There’s been a lot of comment here about anti-intellectualism and modernism. It seems to me profoundly anti-intellectual to think it is even possible to reject wholesale the predominant mode of thought in our Western Society. I should think the notion that it is possible to reconstruct one’s mindset to align it with that of someone in a pre-modern era itself a construct made possible by modern thinking. I have a friend who did convert to Eastern Orthodoxy because, after reading all he could on it and following internet discussion boards he decided it was the closest to the authentic voice of the Christian Church founded by Christ. He had to be rebaptised, since his new Church did not recognise his Catholic baptism. He struggled with the ethnic aspects, and when he said, on one of those internet boards that he did not think it possible to unthink his Western intellectual heritage, he found himself rebuked by several men who said they had done just that. Examining the exchange, it seems to me like a rush to see who could close his mind the most. It struck me as a bit of shame that group did not follow its own logic and give up the Internet, which was surely the product of the Enlightenment thinking they were rejecting; they could all have retired to the cave of Adullam together and followed the shadows on the wall. They would, not doubt, have been the purest remnant possible.
It found myself, as I do here, wondering at what point Christianity so lost its self-confidence that it found it necessary to reject several hundred years of thinking and opt for some ‘Golden Age’ view of itself? In its journey through the ages, Christianity has shown itself remarkably adept at finding in the thinking of all ages what is of God, and adapting it to God’s purposes. This business of insisting on not heeding voices of reform and of standing on the past is particularly relevant as we mark the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his theses to the door of the Cathedral (which of course he never actually did). If you look at what he was condemning, much of it most of us, would condemn. If Christians were, as seems to have been the case, being told they could buy time off purgatory by buying indulgences, then I expect our Catholic friends here would say that they were not being told what their Church truly taught; yet that was what they were being told. I mention that not to get into a discussion on it, but to show that reform is a constant necessity in any organisation led by fallen humans.
Do I reject ‘nationalism’, no, I don’t, because I reject the notion that it is inevitably association with atheist thought and anti-clerical; it was in nineteenth century Europe, and it was in reaction to that Pope Pius condemned it. Neither do I reject ‘liberalism’ – and I doubt anyone does. It gives us freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and if any Church finds these things a threat, it needs to ask itself what Truth has to fear from either of these things? In our time the real danger to the Faith comes from those who believe in neither and wish the enthrone a narrow, secularist, anti-religious viewpoint as the norm.
The Enlightenment took many forms, not one, and it may be that some of the things to which it gave birth severely frightened religious establishments then, and now. To think we can stop the process of change or turn back the clock is wishful thinking; what we could, if we engaged, do, is Christianise that process – as we have in the past and will do so again. For those who wonder how this might be done, I highly recommend reading the encounter between Jurgen Habermas and Benedict XVI – a summary of which can be found here. It may, of course, be significant that that discussion was not being carried on the Anglosphere with its unfortunate tradition of entrenched opposition between reason and faith, and that the atheist view was being taken up by a genuine intellectual as opposed to Richard Dawkins.
Modern and modernist ideas are part of the air we breathe, and to think we can unthink ideas is the sort of conservatism which gets conservatism a bad name. By all mean defend the last ditch – but there is a reason it smells – it is full of dead matter. We fight the good fight in faith, confident that if Truth is with us, it will prevail. If we don’t believe that, perhaps we should find a cave on Athos and wait for the end – and leave the struggle to those who don’t think that all valuable contributions to human thought stopped at some point in the nineteenth century?
I find Father Benedict to be a great Western mind.
I think you hit on the head right here, “I should think the notion that it is possible to reconstruct one’s mindset to align it with that of someone in a pre-modern era itself a construct made possible by modern thinking.”
A part of my does quietly laugh to myself when I speak to my Russian Orthodox friend—who was born in the west– talk about it pejoratively. You’ve put it into words my feelings of “You’re doing it right now.”
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a part of me*
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Thank you Philip. As I say, I have a friend who did, and indeed does, just the same. The mere fact he’s doing it shows he thinks it possible to construct an identity separate from the one he developed naturally – which seems a very post-modern thing to be thinking.
Benedict is indeed a formidable intellect, but we have others, and I see no reason to go cowering in the face of some construct called ‘modernism’. I read the whole of the encyclical condemning it and came away, as I often do from such encounters, feeling as though I’d had a Chinese meal – full on completion, but empty again quite soon.
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I’m not necessarily a proponent of modernism. I think my thoughts on the matter blended in the idea of faith and reason.
I think at the same time, we must not generalize assertions made against modernism, as well as define what is meant by the term modernism.
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Good points here, Geoffrey – and good to have you back, I hope the holiday was a good one?
I feel much the same way. Every time I see someone taking a pot shot at someone like Tina Beattie, I think why carp, why not set out why you find her arguments in whatever area so unconvincing?
