Note about these notes
I thought of these things and then wrote them down because like many Catholics I wanted to reconcile the Church with the modern world without harming the Church’s essence. I wanted reconciliation without either blunt resistance (perhaps best represented by the stance of St. Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors—considered as a kind of apex of counter-reformation “fortress Catholicism”—if not its literal statements) or mushy compromise (perhaps best represented by the theological journal Concilium, the very name of which evokes a conciliation to the worst of the modern world’s errors).
Periodization of time
But in order to try to effect this reconciliation, I first had to determine what “the modern world” actually is—that is, what is it, if anything, that distinguishes it from the pre-modern world.
The difficulty of this is that, like any other “world” (like any worldview) the modern world tends to present itself as normal, neutral, “just the way things are.”
So it is best understood not in itself (indeed, it cannot be understood simply in itself) but in contrast to something else.
The best way to understand the modern world is to compare it with the world which came before it: the pre-modern world.
Reading about the pre-modern world, I came to see the sensibility of the traditional division of the pre-modern period into two further periods: ancient and medieval.
To me, reality seems most accurately reflected by the conventional division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods.
This is because it seems to me that there have only been two times in recorded history in which almost everything about human life changed in a radical way, such that the worlds before and after, in each case, were almost unrecognizable:1
The transition from the ancient to the medieval period. See, as an example of this infinite contrast between ancient and medieval poetically expressed in the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus.
The transition from the medieval to the modern period.2
What caused the first transition? Christ.
What caused the second transition?
To discover what caused the shift from the medieval to the modern period I had to consider the most obvious difference between that time and our own.
The most cursory analysis of the medieval period shows that Christ was absolutely central to it. Virtually everything was at least nominally Christian. Jesus Christ was not only the living substance of the medieval European civilization, He was also its foundation and its highest collective and individual goal.
Yet somehow, Jesus seems almost totally absent from modernity, to the point where most people in the most “modern” nations are almost completely secular—either indifferent to God or hostile to Him.
This could not have simply happened by accident, any more than a husband could forget his wife or a mother forget her children.3
Again: Christendom had been founded on Christ and as a civilization its highest and ultimate end was to perpetually effect a more perfect union between human beings and God. How could that society have lost sight of such a clear purpose?
My own conclusion is that, because it could not have simply been forgotten, it must have been willfully erased.
If we assume that Christ really is the Truth,4 then it seems that we must say that the transition from medieval to modern and its erasure of Christ was not accidental, but intentional. We can say that it was caused by the antichrist.
By “antichrist” I mean that spirit which leads to a systematic and near-total denial/erasure of the Son of God.5 Whatever factor it is that leads to a denial that God entered history as a human being.
Modernity presents atheism as the default position. But if Christ is Truth incarnate, then modernity’s stance is not neutral, but actively hostile to Christianity.
If modernity is nothing more than a movement against God, then it should be cured by nothing more than the reverse of sin, a movement towards God (repentance).
Yet although many people in the modern world try to move toward God, it seems like comparatively few people are able to reach Him.
In fact, the people who try their hardest to move toward Him (while either ignoring modernity or rejecting it completely) seem to end up becoming more corrupt than those who simply succumb to the world (who simply succumb to modernity).6
For some Catholics, the obvious solution to modernity is to force a return to the medieval period. But so far, this has not borne fruit. Why not?
I think that the answer is that there is some good in modernity which even until now has not been incorporated into the Church.
I think that the essence of this good is self-consciousness.
But now I think I have set things up well enough to go into the notes themselves:
Triads
The ancient mind was not conscious that its Dionysus/Bacchus was a “natural type” of Christ.78 The medieval mind was pristinely conscious of Christ (but not of itself). The modern mind is self-conscious, but it hates the self of which it is conscious just as intensely as it denies Christ (thus its structuring archetypal figure is antichrist).
Sophocles' Oedipus is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense (obscure latent consciousness) but in the literal sense that he simply does not know that he is killing his father and marrying his mother. The tragedy is that fate has crushed him through no fault of his own.9 Christ was and is always perfectly conscious of the will of the father and obedient to it (and it is this unswerving devotion which Christians attempt to emulate). Hamlet is self-conscious to the point of paralysis (and, famously, hates himself to the point of contemplating suicide).
I align Socrates with the unconscious (perhaps at first a puzzling choice for the first philosopher) for two reasons:
The motive force of his own life was radically unknown to him. He obeyed a spirit (his “daemon”) about which he knew next to nothing.
