First and Second Things

I have often pooh-poohed the Christian appropriation of the first commandment: to have no other God, to refrain from making idols. This command was given to ancient Israel, for whom polytheism and idolatry were real options. But today polytheism and idolatry are hardly temptations. Judeo-Christian monotheism has won the battle with paganism (see DB Hart's, "Christ and Nothing"). In place of Ba'al and Serapis, moderns have substituted a new-agey pantheism and a relativistic nothing-ism.

Christians have converted idolatry to a metaphor-of-sorts, in that it no longer signifies the making of images of a god. I do not know when this shift first emerged, but the principle behind it is suggested by St. Paul, who noted that human beings "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25).

I have come around. I now recognize that serving and worshiping the creature rather than the Creator is THE idolatrous temptation of the modern Christian. What influenced me first was John Paul the Great's moral-philosophical method based on Jesus' command to love God and neighbor in Love and Responsibility (1960). More recently I have found meaningful CS Lewis's simple distinction between first and second things: "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." (Walter Hooper argues that this theme permeates Lewis's work; I think I agree.)

Christians believe that the human person was designed to find completion only in God; one hungers for God because unification with God is the goal of human life. God is therefore the person's first thing. Everything else, even another person, is a second thing at best.

Thus, for Christians idolatry is the subordination (a placing beneath in importance) of one's first thing, God, to a second thing. The human person may attempt to fill that longing for God with second things, but this results in the loss of the second thing too. For Lewis, seeking God first, and subordinating all other things to this -- our primary good -- results in finding the joy that God intended in created things.

Obviously Jesus's words echo here: "seek first the kingdom of God...and all these things will be added to you" (Matthew 6:33). And what can go wrong with the person was identified by St. Thomas Aquinas: "Men were led to idolatry first by disordered affections, inasmuch as they bestowed divine honors upon someone whom they loved or venerated beyond measure." [8.4.08]