Progress, A Vain Thing

by Richard V. Desrosiers, Ph.D.

The following address was delivered at· the Commencement Exercises of Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary in June of this year. Dr. Desrosiers, a convert to Orthodoxy, is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and Professor of Classics at the University of New Hampshire.

“Why do nations so furiously rage and peoples imagine a vain thing?”

Prophet and King David

With these words, king David, the Ancestor of Our Lord and Savior, begins the second psalm. The inspiration of the entire song is messianic and eschatological. It wells from the heart of the psalmist full of the trust in the ultimate triumph of divine justice and the deliverance of the Church from the power of worldly rulers which throughout the history of Christianity and, especially at the end of the world, will wax terrible against the faithful little flock of Christ. Particularly noteworthy in the psalm is the contempt with which King David treats the plots and ambitions of God’s enemies. In verse four, he sings: “He That sitteth in Heaven shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision,” and later in verse nine, he compares their final destruction to the banal disposal of an unwanted pot: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel,”

In this way, the psalmist traces two distinct phases to the rule of the apostates, first, their brief and wildly turbulent sway, and, secondly, their quick and richly deserved demise. Their power, furthermore, is portrayed as distinctive by virtue of its source, a false and empty idea, a party platform or piece of propaganda, which holds the benighted population in ·mental servitude—“Why do . . . peoples imagine a vain thing.”

The English “a vain thing’’ ideally translates the neuter plural substantive adjectives found in the original Greek of the Septuagint text and the Latin Vulgate rendering of the Blessed Jerome, “χενά” and ‘‘inania” respectively, which mean something empty, of no purpose, void of meaning and destitute of value. The verb “imagine” is a less exact translation of the Greek “εμελέτησαν” and the Latin “meditantur” since in both ancient languages these verbs each have two essential meanings. The first denotes the somewhat passive mental activity of study, contemplation and meditation, while the second bespeaks action, thus to take pains over, to practice and exercise, to be busy about. In other words, these unfortunate peoples will not only be in error but will be frantically and optimistically striving to realize and achieve a situation not only stupidly wrong but also hopelessly unattainable.

Several times in the New Testament Our Lord, Jesus Christ testifies to the power of the lie. As the false idea, falsely expressed, the lie stands as the antithesis of the Logos and, consequently, in the Gospel of St. John the Theologian (chapter 8, verse 44), the Lord calls the devil the father of lies. St. Paul in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (chapter 2, verses 11-12) amplifies the role of the lie both as the delight and the destruction of the damned. “ . . . God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believe not the Truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” Christian Orthodox tradition does not precisely define what this great lie will be and it would be dangerous for us to attempt to pin point the particular falsehood which will or, for that matter, is already tyrannizing over the peoples of the world, since many interrelated fallacies have taken hold of men’s minds in our day, perverted ideologies and ridiculous convictions.

St. Paul the Apostle

Yet, if one should look about today for a likely candidate to set in the role of the great lie, I would humbly submit that a very good choice would be the modern idea of progress which in the last three hundred years has come to be universally and uncritically accepted in the western world.

In this season every year it has become habitua1 to extol progress at commencements across the campuses of America. Because this adulation of progress is performed so commonly, we tend to lose sight of how incongruous it really is to have illustrious academicians and influential politicians reasserting their faith in the ideal of progress amid the ever-engulfing tide of political turmoil, cultural degeneration and ethical indifference. To be sure, the initial portion of such speeches usually recalls in lurid details the alarming loss of civilized values and the threatening onslaught of social disintegration. Then, however, with faith renewed, these honored orators usually turn more directly to the already bored faces of the students, evoking from young eyes no longer either innocent or idealistic, the foundations of a new hope and the elements of a fresh solution, a utopian dream, a world unified and peaceful, happy and secular, done with diseases, drugs and overpopulation, rid of perennial crime and selfish individualism, free of the prejudice of race, nation and religion. Very often these speakers proudly propose some solution or slogan, be it co-existence, integration, ecumenism, ecology, education or simply the magic, electrifying term revolution, of course, peaceful, which will so alter the destiny of their listeners as to make world history a tale with a happy ending.

Thus, the discussion of progress is particularly suitable for a commencement topic and its analysis from the vantage of Christian theology especially useful here at our seminary dedicated to the Truth of Holy Orthodoxy. The idea of Progress can best be defined as a belief or prejudice which holds that civilization or, as it were, the collective continuous life of man on earth has, is and will continue to move in an ever more desirable direction toward infinite human perfectibility. From the start we must recognize that the idea of progress can only be accepted by an act of faith, since its truth or validity cannot be demonstrated scientifically or sensually any more than the correctness of Orthodox Christianity. The final ascent of man to perfection whether for the individual Christian or for progressing mankind has not yet been achieved and can only be awaited with expectation. Thus the devotee of progress must make as act of faith no less than the Christian.