His greatest wisdom (the greatest wisdom of antiquity—echoed in Solomon’s pious despair over the futility of human knowledge10) was, famously, that he knew that he knew nothing. And again, this wisdom was not primarily the issue of any rational analysis or even a particularly well-developed common sense (although of course he possessed both, befitting his attic arete). Rather, it came from the Delphic Oracle.11
With respect to consciousness, St. Thomas corresponds to pure “objective” consciousness, the subject reaching out to comprehend the external object with no (practical) awareness or consideration of itself. No thinker is more clear-minded, more penetrating, more neutral, yet no thinker is less psychological, less reflexive.12
For Hegel, self-consciousness is God (the Absolute). This is insightful (there are deep truths in Hegel’s analyses of history and consciousness—too many brilliant thinkers have been captivated by his ideas for this to be untrue) but also deeply diabolical inasmuch as, under Hegel’s system, the self is elevated to godhood (thus Hegel is entangled with pride, the greatest and most deadly sin).
In this way Hegel perfectly models the deeply ambiguous contributions of modernity to consciousness:
Two distinctive characteristics of modernity
Rejection of Christ (bad)
Self-consciousness (good)
1. Rejection of Christ
In one sense, the modern world is the worst world possible, because, having known Christ, it has nevertheless chosen to reject Him.
It is evil even in secular terms, because it has chosen to reject what it had formerly recognized as its highest principle and source of goodness.
I am of course not claiming that each individual modern subject rejects Christ, even unconsciously. Only that the modern world, as a whole (coming as it did after a world which had received and accepted the Truth) has to have rejected Christ constitutively—just in order to have come into existence as the kind of world which it is (a world in which God is almost totally absent from public and private life). If this were not true, Christ would still be the center and foundation of our civilization (again: it is absurd to pretend that we could have just forgotten Him).
Our situation recalls the parable of the “well-ordered house” from the Gospel of Matthew. The ancient world was a like a man possessed by a single demon. Christ exorcised this demon and set the man’s “house” (his soul) in order.
Yet:
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:43-45)
On the spiritual plane, the collapse of Christendom resulted in evils worse than any which had existed prior to its existence.
For example: pagans are far easier to convert than the inhabitants of a collapsed Christian civilization (whole nations were converted to Christ in the transition to the medieval period, whereas this is almost unimaginable in modern secular nations),13 because the latter civilization has in some sense sinned against the Holy Spirit. This is also why despair (the greatest sin against the Holy Spirit) is so predominant in the art and philosophy of modernity14 (and why the tenor and tone of both are so unremittingly gloomy and morbid).
But modernity is not just pure evil.15 It has more than a purely negative content; modernity is more than just Christendom without Christ, there is more to our historical epoch than the mere denial of Christ.
In order to get Medieval Christendom to abandon God, it was necessary to “bait the lure” with some morsels of truth. Thus along with great evil, there is also great goodness in modernity: truths (albeit merely natural truths)16 of which the medieval mind had no knowledge.
Because of this, we cannot simply turn back time; the “traditionalist” Catholic solution to modernity (which the Church herself attempted) of forcibly regressing to the medieval period just will not work,17 and because such a measure involves the willful denial of truth as it exists in consciousness, it is in fact worse than other attempts to reconcile the Church with the world (such as the far more popular—but equally false—solution of a total compromise with modernity).18 When it comes to the real intellectual goods that modernity has given us, you just cannot put the cat back in the bag. Doing so actually ends up destroying the soul, because it corrupts the conscience. Pretending “not to know” what one has irrevocably learned is just another sin against the Holy Spirit.
So if the negative aspect of our time is antichrist, then what positive content, if any, does modernity possess?
2. Self-consciousness
The positive component of modernity is self-consciousness. This does not strictly refer to an individual’s consciousness of him or herself (although this is the purest self-consciousness). It can be humanity’s consciousness of itself, one nation’s consciousness of itself, one people’s consciousness of itself, etc.
The persistent (apparent) chauvinism of the ancient and medieval mind (on every level) is one of the clearest examples of this lack of self-consciousness—and by extension, its relative absence among “modern” minds is a guidepost towards what we possess which our predecessors lacked.
