The Hagia Sophia and Secularism’s Unquestioned Authority

Why We Should Thank God for One More Place of Prayer

JESSE HAKE

In the opening moments of Yelena Popovic’s film “Man of God,” Bishop Nektarios (later canonized a saint) is confronted by a Muslim man who sits in a line of beggars along a street in Egypt. This beggar has been waiting and watching for Nektarios, and he jumps up to greet the bishop with a radiant face, saying he was healed not long after asking Nektarios to pray for him. As the beggar gives thanks for this miracle granted by the bishop’s prayers, Nektarios gently touches the man’s head and says: “No. Your prayers have healed you.” This is the invitation of Christ that extends over even the dividing lines of faith, and it reflects an understanding of prayer that is mostly lost in our secular age.

A couple years ago, we saw the power of secularism (and the pettiness of our faith) in the debates surrounding the Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque for the second time in its history. Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople, it was a prominent Christian church for almost 1000 years. In 1453, with the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople, it was converted into a mosque, and then finally into a museum in 1935 by the secular Republic of Turkey.

As The New York Times reported two days before the July 24, 2020 transition to a mosque again: “Pope Francis said only that he was ‘pained,’ while the Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew . . .expressed regret that the Hagia Sophia would cease being ‘a place and symbol of encounter, dialogue and peaceful coexistence of peoples and cultures.’” Following these nods to the sentiments of Christian leaders, the voice treated as the most authoritative by The New York Times was UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization):

“Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece and a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries. Its status as a museum reflects the universal nature of its heritage, and makes it a powerful symbol for dialogue.” The statement also warned that alterations to physical structures or changes to accessibility of the site could violate the 1972 World Heritage Convention, to which Turkey was a signatory.

This representation of reality by the Times subtly reinforces all of our current assumptions. The pope and the patriarch only expressed uncomfortable feelings, such as being “pained,” while the voice for educational, scientific, and cultural organization in our world denounced the loss of a powerful “symbol” and warned the nation of Turkey against any actions that would “violate” international agreements. To be clear, the United Nations and its agencies are a great blessing to humanity, and their work should certainly be appreciated and preserved (for even greater reasons than providing Skellig Michael as a filming location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens). However, layers of other human authority should be restored alongside the agencies that represent the authority of the secular nation state.

Although Christians like to complain about secularism when it offends us, it is essentially invisible to us all. We also assume that neutrality in religious affairs is a social good, and we fail to see that this assumption collapses layers of ancient meaning and authority into the shallow but pervasive authority of the secular nation state. The basic concept of the nation state is so ubiquitous and revered in our world that none of us can fully get the concept into our mind’s eye. However, historians widely agree that the invention of the secular nation state was a key outcome of Christendom’s end and a basic catalyst in the rise of secular modernity. To describe the nation state would sound to any modern American like describing the way in which apples always fall downward. It is more helpful to start by listing some of the entities that were replaced by the modern nation state: a host of guilds (including the student or teacher guilds of universities), village commons, empires, kingdoms, townships, manors, church parishes, the papacy, and a host of monastic orders. All these ancient and layered structures of Christendom were radically and suddenly displaced by the single and undisputed secular power of the modern nation state, and this was widely celebrated as liberation from centuries of tyranny.

These layered structures of past human societies, moreover, were not just a part of Christendom but were an aspect of all pre-modern human cultures. All humans who lived before 1618 and the start of the Thirty Years’ War existed as a living link within a web of meanings and powers that ran between the chief, the shaman, kinship ties, the matriarchy or sisterhood, the guild, etc. My own experience, growing up in a traditional Chinese culture as a child of American missionaries, throws into sharp relief what has been lost in the West. In Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where I lived until I was 18, virtually everyone invited Daoist clerics to oversee the rituals surrounding birth and a Buddhist cleric to oversee the rituals surrounding death while temples to local folk deities (with their neighborhood festivals and lay shaman) supported in the many supplications of everyday life between birth and death. This layering of religious authority across multiple traditions and institutions was typical of many ancient human cultures.

With the Peace of Westphalia, this entire layered web of local institutions and traditions (with their deep meanings and diverse kinds of authority) were lost. The various powers of Christendom—in their desperation after the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War—placed all human affairs under the neutral governance of the nation state as the one arbitrator for the will of the people. This decision by European powers soon had implications for all human cultures around the globe, and we have codified the secular nation state since then with layers of international law, with the development of the autonomous individual (a microcosmic reflection of the secular nation state imposed upon us all as the most basic category of our self-understanding) and with the entity of the multinational corporation (which legal systems now granted the same legal status as an autonomous individual). All this has established secularism globally as the uncontested arbitrator of our very humanity. Of course, such a development in the human story did not take place overnight, and the remnants of the old ways are not entirely effaced from the planet. In his stories of Port William, Wendell Berry calls this network of belonging and mutual help “the membership.” While recognizing pockets of its existence long into American history, Berry’s entire life has been dedicated to documenting how “the membership” has increasingly disappeared.