It is really impossible to imagine, let alone prove, that there has ever been an age when belief in God was not widely prevalent among men. Christianity itself is universally admitted to be almost two thousand years old and it has always maintained itself to be simply the post-messianic extension of the church of ancient Israel and of those still more ancient just such as Enoch, Methuselah, Noah and Melchizedek, whose lives antedated the Lord’s call of Abraham and his seed. No such antiquity substantiates the doctrine of progress. If, to quote the immortal American poet William Cullen Bryant (Thanatopsis Line 74), “the innumerable caravan” of numberless dead should arise and vote the question, the partisans of progress would lose by a landslide. With the possible exception of the Atomists and Epicureans, Greco-Roman antiquity shows no inclination to the view of progress. J. B. Bury, in his work The Idea of Progress, (p. 7), reveals the arrogance typical of progressives and liberals when he states: “It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress.” If only we Orthodox Christians had such trusting faith and keen loyalty, the world might not be now in the throes of universal apostasy.

The Boeotian poet Hesiod, writing at the end of the eighth century before Christ, proposes the historical idea, not of progress but of degeneration. For Hesiod, a primeval Golden Age of near perfection has slowly degenerated through a less perfect Silver Age, a fierce but glorious Bronze Age, an Age of Heroes to the present Iron Age, brutal and craven, without justice or mercy. The greatest of Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, as well as their successors the Stoics and Neo-Platonists, regarded human history as cyclic. For them, periods of history and civilization were like the seasons of the year in which great nations rose, flourished and, finally, declined. Plato conceived of man living on an eternal cycle which spanned seventy-two thousand years. During the first half of this time, the universal god holds his hand on the machinery of the universe and keeps the whole perfect and golden. During the latter half, this god lets slip his grasp and the world rapidly sinks into imperfection and evil, ever spinning downward until, at the end of the great cycle, the god once more seizes it and corrects its operations. For Plato all reality had within it the seeds of its own destruction. Even his ideal republic he envisioned as ultimately degenerating into unbearable tyranny. The more perfect the organism, the more spiritual and changeless its operation and history.

Plato

Although their outlook was more practical and political, Roman thinkers also tended to accept the cyclic view of history. At the end of his Republic, Cicero envisaged history as divided into cosmic years, each 10 centuries in duration and marked off by natural cataclysms which destroyed all records of previous civilized life. While he strove heroically to save the collapsing republican constitution, in moments of sadness and defeat Cicero calmly accepted the failure of his ideals and grieved that his life had not been set in a happier age a century earlier, when the patriot could expect tribute less exacting than the fame of martyrdom. Vergil and the other Augustan poets saw the great Pax Romana of the Emperor Caesar Augustus as a new golden age, which, due to the eternal destiny of Rome, would remain glorious and universal.

Cicero

This Augustan view, while remaining essentially pagan and political, most closely approximates the spiritual outlook of Christianity which always faces all history subsequent to the Great Pascha of Our Savior as a prelude to His unending rule. The Orthodox Catholic Christian Church, finally after three centuries of persecution, assumed its full socio-political dimensions subsequent to the conversion of the Emperor St. Constantine in 312 and the regeneration of the Roman Empire as a Christian world power. To be sure, Christianity’s message is and has always been one of hope and newness, of optimism and salvation, but always with nearly exclusive reference to the individual believer. The Orthodox Empire, its society and laws, simply served as the context for the progress: of the faithful toward salvation. History, from the view point of Christianity, represents a succession of divine interventions into the life of man. Since we are made in the image and likeness of God, our will is free and we are empowered to exercise rule over the physical universe. God rested on the Seventh Day, allowing the human race to struggle freely on the playing field of salvation.

Since our enemy, the devil, has great power and there is no man who lives and sins not, men, operating a free agents, have always tended to decline. As a result, God in His love was, as it were, compelled to enter forcefully into events and restore the potentiality of human innocence. If we look at the Old Testament, we see that it is simply a series of such divine intrusions into history. After the sin of Adam, God restored man with the hope of the Messiah. When later the grossness of sin became almost universal, God sent the great flood and gave the human race a second beginning with Noah. Again later idolatry threatened to engulf the world and Abraham was called, so that at least one chosen people might prevail in possession of the True Faith. Since the slavery of Egypt and later the loneliness of the desert tempted the children of Israel to infidelity, the Lord on Mount Sinai renewed His covenant by granting the Mosaic Law unto His people. Still in subsequent centuries God intervened again and again to restore Israel morally and politically by the establishment of the Davidic Kingdom, the sending of the prophets, the restoration after the Babylonian captivity and the deliverance under Judas Maccabeus from the hand of King Antiochus IV of Syria.