Self-consciousness emerges out of “purely objective” consciousness and thus it must first pass through the subjectivity of the other before it returns to the self. The medieval pure consciousness had to pass through the other before it could come to a greater understanding of the self (before it could become truly modern).
We can see this process in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.19
What is most important in Chaucer’s story is the ending. To briefly summarize the story: a Knight has become married (against his will) to an ugly witch. Sensing his unhappiness, the witch gives the Knight the choice of having her be ugly but virtuous or beautiful but unfaithful.
The key moment in Chaucer’s story is when the Knight (the first psychoanalyst)20 flips the Witch’s question around and asks her what it is that she wants.
The Knight’s asking, not the witch’s answer (she becomes both beautiful and virtuous—expressing in confused mythical, dreamlike form the goodness of truth which comes from the consciousness of others as independent subjects), is the most important moment, because it involves a concrete acknowledgment and thus awareness of the other as a separate person with a free consciousness of their own.
In Hamlet (a couple centuries later) we have progressed from consciousness of other as self (acknowledgement of the subjectivity of another) to self-consciousness proper.
Yet this awareness of self is associated with hatred (Hamlet’s “melancholy” is a paralysis caused by self-hatred) for reasons we will discuss later. Hamlet hates both mankind (“Yet what, to me, is this quintessence of dust?”) and himself (“… to be or not to be… ”).
This appearance of self-consciousness in poetry precedes its emergence in philosophy. A general maxim: Poetry expresses the same reality as philosophy, only much sooner and on a level below rational consciousness/conscious awareness.21
In philosophy, self-consciousness yields new truths about history (Hegel) and human society (Marx) before it finally arrives at truths about the individual person (Freud).22
It moves from abstract, external, and objective to concrete, intimate, and subjective because self-consciousness is the result of a movement from objectivity to subjectivity, gradually bringing the “stance” of objectivity into subjectivity itself.
So what is the substance of self-consciousness itself? What are some of the truths it brings us? It is Hegel showing that human history and the unfolding of human thought both have a certain logic, a certain necessity and structure to their development. It is Marx showing that capital has an “automatic” influence on human societies;23 it is Freud showing that even in our waking life there is some influence from the unconscious mind. Marx and Freud are hidden in Hegel, and all our modern critical theories (the figures in whose shadow we all live) are hidden in some combination of these three thinkers.
Typically these ideologies are all marshaled against the Church. In history the Church vehemently rejected all of them (not without good cause!). But there are important truths which these theories make accessible to mankind, even if we must proceed with extreme caution when extracting them—Hegel accepted completely is a kind of pantheism, Marx and Freud accepted completely involve a denial of free will and of human nature as a real, invariable substance. All three were atheists (or else they possessed a gravely deficient conception of God), all three explicitly denied the divinity of Christ.24 But these thinkers were not merely successful because they were atheists, but because they presented the world with truths which the Church had not discovered: truths about history, society, and the soul.25
In modernity mankind has become conscious about certain natural truths about himself: truths about his history, his political communities, and his very soul (on the level of nature).26 We are still living in the fallout of these dangerous ideas. Until they are brought into the Church—until the truths in them are refined from the dross of satanic error which surrounds them and until those natural truths are incorporated into the edifice of eternal, supernatural Truth, these theories and all the similar specters which they have begotten will continue to haunt and corrupt mankind.
Self-hatred
In his De Trinitate, Augustine uses several analogies of the human soul in an attempt to describe something of the Holy Trinity. In one such analogy, He likens the persons of the Trinity to the mind, its knowledge of itself, and the love it bears for that knowledge.
Reasoning backward from this analogy, a person’s self-image is the “natural” image of Christ in the soul.
Thus self-hatred is the image or expression of the spirit of the antichrist in the soul (on the level of nature).27
As the convergence of the two modern characteristics (antichrist and self-consciousness), self-hatred is the distinctively modern phenomenon.
You cannot find self-hatred before modernity. Its absence is puzzling—unless or until you see that modernity is self-consciousness + antichrist.
This is why in the (largely pre-modern) Catholic tradition one will not find many exhortations to love oneself or reminders about human goodness as such.28 If I’m not mistaken, the customary argument for self-love in the tradition goes something like this:
“Love God and you will be loving yourself, because anyone who loves God becomes better.”
The tradition presents self-love as consisting of nothing other than a subject’s love for God, rather than as a precondition to loving God (which is probably what it is for many modern subjects).