With this seismic shift in human history, state authority came to provide strictly technical and scientific solutions to all people through agencies and programs insulated from all private affections (such as faith in God or even with the bonds of deep relationship, comradeship, or kinship). With the one sovereign arbiter of this impartial secular power, laws and shared practices can no longer be developed and maintained by a pantheon or network of authorities who all seek to fit their laws or customs to “the way things are” (i.e. to the realities of how creation—in its webbed splendor—must move together in a dance of lives who face mutual dependence on every side). In contrast, the laws of today can only be made by an impersonal power (ironically representing the dignity of all the autonomous individuals), and all laws have become tools for shaping, improving, and controlling humanity and our world instead of attuning ourselves with the shared life of our dancing and singing cosmos.

This story is grounded upon a series of distortions that developed within the Western Christian understanding of sovereignty and freedom. Many scholars including David Bentley Hart have argued that modernity is a Christian heresy. Some ideas about God’s power and human will among the late writings of Augustine started to depict freedom as simply the capacity to make a choice instead of as the capacity to see, want and move toward the greatest good and the highest form of beauty. As freedom was reduced over time in the West, until it came to be seen as merely a power to decide and dictate, this gave rise to a concept (only late in the medieval period) of an absolute monarch with the same kind of purposeless power that had been attributed to God. This same false idea of freedom and power was applied during the Enlightenment to the autonomous individual and the secular nation state. (For more, see Hart’s September 17, 2021 interview Tony Golsby-Smith or Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat.)

This sad step on the human journey also involved the invention of modern religion, which is nothing more than a prop to the nation state. The mechanistic and progressive vision of secularisms renders God pointless and leaves religion with no purpose (beyond perhaps serving as a support to psychological and social health). Religion therefore went from being a universal human virtue—with multiple local institutions in most cultures to steward the singing of sacred songs and to model the habits of wisdom across generations—to being just a set of contending ideologies that must compete for adherents on whatever ground the modern secular state might permit. In this context, religions have long ago come to look to most young people like nothing but a petty collection of outdated factions fighting over inexplicable ritual, arcane points of history, and petty doctrines. (For books about this invention of modern religion see The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith or Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri.)

In all this, secularism has obliterated a once massive and diverse array of unique places and local cultures. Within all these places, the common arts, liberal arts, and fine arts once flourished together as schools and traditions of skill and craft in service of diverse human ways of living together. Artistic creations served the life of family homes, civic buildings, various religious communities and a diverse network of craft, merchant and academic guilds. We get this story in Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa where Natalie Carnes lays out how beauty went from being a central interest of human thought and culture to a private concern with no intellectual or even social value. After surveying beauty’s dethronement within intellectual history, Carnes says that there “was an event at the end of the eighteenth century as important for the [death of] aesthetics as any of these philosophers: in 1793, the Louvre Museum opened.” As she explains, “the Louvre was a solution to a problem caused by the French Revolution” as they sought freedom “from the centuries of tyranny by church and crown” and “angry mobs attacked the symbols of the old regime.” (25)

Some of the revolutionaries considered this destruction to be shortsighted, and Pierre Cambon proposed to the assembly that they create a museum as an alternative. In his book The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner describes the reasoning:

By placing the suspect works in a museum, the assembly recognized that the museum would neutralize them. Once in the museum, monuments to royalty would lose their sacred power. They would cease to be symbols pointing beyond themselves and become merely art. Out of the crucible of the Revolution had come an institution that “makes” art, that transforms works of art dedicated to a purpose and place into works of Art that are essentially purposeless and placeless. (182)

Museums were invented expressly so that the new secular powers could dislocate the sacred and place it within an institution for the display of dead things from times long gone. To be dramatic, museums and guillotines were invented by the same people and for the same purpose. Of course, a lot more was going on. Larry Shiner points out that during this same century, the concept of “genius” as a divine gift that everyone had in some unique way evolved into the modern idea of an artistic “genius” as a kind of person that only few people could be (111). Shiner also notes that this century also saw the invention of secular concerts and literary criticism—virtually all of the fine art institutions that we take for granted in the modern world and that create and maintain separation between art and its many situated purposes (88). Two other wonderful books on this topic are Putting Art (Back) in Its Place by John Skillen and The Common Arts Tradition by Christopher Hall. (None of this, clearly, is to entirely dismiss the value of museums, with many examples such as The Met Cloisters in New York city doing all they can to counteract these negatives for their visitors.)