Judas Maccabeus

 The partisan of progress never ceases to ask in bewildered naivete why the Christian must view history so pessimistically. The very question reveals a hopelessly faulty prospective. Christians regard history’s course with the confidence of children and the joy of Christmas, when first the song of the angels was heard: “For unto you is born this day . . . a Savior, Which is Christ the Lord.” Note, please, who was born—not a teacher, not a philosopher, not a religious leader but rather a Savior, One Who saves. What need is there for a Savior, if the inexorable plodding of progress can be expected to render the world perfect? It is not pessimism but the fullness of Faith which renders the Christian heedless of progress and profoundly suspicious of faithless arrogance.

If both Greco-Roman classicism and the great millennium of Christian civilization were free from the concept of progress, how has it come to be accepted so universally by modern man? Although murmurings about progress from individual authors were heard as early as Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century Franciscan, the concept did not make its full debut on the ideological stage until the seventeenth century. Several modern movements, which had profound effects in de-Christianizing western civilization, have stimulated today’s trust in Progress. In the seventeenth century Rene Descartes brilliantly formulated the doctrine of the supremacy of human reason on which was founded the eighteenth century enlightenment and philosophical revolution of the Encyclopedists. Toward the end of this century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau shocked Europe by calling for the abandonment of civilization and the building of a new social order based on the natural, by which he means, the passionate inclinations of man. The French Revolution made bold to sweep away Christian political tradition and promised the creation of a state emancipated from religion and capable of endless material progress.

Roger Bacon

The advances made in physical science, together with the Industrial Revolution, particularly in England and in America, gave birth to the defiant dream of limitless progress toward a world of pleasure-filled leisure without restraint or obligation. Only in the last few years the vast threat to our physical environment and our precious resources has revealed how foolish man has been in not expecting any penalty for a century long plundering of nature. In the areas of ecology and atomic science, the doctrine of progress has been called into serious question by twentieth century thinkers, who, nonetheless, remain obdurately blind to the ravages of political, social and moral pollution, all wrought insolently in the pursuit of progress. Malthus and Darwin promised man limitless progress in exchange for his willing self-degradation to the level of animal existence. Freud announced final progress for man, so that he could become an absolute slave to the most vulgar instincts of his unregenerate nature. Marx demanded that man make progress toward a world of class warfare, economic servitude, and the complete expurgation of all noble emotions, be they the love of God, family, fatherland or fellow man. Today the capitalist and the communist face each other in bitter rivalry, both convinced that progress will flow from their ever-changing and ever more frustrating manipulations of men and societies.

For us here today, probably the most dangerous advance of the idea of progress is its almost entire infection of western Christian denominations. As early as the Victorian period, Protestantism began to adopt the progressive outlook, identifying the political and scientific advances of secular society with the Will of Christ and the well-being of their churches. While Roman Catholicism has always been eager to condone aspects of progress within the context of its world outlook and authority, not until this last decade did progressive thinking—or to use the term of Pope John XXIII—aggiornamento score a complete and irretrievable victory within its ranks. The Roman Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally denies the Christian view of history and the ultimate, all-embracing evil of the Anti-Christ. Instead de Chardin looks for the omega point, when the self-perfecting progress of mankind will join the essence of Christ in some mass theosis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Before we too eagerly condemn Protestants and Catholics for capitulating to progressivist ideologies, let us remember that ecumenism and modernism, two projections of progressive thought, have to date managed to rupture the unity of the Orthodox Churches and led our most prominent hierarchs into heresies which totally undermine Orthodox life, ecclesiology, doctrine and worship. Such a sight emboldens me to warn you, our worthy graduates, that, to be true priests amid the ravages of modern society, you will be required to stand ever alert to the danger of progressive thinking. Be careful that it has no part in your personal spiritual lives. Be fearful, lest its danger ever present and ever seductive corrupt your parish, the youth, in particular, so prone to false idealism and counterfeit display. Be prudent to scrutinize every new idea and popular slogan, so as to lay bare to the cleansing fire of Truth the cancerous germ of Progressive Thought almost always lurking therein.

With the advent of Christ, St. Paul tells us that all things were made new. An impetus was thus generated which conquered the world. If one looks at those prophetic portions of the Holy Gospels, the Epistles and the Apocalypse, he will clearly understand that history will close with victory of Our Lord and Savior over the power of the Anti-Christ. This last and greatest theophany will then inaugurate the great and termless Eighth Day, which St. Seraphim of Sarov calls the Pascha without evening. Thus, with the vain thing of progress firmly rejected, let us recognize this promise of Christ as enough, nay, more than enough for our lives. Let us arch our hopes toward our heavenly fatherland, where, as sings the enraptured author of the Akathist to Our Lord, the Angelic Host, glorifying unceasingly the most holy name of Jesus and crying Holy, Holy, Holy, hears the chorus of our frail, earth-bound voices, chanting Alleluia.

St. Seraphim of Sarov

SOURCE

Desrosiers, Richard V., Orthodox Life, No. 6 (1972), Vol. 22 (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1972), pp. 12–19.