Welcome to the New Age (Sorry We Don’t Know Whether It’s Going to Kill Us Yet)

The Neo Axial Age, Part 3

The door of the church in Wittenberg where Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses. Photo by Wim van 't Einde.

"All of life is a story." — Madeleine L'Engle

When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg in the Autumn of 1517, the story of the world changed forever. 

For in those writings, the infallibility of the Pope and the Mother Church as God’s Vicar and Voice on earth were called seriously into question, not by a heretic (though he would later be labeled as such) but by a noble-hearted and ardent son of the Church, a monk of the Augustinian order, a teacher of theology at the University of Wittenberg, with bachelor degrees in both biblical studies and theology, and a Doctor of Theology. He was no lightweight within the Catholic social hierarchy, a man widely known to possess the passionate convictions of a true believer and the stubborn courage of an angry bull. 

Today we might call him a whistleblower, but it was never his intent to bring the Catholic Church down. Rather, he sought to reform it, to restore its teachings and practices to what he believed to be a purer expression of biblical truth. 

It’s unlikely when he wrote his Theses that he had any conception of the world-changing shifts his words would catalyze. But the moment he published a compelling biblical argument claiming that peasants had just as much direct access to God as any king or priest, he put an axe to the root of the dominant narrative of his Age. 

The Peasant Wars erupted just a few years later. Though they probably came as a shock to the elites of their day, we can easily look back on them now and recognize them as inevitable. After all, if you were born a peasant and had been taught all of your life that you are a peasant by God’s divine decree, and that everyone holds their rank in society because God ordained it to be just that way, and then you learned that all of that was rubbish, and all humans actually had equal access to God, wouldn’t you be a bit miffed? Wouldn’t you stop and ask yourself, “Well if God isn’t keeping me trapped in this miserable life, then who is?” The answer would be obvious: the kings and priests. The landowners and social elites. Those whom the current story favors. 

Wars led to wars, and the Protestants (those who fell in line with Luther’s beliefs) rose in prominence, leading to more wars, reshaping the map of the Western world largely into what we see today, give or take a border or a country name here or there. All of this happened because the dominant story we had relied upon to explain the universe to ourselves suddenly cracked at the root, and could no longer support the weight of a new reality. 

There are many ways to define an Age, but there is one I have found most useful of all: An Age is a span of time defined by a particular narrative — that is, an overarching story of who we are, what all this is, and what’s really going on here — that dominates the culture.

An Age: a span of time defined by a particular narrative — that is, an overarching story of who we are, what all this is, and what’s really going on here — that dominates the culture.

Stories hold societies together. When they break, societies break open, revealing new pathways to both chaos and possibility. By exposing the weakness of the dominant narrative of the Middle Ages, the Reformation marked the beginning of a new Age in the history of the Western World, though it would take hundreds of years for the full emergence of the Modern Age to come into its own. 

A second blow to the Middle Age Narrative came just a few decades later with the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), in which Copernicus made the claim that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. This claim — commonly known as heliocentrism — struck at the heart of Roman Catholic theology, which rested on the belief that the universe was ordered according to a Divine hierarchy, with God at the top, Man just beneath, and everything else below that. Since Man (I’m deliberately not using the term Humanity here, as Catholic beliefs at the time were decidedly male-centric) was the highest order of created being, they reasoned that the structure of the universe would reflect this truth in the way it ordered itself. Thus, the earth had to be at the center of the universe, because Man was the central focus of God’s creation. 

Even so, the Catholic authority was not initially threatened by Copernicus’s ideas, still believing, quite incorrectly, that it remained in firm control of the dominant narrative of the Age. It wasn’t until Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) about seventy years later that the Church perceived the threat for what it was. In his essay, Galileo made the same claims Copernicus had, but the data he used to support his claims were far more robust, thanks in large part to improvements made in the telescope in the intervening decades. The evidence was impossible to deny. Even so, just six years after the publication of Sidereus Nuncius, the Catholic Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be “formally heretical,” and warned Galileo off of continuing to pursue this line of inquiry in his work.

