:

[Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos, 1949]

In an attack on the materialistic culture produced by capitalism, Dorothy Sayers wrote:

“It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise…. It has become a swaggering, swashbuckling,piratical sin… its war-cries are ‘Business Efficiency, ‘Free Competition’,’Get Out or Get Under!’ and ‘There’s always room at the Top!… it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way, it takes risks…”

[Creed or Chaos, 1947]

Prediction of the GFC?

Catherine Kenny observed that “the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers demonstrate the curious affinity between detection and a belief system which holds that there is something fundamentally amiss in human relations  [or as Sayers said in Creed or Chaos], ‘that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality'”

Catherine Kenney (2013).

“An extreme version of one of the basic tendencies in modern life, Judas’s total self-absorption represents the fearful consequences of making man the centre and measure of all things” [Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, 2013, p. 239].

Look around for yourself. Isn’t self-absorption (often leading to outright narcissism) so marked, so representative, of the world around us?

My next essay will be on Dorothy Sayers.

Charles Raven, an eminent naturalist and leading Christian writer, said this:

“There has been…a general tendency in Christian thought to regard nature and the natural order, if not as inherently evil, at least as spiritually meaningless… The Catholic anchorite, for whom natural beauty was a snare of the devil, and his Puritan brother, for whom the world was at best a vale of tears. join hands here” [Creator Spirit, 1927].