I think that because modernity is marked by self-hatred (self-consciousness + antichrist), modern subjects first have to learn to stop hating themselves (even unconsciously) before they can be free to love God. Nature must be repaired before grace can work on it. Or rather, grace itself must first repair nature before it can elevate the soul to a state higher than nature (“grace builds on nature; it does not destroy it”).
Because this preparatory step was not necessary in the pre-modern world, you will never find such an exhortation (“love yourself”) in the tradition (at least not in the sense that many modern people need to hear it).
Rather, from the traditionalist perspective, it seems easy enough to reply that such an exhortation to self-love (which I propose is a measure one may take against the antichrist) is actually satanic: “Christ tell us to deny ourselves, not to love ourselves! St. Augustine says that sin is nothing other than inordinate self-love!” etc.
But this would be pseudo-medievalism, which as I hope I have shown is destructive, because it involves the willful denial of all the truths that self-consciousness has made known to us.
A way out of modernity: rightly-ordered self-love
Just as the Father's love comes to Christ (and returns to Him through Christ) and through Christ comes to all creation, so the love human beings give to the world has to come, in part, from a very primal love of self. A “natural” Christ must become present in the soul even before the supernatural Christ can dwell there—or at least, this repair of the natural Christ within the soul must occur before the soul can be fully supernaturally active.29
This exhortation may seem alien to the Catholic or Christian tradition because there was no hatred of self before modernity. It would have been obvious—mentions of self-love would have been as redundant and thus misplaced as exhortations to eat, drink, or breathe.30 Just as there was no denial of Christ before Christ, there was no natural image of the antichrist in the soul before there could be the fullness of the image of Christ there (only the saints of a Christian civilization ever truly 'loved themselves' as much as possible; this is implicit in their explicit and more primary love of God).
Brief Summary
The whole body of new truths which were discovered in modernity until now (almost all apart from the Church) has to be extricated or purged from the spirit of the antichrist and its various ill effects and incorporated more fully into the Church.
The essence of these new truths is self-consciousness, a new dimension to human knowledge which is essentially reflexive, subjective being considered as objective.
But self-consciousness emerged in history simultaneously with antichrist (with sin against the Holy Spirit—or in secular terms, bad conscience); these two currents converged in the distinctively modern phenomenon of self-hatred. So, in order to return to Christ, modern people generally have to re-learn how to love themselves. The more “modern” a person is, the more necessary this will be. People cannot love God if they do not first love themselves.
Addendum
To go even further, we might say that the corrective to modernity is self-will. At first, this may seem like an even more flagrant violation of tradition and moral reason than the earlier assertion. Self-will, after all, has been described as something like the essence of sin. But examining things closely, we can see that the sin of self-will is willing the self to the exclusion of God. And again, many modern subjects are frequently the victims of directly self-destructive tendencies. Of course, as long as there has been sin, there has been self-destruction (as the inevitable consequence and even, ultimately, the essence of all sin). But in some modern people the impulse against the self is so strong that it takes the form of direct self-harm, either psychological or physical.
The solution then, is not even rediscovery of the natural love of self, but the rediscovery of the will to live, even in the bare form of the simple refusal to die. But in order for this to become necessary, the situation must be very grave.
One could also argue that everything changed in the long, slow transition from prehistory to history proper. The problem is that, by definition, prehistory is not a part of history.
One could imagine a kind of tragic inversion of the story of the seven sleepers, in which seven scholastic monks are miraculously transported from the 13th century to our own (and scandalized, disgusted, saddened—perhaps even driven to despair.
Indeed, medieval Christendom rightly recognized that the supernatural bond between man and God, once established, is more important than any other social bond. See Luke 14:26.
Yet we need not make this assumption; it suffices to acknowledge that the medievals believed that He was.
1 John 4:2-3 “By this you will know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist…”
See the emerging schism in the United States, in which the traditionalists increasingly reject the authority or validity of the current Pope. The choice is between becoming like a demon (through pride) or becoming like an animal (through sensual lust and indifference). Again, these notes are an attempt to forge a path between the extreme poles of prideful traditionalist sedevacantism/reactionary medievalism on the one hand, and liberal indifference on the other.
“Why Dionysius (as the representative you propose as the structuring mythic figure proper to antiquity) and not, say, Apollo? Didn’t the Greeks consider him to be their national deity (whereas Dionysus, as they admitted, was a foreign God, possibly even their version of the Hindu Shiva)?