As we know, he did not heed this warning, and in 1632 he published the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), which became quite a popular work. This led to the Roman Inquisition putting Galileo on trial for heresy a year later. They declared him “vehemently suspect of heresy,” forced him to publicly renounce his beliefs, and put him under house arrest until his death in 1642. 

All of this became known as the Galileo Affair. To my mind, it serves as a helpful example of what it looks like when a new Age begins to supplant an old one … how when the dominant narrative of an Age begins to fail, those whom that narrative favors will always be the last to accept its loss and will fight against all reason to keep it alive, while those who were oppressed by it (like the peasants of yore) will be quick to welcome the wild mystery of whatever’s next … how the old story dies long before it actually relinquishes its power … how the new story, whatever it is, will necessarily be a fragile and tentative thing for quite a long time, emerging slowly as it must not from the bones of the old story but from the newly opened fields of unpredictable possibility … how this entire process requires great courage from all the people involved, and if enough of the citizens let fear dominate their courage, the transition will be much more violent than it needs to be, and may even lead to the society’s complete collapse. 

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m sharing this example from history as a way of making a fairly bold claim about the present:

I believe we are now caught up in a new Turning of the Age, one that’s every bit as significant and volatile as the Great Turning from the Middle to the Modern Age. 

Much like what happened at the end of the Middle Ages, the dominant narratives of our Modern Age — that the universe is a clockwork device governed by clean rules that never change, that truth is never relative, that the lines God draws are always clear and distinct, truth and error, right and wrong, and never cast in shades of grey, that human beings are always clearly either one thing or another and can never be a blend of both or something unique that defies categorization, that the earth is infinite and ours for the pillaging — all of these have become too small to hold reality as we now understand it. Einstein was our Luther, and those who have accompanied him through subsequent decades in the exploration of the universe in both its largest and smallest scales — Hubble, Hawking, Kuiper, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, and many others — have become our collective Galileo, uncovering truths about ourselves and the universe that unravel long-standing notions about the nature of humanity, the nature of life and society, and, most critically of all, the nature of God.

As has happened in previous Turnings, we have been slow to become aware of these changes. But now, 100 years in, the shifts are becoming too obvious to ignore, and the emergent narrative, while still vastly undefined, is nonetheless clearly far more quantum and relative than its predecessor ever was or could be, and as such, is proving to be even more unnerving than it would otherwise be for those who long for the clarity and certitude of earlier days. 

Thus, we find ourselves in the throes of a Great Uncertainty — about who we really are, what all this really is, and what’s really going on here — and this uncomfortable liminality is, quite understandably, stretching us to our limits. 

Old stories are hard to let go of. Even when they can’t hold us anymore, we tend to cling to them like a lone buoy in the open sea, certain that should we let them go, we’ll sink into oblivion, and all we ever thought we were will be proved a lie. But though such transitions inevitably involve loss, they are not without hope. In fact, they are the one occasion in history when hope and possibility are at their peak. Because it is from here, in the middle of the Turning of an Age, that anything becomes possible.

"When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge." — Tuli Kupferberg

In future posts, I’ll delve more into why and how I believe Einstein and his fellow explorers have effectively unraveled the dominant story of the Modern Age, and how that informs where we are now, and the available options for where we go next. But for now let me share a few questions I’m still pondering around all this, and invite you to ponder along with me. Any reflections or insights are welcome in the comments below. After all, wherever this liminal path may be leading us, we’ll either get there together, or not at all.

• What is the dominant narrative of the Modern Age — that is, the overarching story we have long told ourselves to explain who we are, what all this is, and what’s really going on here? It’s hard to see the water you’re swimming in, but when you consciously look into this inquiry, what do you see?

• What aspects of that dominant narrative do you still hold as true? What supports that belief and allows it to thrive (or at least to survive)?

• What aspects of the dominant narrative have you already discarded? Why have you discarded them? What new narrative, if any, has taken their place?

• In the face of the unknown, are you more prone to courage, wonder, and curiosity, or to fear, suspicion, and self-protection? How will this tendency impact the way you navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead?

Thanks, fellow sojournists. More to come. 

(Note: This is the 3rd installment in a series of essays. You can find all the entries by following these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.)