The Reign of Error

Either because of or in spite of having so many children the man who raised my siblings and me rarely expressed annoyance. His two pet-peeves which I recall were the abuse of the first person pronoun in that grammatical aberration: “between you and I” and publicly displayed clocks which had ceased operating. Recently in a small town in Pennsylvania’s Chester County I came across an example of the latter in the town square. Other than a fond remembrance of my father my reaction wasn’t one of annoyance over the town management’s negligence but rather a reflection on the relevance today of the philosophy of Deism.

The connection isn’t so farfetched. Deism posits that God is a supreme being who, unknowable and untouchable, is merely the impersonal “first cause” who created and set in motion the universe and its natural laws, like a clock maker that sets up a time piece and without any further involvement lets it run on its own perpetually. The prevalence of Deism in the eighteenth century resulted from the Enlightenment’s apotheosis of reason which led to the conviction that reason is the supreme reality.

But, as time itself has attested, the proverbial clock of Deism won’t tick on its own unattended.

History demonstrates it can stop and even break down when the clockmaker is unrecognized or is denied access to its operation. Consider the horrors manifested just in our era in the godless initiatives of the Gulag in Soviet Russia, the Holocaust in Europe, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Or, recall the bloody Reign of Terror in France when the Note Dame Cathedral was converted into the Temple of Reason and the ‘Goddess of Liberty’ erected in the sanctuary. Without deference to and reliance on Providence we mess things up.  Although we learned the costly lesson in the Garden of Eden we repeatedly succumb to the seductive whispers of hubris and allow ourselves to believe that not only can we keep things running on our own but with the sole implement of reason we can improve on the operation. One wonders if the Deism of two centuries ago hasn’t been supplanted in the current century by Atheism – an enticingly less complicated substitute.

What wisdom the perennial celebrations of Advent and Christmas offer. Whether people give credence to it or not all are reminded of the Christian belief that God is not the God of Deism. Rather He is a personal, interventionalist God who “so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have everlasting life”. Ours is an ongoing covenantal engagement with God, the turning point of which is the Incarnation, and the Incarnation is the foundation of our hope. As a society we neglect or dismiss its relevance at our own peril. Our clock, whether traditional or digitally armless, will start to indicate erroneous information and eventually stop.

St. Irenaeus wrote that ‘the glory of God is man fully alive’. Let our Advent prayer be that we as a country welcome the guiding hand of God in our daily and national affairs so that we may continue our advance to this long aspired, full human dignity.

Lamentably, the phrase “between you and I” has become commonplace. Let us hope an estrangement between us and the Clockmaker does not.