Respondeo: The act of positing an anthropomorphized mythical figure as the representation of one’s national identity is itself quite at odds with the clear-eyed, rational Apollonian spirit (which was always secondary in paganism, where it ever existed). Just as in dreams one is capable of some degree of fuzzy logic, even though the whole tissue of the experience is endlessly confused, emotional, and mysterious.
Also: by some etymological theories Dionysus’ name means either Son of the tree (itself recalling the Son, who was hung on a tree for the remission of the world’s sins) or even Son of God (!); Dion- comes from Zeus from whence we get Deus (God). Which itself comes from some proto-indo-european root which means something like “Sky Father.”
In short: because the Greeks’ whole life-world was unconscious (at least compared to the middle ages and modernity), their representative God, in retrospect, was the God of unconsciousness, of the freedom of dreamlike association (as Nietzsche recalls, western drama was born from the festivals of Dionysus) and the divine madness of drink, eroticism, etc.
N.b: This is not a subversive “Golden Bough” style argument to the effect that Christ is flattened into a myth. There are many obvious and enormous differences between Dionysus and Jesus Christ (namely that the latter name refers to a real person, the former to a mythological figure). I am simply arguing that Dionysus represented something in the dream of antiquity that obscurely foreknew Christ’s coming on the level of nature—the natural joy and life which Dionysus stood for was an unconscious foreknowledge of the supernatural joy and life which Christ really provides, really is.
Consider, for example, the confusion surrounding the epistemological status of the Greek Gods among their votaries. The common (and bafflingly unanswerable) question: Did the Greeks really believe in their Gods? On the one hand, they built temples, offered sacrifice, etc., but their belief is nothing like Christian faith; there was never a pagan creed, never any pagan heretics—pagan “theology” is almost an oxymoron, etc. I think that this is because (or at least that this shows that) the belief and devotion of the ancients were both unconscious, not necessarily in the strict psychoanalytic meaning of the term, but in the sense that they were devoid of the affect of consciousness, which we see in the aforementioned creeds, ecumenical councils, etc.—in short, which we observe in the whole historical practice of Christianity, culminating in St. Thomas. Not that St. Thomas is the greatest saint, only that he is most characteristic of his epoch’s intellectual consciousness and is furthest, in some sense, from all that has since happened to the “west” (former Christendom and its descendants), and thus especially instructive.
Kierkegaard somewhere makes the point that it is the ambiguity of Oedipus’ innocence that gives pagan drama its enduring attraction. That is, if he was wholly at fault or wholly innocent, the story would be uninteresting. It is the endlessly ambiguous question of how guilty he really is that gives the drama its power—in other words, the ultimate drama, even for the pagans, was the mystery of free will. This latent content (the pathos of free will) is exposed in historical Christendom and frequently repressed in modernity; either we are conscious materialists or effective materialists when we excuse all sins, all crimes as being merely psychological in origin—either way, we tend not to believe in free will.
Everything in Jerusalem (pure faith, supernatural knowledge) had its lesser counterpart in Athens (pure reason, natural knowledge). The two became united in Rome (and by extension, Medieval Europe). Other examples: Hercules and Samson. Theseus and King David. And so on.
See the Apology.
Even St. Augustine, that early master of consciousness (one of the earliest medieval thinkers) was not truly conscious of himself in the way that moderns are conscious of themselves. There are insights about the self, but they all strike the modern ear as finally somewhat external, objective, to the degree that they can even carry the illusory affect of pride. This says nothing about the quality or intensity of the charity in that Holy Doctor’s soul. It would be like blaming him for not having invented the steam-engine. One cannot leap from unconsciousness to self-consciousness in a single step. The mediation of pure consciousness is historically necessary.
The only places where this kind of mass-conversion has been possible in modernity has been in nations the consciousness of which (due to external oppression or other factors) is still essentially on the level of antiquity. I propose that, while it may be tempting for modern westerners to take refuge in, say, Africa’s incandescent Christianity, the fact remains that (for better or for worse), “we” remain a step ahead of “them” in history (just as our technology is more advanced)—and thus our failure to deal with modernity will only mean that they will eventually be afflicted by the same collapse of faith which destroyed medieval christendom.
