Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly: The Modern Religion of Conscience

Epilogue: The Shattered Mirror

Epilogue: The Shattered Mirror We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. — j a c k g i l b e r t It has become a commonplace in many philosophical, theological, and literary circles to depict the ‘modern subject’ as the self-conscious activity of self-assertion that issues in strategies of domination. The picture looks something like this: anchored in the (Cartesian) certitude that the only reliable thing is that which the subject presents to itself, the modern subject valorized its own self-objectification. Through this subjection of the object, in turn, the modern subject exercised mastery over everything that is other than itself: only that which is presented to consciousness by the subject’s own activity of representing objects can be present to self-consciousness. By means of such representation, the modern subject in effect transformed the world into its own image. Thereby, the modern subject pursued a path of (Baconian) self-enhancement, domesticating all forms of otherness through its (interrogating/negating) practices of representation. Wary of religious dogma and cant, as well as various forms of religious institutional exploitation , the modern subject exploited the contours of its own self-conscious 183 184 Epilogue: The Shattered Mirror representation to chart a path of emancipatory enlightenment. Guided by its self-legislated course, the modern subject sought to stave off the threat of encroachments of others to its own desires and inclinations. Although emerging from a reconsidered Christian heritage (in the shape of ‘Reformation ’), the modern subject drifted from its origins to become either nonChristian or anti-Christian. In its (Nietzschean) apogee, the modern subject swallowed up objectivity, not only by removing the barriers that Christianity erected to protect itself from Enlightenment, but also by eliminating that which is itself, independent of the parameters of self-consciousness— the killing of God. In this act, the modern subject transformed itself, turning against itself. Its enlightened respect for dignity metamorphosed into moral nihilism; its tempered skepticism, epistemological nihilism; its august valuing of the person, rampant totalitarianism. What was once humanism consonant with at least some of Christianity now became secular humanism incompatible with any recognized form of Christianity. The essays in this book have attempted to complicate this picture, which turns, tacitly, on the view that liberty consists in safeguarding individual expression against external threat. I have explored instead a movement within modernity whose thinking is reminiscent of St. Paul’s dictum that we fight against principalities. It construes the issue of liberty from the threat of various fanaticisms, both political and religious, as a conflict rooted primarily within the individual. Overcoming the threat of coercion was thus a matter of conforming one’s desires and inclinations to the voice of conscience, through which, it was thought, God spoke. The progenitors of this view— the modern religion of conscience—Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, each appealed to ‘ordinary consciousness,’ and claimed, albeit in differing ways, that reflection on its contents shows that self-legislating authority and liberty are coterminous. The commonplace picture lifts up this self-conscious self-assertion and valorizes it. But it omits from mention the awareness that the subject of the modern religion of conscience harbors: that the threat to conscience is the seduction of inscrutable otherness. Heteronomy lays bare the incoherence of the self-legislating self that is indispensable to the modern religion of conscience: the self thrusts its autonomy into its loss of relation to the other, but at the cost of a world that can ever evoke words from it. Dialogue devolves into soliloquy. So the commonplace picture does not portray the frantic determination of the subject of the modern religion of conscience to cover over its incoherence by routing the various fanaticisms Epilogue: The Shattered Mirror 185 of religious practices. Balancing, by affirming, the limits of natural reason and the place of free will, the subject of the modern religion of conscience attempts to effect salutary moral and spiritual transformation. Not alien to, but resonant with the main body of Christian teaching that opposes certitude about human perfection, such efforts at balance hold at bay the prospect of an...