Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind,
Morals, and Meaning
By
Nancy Pearcey
(B&H Publishing Group, 328 pages,
$26.99)
The Third Church of
Christ, Scientist, in the District
of Columbia is one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. It’s a
hulking, windowless pile of poured concrete, constructed in 1971.
Over time, church members came to detest it so intensely that they
wanted to tear it down, but the District government wouldn’t let
them. The church, against the will of its members, had been
designated as a historic landmark — an exemplar of the “brutalist”
style of architecture.
Why are we now not surprised when architecture is ugly and
inhuman? Why, for nearly a century, has our culture produced
painting and sculpture that is meaningless and sterile? How did
20th-century academic music become so theory-ridden that it was
impossible to listen to? Just before the First World War, the word
“architecture” was defined authoritatively as “the art of building
in such a way as to accord with principles determined, not merely
by the ends the edifice is intended to serve, but by high
considerations of beauty and harmony.…” In the arts as a whole, why
have we descended from “high considerations of beauty and harmony”
to a weary acquiescence in the degraded and absurd?
In Saving Leonardo, Nancy Pearcey illumines the answers
to those questions and much more besides. Although a great portion
of the book discusses the arts, in one sense that is not her real
subject at all. Her subject is the intellectual underpinnings of
Western society over the past 250 years, how those
underpinnings have radically shifted, and how those shifts affect
— well, everything, including not just the arts, but culture,
morals, and even our concepts of truth and reality. Art mirrors
underlying beliefs, and is a harbinger of where those beliefs are
taking us. In recent times, the news has not been good.
Pearcey’s analytical framework will be familiar to those who
have read Total Truth, her powerfully insightful work on
“worldviews” published in 2004. Formerly, Christianity was
viewed as making truth claims about the world, and those claims
were nearly universally accepted in Western culture. God exists;
the world is his creation; and science is an investigation into his
design using the senses and reason he has given us to discover
truth. Our conduct should be governed by his moral laws, which are
ascertainable, immutable, and true. Beauty is not merely
subjective, but is an objective perfection toward which artists can
aspire, and which their works can approach more or less nearly. In
short, truth was considered to be unitary and the truths of
Christianity were an integral part of it.
That has changed profoundly. As Pearcey shows, a secular
worldview now reigns, at least among the classes that matter. The
elites in “law, education, mass media, academia, and advertising,”
among others, act as society’s gatekeepers, and are in a position
to control the “official definitions of reality.” And they have
officially ruled out of bounds all public discourse based on
Christian principles, primarily by means of what Pearcey refers to
as the “fact/value split.”
Adapted from Francis Schaeffer, under whom Pearcey studied in
Switzerland, the fact/value analysis holds that modern secularism
has artificially separated truth into two domains. Analogizing
truth to a two-story house, the first floor is the realm of
“facts,” generally defined in an empiricist or materialist way. The
truths of science are the paradigmatic facts that can gain
admission to the first floor. Only in this realm, the secularists
assert, do we find real truths about the world that are objective
and verifiable, and can thus form the basis for education,
government policy, and public discussion.
The second floor is the realm of “values,” such as statements
about aesthetics, morality, and God. These are considered by
secularists to be expressions of personal preference only, which
are subjective and unverifiable, and cannot form the basis for
public discourse or actions. So the second floor is where religion
goes. Like an eccentric uncle shut up in the attic, Christianity
can be ignored so long as it doesn’t try to come downstairs and
annoy polite company.
Thus, materialist secularism becomes by definition the default
worldview and the only legitimate worldview. As Pearcey notes, the
fact/value split is the “main strategy used to marginalize and
disempower Christians in the public arena.” Indeed, “why bother to
argue that Christianity is false when it’s so much easier to take
it out of the realm of true and false altogether?”
THE CONSEQUENCES OF FRACTURING TRUTH, delegitimizing
Christianity, and substituting a secular worldview have been
staggering. In Saving Leonardo, Pearcey first examines
those effects on hot-button issues such as sexual morality,
abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic research. As she shows,
divisions on these issues are deeply influenced by whether one
adheres to the secular view that human beings are merely biological
machines, blindly evolved for no purpose, and guided by nothing but
their own interests and preferences, or whether one embraces the
Christian view that each of us is a divine creation, with a
God-given purpose in life, and subject to immutable moral laws.
The central part of the book then traces the development of the
two main streams of thought that have produced most of the modern
and postmodern worldviews, in which secularism has now come to
predominate. Enlightenment rationalism was the spring of the first
stream, while the second was fed by the romantic reaction against
rationalism.
Pearcey often turns to philosophers and thinkers for the
explicit intellectual articulation of those two currents. But her
major task is to track the continuing courses of rationalism and
romanticism as they shaped artistic expression in the 19th and 20th
centuries. In doing so, she lays bare the secular pre- suppositions
that have increasingly come to underlie literature, the dramatic
arts, the plastic arts, and music, with generally baneful
effects.
That is an ambitious, synoptic undertaking, but Pearcey traces
cause and effect deftly and clearly, without any sacrifice of
nuance or accuracy. The breadth of learning that she brings to bear
is formidable. How does materialism deeply inform the novels of
Jack London and Theodore Dreiser? What is the philosophic
foundation for the (unlistenable) musical serialism of Boulez and
Babbitt? How do three paintings depicting executions by firing
squad, one by Gamborino, one by Goya, and one by Manet, reveal
different underlying worldviews? Pearcey marshals hundreds of
examples to elucidate how worldviews play out in works of art.
(I’ll also note here that the book has more than 100 color images
interspersed with the text, so her intellectual points are vividly
and graphically reinforced as the reader progresses.)
The effects of the precepts of secularism, which destroy the
unity of truth, and deny any objective meaning and purpose in life,
have necessarily been dismal in the arts. The romantic strain,
focusing on the individual’s quest for liberation and
meaning, ultimately degenerates into paintings in which
paint is flung on canvases, and plays in which noth- ing occurs but
banal, meaningless dialogue. The rationalist strain, which has
tended to devolve into materialism and determinism, produces barren
geometrical abstraction in painting and hideous Corbusian “machines
for living” in architecture. An author who actually bases
a novel or a play on materialist principles, as the turn of
the century “naturalists” tried to do, runs the risk that his work
will be utterly boring. Who cares what characters might do, if they
are mere “puppets of fate,” and lacking free will? As Pearcey
shows, human freedom and the responsibility to make moral choices,
which are central to the Christian worldview, are also essential
for artistic meaning.
Saving Leonardo’s final chapter is an exercise in how
to tease out the hidden moral (or amoral or immoral) assumptions in
popular movies. It concludes with an epilogue entitled “Bach School
of Apologetics,” which notes the inadequacy of the saccharine
sentimentalism that sometimes afflicts “Christian art,” and is a
call for serious, committed Christian engagement in the arts and
culture.
The book is in no sense a dispassionate history of the rise of
secularism in society or in the arts. In an age drenched in false
ideas, Pearcey’s avowed goal is to help her readers “recognize and
resist secular ideas in science, philosophy, ethics, the arts and
humanities.” Thinkers and artists have in recent times created
“worldviews that undermine human dignity and liberty,” and the only
hope, she argues, lies in a worldview that is “rationally
defensible, life affirming, and rooted in creation itself.”
A postscript on the Third Church of Christ, Scientist: After a
legal struggle, the congregation has now received permission to
demolish the poured concrete, brutalist building that has burdened
their souls for so long — but only after they put plans in place
to construct a new church in its stead. I hope they will build a
magnificent church of profound beauty. There is room for hope that,
after a long struggle, we can build a renewed culture of profound
beauty, too.