Secular nation states—as they have reinforced the idea of autonomous individuals interacting in the terms of libertarian freedom and provided the legal framework for the development of corporations—have enabled the accumulation of capital and technical resources in unprecedented ways. While many of these resources are obviously great goods that have helped to bless and sustain human life, they have also spurred an unprecedented and systematic destruction of human life in the name of various kinds of progress (both under totalitarian fascist states and communist states) as well as practices such as Down syndrome screening, or abortion as a form of birth control. We generally assume that the Enlightenment reduced the toll taken by warfare and other forms of state-sanctioned violence, but this is not the case. Oxford economist Max Roser (founder of the online resource Our World in Data) has used figures compiled by Dr. Peter Brecke to visually represent the death rates per capita from war and other state-led violence from 1400 through current times. This chart factors in the growing human population by only showing per-capita death rates. It shows that while we have enjoyed a period of remarkably low death rates from war and state violence for over a decade now, the overall rate of human destruction has been measurably higher than it was in the supposedly benighted pre-modern world. When we consider everything in aggregate, there is much to be concerned over regarding the fruits of modernity (or lack thereof). In a July 9, 2021 interview with David Armstrong, Hart concluded that “we have arrived at a moment in the post-industrial age in which we are literally killing the world and nothing less than that.” (See also Our Only World by Wendell Berry.)

None of this means that the blessings of modern, representative government at regional, national or international levels should be denied. All of us living in the modern world should be grateful for advances in civic institutions (not to mention science, medicine, and technology), and these many blessings should certainly be preserved. However, nothing about these modern goods is necessarily in conflict with the regrowth of dense regional webs of human institutions such as craft guilds, schools, local food production networks, a diversity of religious traditions, and even clans and dynasties of various kinds. In the interview above, David Bentley Hart argued that this vision is much like the ideas of Christian distributism (promoting layers of local, stateless authority through layered and organic human collectives or solidarities). A similar vision is advanced in Rowan Williams’s book from last year, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition. To be clear, this proposal upholds the secular nation state as a good to be preserved while maintaining that a host of alternative authorities and sacred allegiances can coexist with the secular nation state as people give their time and trust to the network of other institutions and traditions that can claim their loves. This simply means that we should find any opportunity that we can to give and to receive help from organizations close at hand and that our default should be to celebrate when a neutral museum becomes a particular place of prayer.

At this post-Christian juncture in world history, David Bentley Hart points to the apocalyptic thrust of Christ’s gospel, saying that God’s kingdom is uniquely capable of remembering all that has ever been faithful and lovely so that it can be given a home, even if that home is no more than one human heart filled with love for truly human things (to echo the title of Vigen Guroian’s beautiful book, Rallying The Really Human Things). Hart calls for us to diligently seek out, champion, and reassemble (in new and organic forms) all that is good, true and beautiful from all of the ancient human cultures that once covered our planet. Within Roland in Moonlight, he confides his “unwillingness to relinquish any dimension of anything that I find appealing or admirable… or beautiful” (326). He says this too in his critique of Peter Sloterdijk’s After God (Commonweal, July 2021): “The configurations of the old Christian order are irrecoverable now, and in many ways that is for the best” because “disencumbered of both nostalgia and resentment” we might be “eager to gather up all the most useful and beautiful and ennobling fragments of the ruined edifice of the old Christendom so as to integrate them into better patterns.” Hart pleads for a return to the “apocalyptic novum of the event of the Gospel in its first beginning” so that we might draw “renewed vigor from that inexhaustible source” and “imagine new expressions of the love it is supposed to proclaim to the world, and new ways beyond the impasses of the present.”

Exemplifying this, the Very Rev. Dr. Archimandrite John Manoussakis was one of the minority voices in the Greek church who celebrated when the Hagia Sophia went from museum to mosque. Born in Athens, Greece, and educated in the United States (Ph.D., Boston College), as well as being a monastic, John Manoussakis was ordained to the priesthood in 2011 (Archdiocese of Athens). He currently serves as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) and as an editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion (Brill). In June 23, 2017, he described a “first visit to Hagia Sophia” when he was “disappointed with my disappointment” because he “was not moved, overwhelmed, amazed” as he “had expected to be.” He wondered if this “had something to do with the fact that Hagia Sophia is a museum.” Three years later, following the announcement that the Hagia Sophia would again become a mosque, Dr. Manoussakis wrote that we should “welcome this decision recognizing in it a victory of the polymorphous sacred over the monotonous secular laïcité.” If the church “cannot be again a place of worship to the living God,” he considered it “much preferable . . .to be used as a living place of worship to God than a mausoleum for the ghosts of the past.”

This is a Christian view of things. It is a view of the matter that is not caught up by the ideological fights to which both Muslim and Christian have been reduced by secularism. This view of the case simply claims that it is better for there to be some kind of prayer taking place than none at all—for there to be human life in the place of a graveyard.

Jesse Hake is the director of ClassicalU.com and the former principal of Logos Academy in York, Pennsylvania. He is a parishioner at Holy Apostles Orthodox Church in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.