An axe to Nominalism and Christmas Every Day

Rod Dreher in his seminal 'The Benediction Option' (2017) identifies the emergence of Nominalism in the later part of Medieval civilisation as the start of all our troubles with modernity. It is no easy thing to describe what Nominalism is but it appears to be the first of four intellectual movements which have brought us to a post-Christian Europe. As Matthew Arnold claimed in his 'Sea of Faith' poem we are witnessing the receding of shores of belief. Of course, the yarn we are sold is that the Church's demise is due to the superiority of the scientific worldview, the moral failings of the clergy and poor marketing. However, notwithstanding this criticism I want to suggest that Nominalism was from the start a big cause for the Christian worldview to collapse in the West.

Basically, Nominalism views that stuff is stuff and the world is not a magical or supernaturally charged place. God is therefore one of many beings and it just happens that he is very big and powerful. The God of Nominalism cannot be known through the mediation of the created order. God is essentially a distant supercomputer or an old man in the sky. In the Medieval model, the sort of thinking championed by the scholastic Thomas Aquinas, God is mediated through the world and the world is mediated through God. All the cosmos is in harmony and the purpose of human society is to be in communion with that higher reality. Gerard a Manley Hopkins (1889) wrote that 'The world is charged the grandeur of God.' To use an artistic metpahor Nominalism sees God as one of many drawings on the canvas of reality. The Medieval Model, borrowing from the Classical past, sees the canvas as the mind of God. (This is distinct from  pathensim.) It is that sort of viewpoint that William of Ockham (1347) and others abhorred because they imagined it demeaned the Almighty. Ockam meant well, his intentions as a Franciscan priest and philosopher were well intentioned - however, he started an intellectual movement that would rob us of something so very precious. 

So when you take away the magic from world what are you left with? Why bother with, for instance, building a cathedral? Sure, there was a bit of gothic revival in the 19th Century but beyond that Western people have had no stomach for building anything in the realm of say, Wells, Exeter or Lincoln Cathedral. The cathedral we would eventually construct would be shrines to mammon rather than to a reality beyond us. These glass temples and concrete palaces would belittle and dehumanize us rather than lift us up into a world of transcendence.

And, as for relating to God, the need for a scared Society, namely the Universal Church, a worldwide brotherhood and sisterhood becomes unnecessary - or at best an optional extra. It is supposedly superfluous because individual contact with the Creator is to be preferred. Now we have to pine for the distant God to make contact and "pick up the phone." As Cardinal Schonberg said in his 2010 lecture on this subject, "All that is left for Christians to do is be pious." Christianity has happily allowed itself to be pushed out of the public sphere and into the private realm. Religion we are informed by our secular overlords is about having nice feelings - even though the ancient word meant the bond we commit to and share with each other. We have even kidded ourselves that Christendom was a terrible experiment and that something better will come along..eventually. Yeah - right! I suspect our future soulless AI masters and their augmented human puppets will have some interesting ideas on that one!

The world of Nominalism seems cold and contradictory. Here matter is just matter and we are but a collection of atoms. We even rejoice in it and sing hymns to our own cleverness, trying endless permutations of ethical and political philosophy to answer the basic unsolvable conundrum that a meaningless universe has no moral order.  Over the centuries an embittered civilisation like this will just imagine that it's God never existed in the first place. Welcome to modernity where 'Things can only get better' (until we hit a global recession). Yes, we are fitter, healthier, live longer, life is less cruel, there is more opportunity for everyone. But, yet, I dare to say we have but a glimpse,. a droplet, of the inner joy our ancestors had.

I have a mug which jokingly says "I wish it could be Christmas every day." As awful and brutal as Medieval life could be it was Christmas every day in the imagination of the people. Reality was a beautifully charged thing in which we shared the mystery of God's presence. I think we hark for a magical Christmas, snowy villages, choirs singing, peace on earth and even a visit from Turkish saint in a red costume all because we want this awful Nominalism to go away - just for a month.


We can do by slowly constructing "intellectual" cathedrals, networks of deep thinking which brush down the Holy Tradition and represent it as beautiful and harmonious. The more I talk like this to people the more I find them amazed that they have been sold a caricature of Christianity and our Medieval past.  "I never knew Christianity was SO spiritual," is a regular response. You don't need to go to India (as lovely as India is) to find mindfulness and meditation, you can get it from your local church. This is what Lewis derided as temporal snobbishness where everything in the past is bad and boring. Of course, this is also typical Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism where our heritage is to be booed and seen as unmodern, savage and pathetic.












Christians have to put the axe to Nominalism and offer something better, still intellectually robust, but nevertheless, as C S Lewis would write of Narnia a "Deeper magic that was there before the dawn of time." This is no easy task but it is task we must set ourselves to if we are to have hope beyond "post-Christendom" and secularism. Down with Nominalism!