christiannonduality.com Blog

The New Age seems to be a dysfunctional response to postmodernity.

I use the word response to indicate an over against or counter-movement. For example, it seems to me that the emerging church conversation is a response to Protestant fundamentalism (and, I’m hoping, Catholic fundamentalism). For its part, the New Atheism, is a form of Enlightenment fundamentalism. Another example, in the Catholic church our new priests are tending toward a reactionary traditionalism, what sociologist, Fr. Andy Greeley, has called “young fogeys.” Radical Orthodoxy seems to be another response to both modernism and postmodernism; I’m sympathetic to and interested in RO’s response.

If I had to choose one word to describe what many, many people seem to be searching for it would be reenchantment and I would reckon it is motivated by a nostalgia for an experience of the world prior to it being demythologized. (If only they understood our true myth.)

If the transformative journey is marked by movement from a naive understanding through reflection to a novel hermeneutic of the second naivete’, then some movements, as responses, seem to entail an en masse regression back to an original, first naivete’. I’m no sociologist of religion but this dynamic does seem to capture at least part of what is going on.

I would like to add that, in my view, the New Age movement has done violence to the wisdom of the Eastern traditions. It has engaged them at a very superficial level, especially where ontological monism is concerned. The East, for the most part, is not engaging in classical Western metaphysics. It’s practices are geared toward leading people into phenomenal experiences and not, rather, to metaphysical conclusions. The New Age movement, in my view, is a superficial engagement of the East that results in a perversion of those traditions, which I treat here, for any interested: No-Self & Nirvana elucidated by Dumoulin.

The New Age, then, is a facile syncretism and seems a kindred spirit to the Prosperity Gospel movement in that it tries to do an end around the Cross. What has often been called transrational, in the New Age movement, is actually an arational gnosticism, which tells us spiritual pedestrians of the metaphysical bourgeoisie: “You don’t see this truth because you are not at this stage, on our level.” And they are blind to and caught up in this silly tautology, which is like saying you don’t see any elephants around here because I carry an elephant gun and they wouldn’t dare come ’round here.