The Uses of Idolatry unites William Cavanaugh’s well-established scholarship at the intersection of ethics and sacramental theology with his more recent reflection on the relationship between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ to offer a theological account of some of the most pressing political and economic issues of our time. In it, Cavanaugh rejects flat secularisation narratives for the ways that they obscure forms of devotion that saturate everyday life. Even as it seems that worship of the Jewish and Christian God has indeed receded in the West, there has been an expansion of worshipful relationships towards many other things: commodities, nations and more. Through close readings of Max Weber and Charles Taylor in the book’s first two chapters, Cavanaugh argues that to call ours a ‘secular age’ is more ideological than empirical. It is not so much a description of the way the world is but the way we have come to understand it. What is needed to address the gap between this inherited understanding of the world and the way we actually experience it, he proposes, is a theology of idolatry.
Scripture, theology and phenomenology form the foundation of his account (in chapters 3-5). In attending to scripture, Cavanaugh shows the ways that idolatry emerges not only to name the worship of other gods but also to name an inordinate attachment to any thing that is not God. In an extended consideration of Augustine’s theology, Cavanaugh shows how idolatry surfaces as a kind of self-worship in which we become dominated by the gods of our own creation. And in his engagement with the phenomenological thought of Jean-Luc Marion, Cavanaugh draws out a sympathetic treatment of the idol – one that builds on Augustine’s view of idolatry as a form of narcissism but that also takes seriously the ways that idols serve as limited yet authentic revelations of the divine. These three witnesses form an account of idolatry through which Cavanaugh attempts to unveil the differing degrees to which we all worship badly in modernity, even as he seeks to shed light on the true longings to which such idolatries often testify.
He models this approach in chapters 6 and 7 by offering an account of two contemporary idolatries: nationalism and consumerism, respectively. Expanding on Marion’s underdeveloped concept of ‘splendid’ idolatry – a form of idolatry in which one is given over to something larger than the self – Cavanaugh shows how nationalism calls forth virtues like self-sacrifice. But while nationalism invites transcendence of the individual self, it ultimately results in a form of collective narcissism with the capacity for lethal violence. While Cavanaugh considers consumerism to be an ‘unsplendid’ idolatry because it does not carry the same potential virtues of service and care for others as nationalism, he still approaches it with an openness to ambivalence. He shows how longings for created things – even for commodities – often represent a search for meaning and transformation. But ultimately, capitalist consumerism invests things with a kind of divinity that drains life from human persons. In his accounts of both nationalism and consumerism, Cavanaugh reveals a modern world that is hardly disenchanted. Instead, he argues, our worship of many things that are not God produces a world that is deeply misenchanted.
Cavanaugh grounds his constructive proposal – an antidote for idolatry – in an incarnational sacramentality (chapter 8). Where idolatry is an attempt to bring God within our grasp, the incarnation attests to God’s self-emptying descent into the world, revealing all of creation as a sacrament of God’s presence. Drawing on Marion’s distinction between idol and icon, Cavanaugh argues that where idols serve as mirrors of the self, icons serve as a gateway to participation in God. The sacraments in general and the Eucharist in particular, then, are ritual practices par excellence of such participation, making the invisible manifest in the visible. They are charged with the potential to remedy idolatry, he argues, because they are concrete manifestations of a particular encounter with Jesus Christ. The divinised ‘we’ embodied in the idolatry of nationalism stands in stark contrast to the divinised ‘we’ that is the body of Christ. The idolatry of consumerism that invests things with divinity while objectifying people stands in stark contrast to the self-offering of the Eucharist that brings people to new life. The Eucharist does not work automatically to heal idolatry, he argues, but its fruits call us to conform our lives to Christ in ways that resist idolatry.
Ranging across disciplines and discourses with an extensive bibliography, The Uses of Idolatry represents the most nuanced articulation of core themes of Cavanaugh’s larger corpus to date and extends them in new directions. While he is neither the first to launch a theological critique of theories of secularisation nor the first to draw attention to the myriad ways in which the ‘sacred’ has in some sense migrated into the ‘secular’, Cavanaugh’s meticulous account of idolatry as a way to meaningfully transcend the sacred/secular binary is rich with potential to deepen reflection at the intersection of theology and ethics in our present cultural milieu. Particularly praiseworthy is the consistent care with which he approaches his core topics of nationalism and consumerism. His attentiveness to the ways in which even our idolatries have the capacity to express a longing for God yields a more refined account of consumerism than in past works. In so doing, he shows that the persistent worship of things that are not God demands more of theologians than mere ham-fisted denunciations of a ‘disenchanted modernity’. Instead, Cavanaugh writes with extraordinary self-reflection and empathy to model a faithful ambivalence that is both more adequate empirically and more nuanced theologically.
While Cavanaugh’s lucid account of our modern idolatries signals an important development in the overall trajectory of his work, I am less persuaded by his proposal that the Eucharist can remedy these idolatrous failings in this age. He engages meaningfully with critiques of his past work from people like Kate Grimes and myself who have surfaced the empirical limits of his frequent turn to the Eucharist as an ethical antidote to the ills of culture. Importantly, he acknowledges here that the Eucharist can and has been celebrated in idolatrous ways, that the sacraments do not work automatically and that he does not mean to imply that Christ’s presence is dependent on human activity. Yet his reassertion of the Eucharist as a privileged site of resistance to idolatries like consumerism and nationalism does not do enough to contend with the subtle and insidious ways these idolatries have penetrated even into sacramental practices like the Eucharist. In a time when the very idolatries to which Cavanaugh carefully draws our gaze in this book have intensified in alarming ways – through forces sustained in no small part by Christian communities rooted deeply in the Eucharist – a more thoroughgoing account of such complicities will be necessary. Indeed, the ultimate hope toward which The Uses of Idolatry so brilliantly drives demands it.
