Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 14

MODERN AGE

T

he sacerdotal privileges that are now
open to the new university priesthood were anticipated in a remarkable way
by the great Victorian unbeliever Thomas
Carlyle. Dismissing traditional Christianity as merely "the dead Letter of Religion,"
Carlyle hailed as the central new religious
reality "that wonder of wonders, Society,"
declaring that "every conceivable Society,
past and present," constituted "properly and
wholly a Church." But Carlyle recognized
a Church within the Church, and within
this inner Church, writers exercise special
prerogatives. "The true Church," Carlyle
remarked, "is the Guild of Authors." And
this Guild-a guild that today populates the
university-does now what prophets and
apostles once did. "Every man that writes,"
Carlyle explained, "is writing a new Bible;
or a new Apocrypha; to last for a week, or
for a thousand years."34
Writing a new Bible allows the priestwriters in the "last true church" to elide
the old biblical texts that define what they
perceive as restrictive social roles (e.g., Gen.
1:28, 2:18-25, 3:16-19; Eph. 5:28-33,
6:1-4) and replace them with expansive new
texts. Abandonment of the truths of the old
Bible greatly distressed Fyodor Dostoevsky,
who famously expressed his fears through
his character Ivan Karamazov: "Without
God and immortal life . . . all things are lawful."35 But many university priest-prophets
welcome the wide-open permissiveness of a
utopian Society answerable only to itself, a
permissiveness that permits them to write old
moral and philosophic truths out of existence
as they enshrine new ones in their Sociocentric New Bible. Consider, for instance,
the prominence of university prophet-priests
in writing a New Bible that-unlike the old
Bible relied on by Newman and countless
other traditional academics-legitimates
same-sex marriage.36
14

SUMMER 2014

So exhilarating are the joys of serving
Society by writing a utopian New Bible that
the university priest-prophets writing this
new surrogate Scripture may not even notice
how slovenly, vacuous, and shallow intellectual life has grown on the university campus. Concerns about a neglected cultural
heritage will never trouble priest-prophets
carried away in transports of quasi-religious
ecstasy as they contemplate the utopian
Society that they are making possible by
writing a New Bible filled with feminist,
queer, environmentalist, and Marxist texts.
Endowed with the power to write new
Sacred Writ in the name of Society, why
should the university's new priest-prophets
fret over the disappearance of Newman's
sapiential insight, a wisdom that "maps out
the territory of the intellect" and "acts as
umpire between truth and truth, and, taking into account the nature and importance
of each, assigns to all their due order and
precedence"?
But the very boundlessness of the authorial privileges claimed by the university's
priest-prophets finally constitutes their greatest danger. Nowhere in the New Bibles that
these new theologian-apostles proffer does
the reader encounter much needed warnings against "the mystery of iniquity" (cf.
2 Thess. 2:7). Nowhere does the reader even
encounter anything like the moral "inner
check" so important to the courageous cultural critic Irving Babbitt. Without such a
warning, without such an "inner check," the
university-based priest-prophets can hardly
hope to avoid what Panichas aptly called "a
modern dreamworld with its unchecked ideologies, chimeras, fantasies, reveries, [and]
utopias that plunge us deeper in a vacuum of
disinheritance."37 Unfortunately, this "modern dreamworld"-now at least as pervasive
on the modern campus as Newman's theological metaphysics once was-inevitably
Modern Age - Summer 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2014