Note that this is not a judgment directed towards races or individuals (and certainly not a statement of relative morality between peoples), but an attempt to be clear-sighted about historical factors in the lives of nations. Those whom great virtue and education have made “modern” (say, Cardinal Robert Sarah, whose parents were Guinean animists yet whose erudition certainly places him far beyond that of almost all native westerners)—such people are not arbitrarily excluded from taking part in the intellectual and spiritual development necessary to move Christianity forward in history.
And of course, I may be wrong. Perhaps the most Christian nations are not so excluded from history as I believe. I am not so confident as I may seem. Yet generally it seems as if it is better to act as if all depends on us.
See one of the latest modern deviations, anti-natalism, in which life itself is lucidly execrated as not worth living. It is hard to imagine a darker philosophy than this, which all but directly encourages suicide.
Indeed, as evil is only the privation of goodness, as the “anti-substance” which can only “exist” as a parasite on the good, “pure evil” cannot really exist.
The Church has always had the fullness of supernatural truth, although this deposit of faith must unfold over the centuries. But she makes no such claim to natural truths. Obviously science progresses over time.
In fact, it is so misguided that it can be somewhat ridiculous. See A Confederacy of Dunces.
Which answer is worse? One solution is more harmful “in itself” (prideful voluntarism is the greater evil), the other is more harmful “overall” (worldliness and indifference, though less evil in themselves, are far more common sins than prideful rigidity).
Note how closely this corresponds to the traditional or customary periodization of history. Chaucer’s death generally marks the transition point from “middle English” (medieval English) to Early modern English.
I am almost certainly unconsciously plagiarizing this insight, but I can’t say from whom.
This is because action always precedes thought. Even the act of thinking necessarily precedes the act of thinking about that thinking.
Incidentally, these three thinkers correspond to the three main sources of sin in the Christian tradition: the world, the flesh, and the devil (Marx, Freud, and Hegel respectively). I mention this to reiterate that there is not only great goodness, but great, even diabolical evil in modernity.
Marx’s whole insight expressed in a handful of (brilliant) words: “[Modern Capitalist Society] is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Hegel in his phenomenology (Christ, like everything else in history, was simply a momentary step in the self-unfolding/self-understanding of Absolute Spirit), Marx when he writes of religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature” (taking the Feuerbachian stance that religion is just the alienation of man’s own misery), Freud in his Moses and Monotheism and elsewhere.
Psychology = lit. “soul-words”
Psychology thus far has had nothing truthful to say about grace or the supernatural, although one of the psychoanalysts whom Lacan had wished to continue his school, Fanichelli (a very interesting yet sorely neglected psychoanalytic thinker), had begun to furtively dip his toes in the subject.
I specify “on the level of nature,” because this is disorder is a derivative reality of antichrist. Antichrist primarily works to separate man from Christ (hence the name!), but this separation itself causes a secondary, derivative separation within the soul which was once attuned to God. The medieval soul was oriented towards Christ. As it turned from Christ (a movement of hatred), this turn gradually became reflexive and led to a hatred of self. Just as grace builds on nature, sin destroys grace and nature.
That is, without any direct reference to God. Man is seen as good only insofar as he is made in God’s image. Man has no goodness apart from God. While these are both true and the spirit in which they were spoken was right in its time, that spirit may serve to harm modern people (not all truths should be uttered at all times—this is prudence), because unlike medievals (who never hated themselves) many of us have forgotten that we are not entirely evil; Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity or the psychological phenomenon of self-hatred are aberrations which could not have existed before or even during the relative reign of Christ on this earth (I say relative because Christians in the medieval period did not manage to live up to their own noble ideals).
Here it is probably worth saying with Pope Saint John Paul II that, while there may be some graduality in fallen man’s somewhat sluggish response to the law, there is no graduality in the law itself. I am not saying that we are so fallen that evil truly is goodness, but that it seems to me that modern subjects can be so disturbed and fallen that it may take a time for them to climb back even to the level of nature, let alone to rise above that into the order of grace.
The problem before modernity was loving oneself too much, really ultimately in the improper way, not in loving oneself too little. Moderns indeed love themselves in an improper way, but it is a different (in some sense opposite) improper way from that of the pre-moderns. Moderns often turn to the annihilation of distractions & diffusion as a means of escaping the misery that their self-hatred has engendered. Pre-moderns only turned to these things because they were not conscious that Christ could provide them with a much greater joy. Their sin simply failed, full stop (creatures cannot satisfy). Our sin fails to keep us from a greater evil (the psychic pain of self-hatred).