We are back in the age of the Fathers here to some extent – and the better for it. We no longer have the option, as a Church, of telling people to shut up, banning their books and forbidding people from reading such books. That was never a good thing for the Church to be doing. You are quite right, you cannot unthink an idea – all you can do, if you are up to it, is challenge it and show why it is a bad idea – or if one is not up to it, leave it to others – a line I increasingly take 🙂
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Thank you. Yes, good to see the grandchild and the one in utero. Mrs S very excited, me trying to pretend I am not 🙂
I think you are right. We must have in our churches intellects who can challenge bad ideas and help drive them out – and if you’ll pardon me, I don’t see you leaving it to others 🙂
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Congratulations to you all – what good news.
You are too kind. In many ways I wish I’d spent more time on this subject than a busy career allowed for.
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C, I for one would like a little more clarity on your statement here. For instance, if Tina Beattie was a flunk out from medical school but sold herself to the public as a medical doctor would it be OK to carp about her (especially to the medical authorities) as why she is being allowed to hang a sign on her door that says, M.D.? Or would I need to go to medical school so that I could refute her malpractice? Is the only recourse to confront her in the marketplace of ideas in order to convince people not to go to her or take her advice? Or is it OK to carp to the medical authorities in hopes that they will remove her license and the fraudulent use of medical credentials? Seems that her use of the Catholic Theologian credential is about the same thing; malpractice. I don’t think I need to be another Catholic Theologian to complain when folks are being misled into thinking that she is a licensed Catholic, so to speak.
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In terms of representing herself as a Catholic thinker, that is matter for the Church to sort out, not me. Having been beset myself by academic Macarthyism, I should be the last to wish it on another. If the Church says she, like Kung, cannot represent herself as a Catholic thinker, that is its right, and in so far as my view matters, I rather think it ought to; but I do not think it has – though I may be in error.
She does not, I think, represent herself as a theologian, which is as well as she isn’t. But if she is Professor of something called ‘Catholic Studies’, then unless the Church says she can’t be, she is.
All of that said, you’d have to be not even at the Catholicism for Dummies 101 stage to mistake what she says for orthodoxy.
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As an ordinary working man who saved his hard earned money and sent their child to a Catholic School and they took Catholic Studies from this woman I doubt anyone would be surprised if I did a bit of carping.
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Another one of these expert fruitcakes. I always ask why doesn’t she just leave ? How are these fringe ideas allowed to exist in the Church? There are plenty of options, to me it has nothing to do with faith, but rather she needs wants a cause. It has become about her and not God.
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I just goes to show that there are always going to be snake oil salesmen who are willing to make a living by selling a witches brew replete with eye of newt if someone will be fool enough to buy it.
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That’s for your church to decide Philip. I assume she’s one of those who is staying in to bring the rest of you cavemen into the light of Sophia’s wisdom – or something similar?
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I doubt anyone capable of studying at a university would mistake her for orthodox. There is now, however, one very good Catholic school. St Mary’s University, Twickenham, which I’d recommend to anyone with a serious interest in their faith.
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How sad it is that we get excited when a Catholic University actually teaches Catholicism but finding one that does is extremely good news.
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There’s always one – the problem is that’s often all there is!
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Rather a pity and it is very much like that in the US as well. In normal merchandising we would call this fraud and put the offenders in prison or hit them with a big fine and lawsuit. But in education they get to advertise themselves as anything they want without so much as a peep from anyone except for the poor parents who were fleeced and had no idea of what they were sending the kids to learn.
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Alas, that’s very true.
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We may have 20-30 good Catholic colleges or universities in the US but they are not the ones that most people traditionally think of: Notre Dame, Georgetown and Marquette etc. lost their Catholic identity many years ago.
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It is a great shame that the Venerable Eccles only comments on this blog in his humorous way to counter the Clown (his “brother” in the mythology he created in these past years).
Since my departure from the traditional Catholic group that Eccles was a part of, I have not seen much constructive contribution from them and it would be a pity if all we did was wasted time. We did some good work.
However, I am still sure that the view I expressed last August here, that militant internet factions are harmful, still holds true. I do not think lurking in anonymous shadows benefits any dialogue. It’s like having a Panamanian accountant.
Or maybe Eccles would disagree?
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Far be it for me to need to come to the defense of (did the tongue in cheek Venerable need to be used?) Eccles as I do not know the man other than through his occassional humor; and I do get a chuckle from it quite often. You apparently must know him quite well and feel some animus for him for which only you know the reason. Whether he adds to some constructive contribution or not is rather a point of view. At times a break from the discussions and a bit of laughter is a form of contribution.
I do much that has no end in mind other than to defend a strongly held conviction or to learn from questions and challenges to these convictions which further my ability to not only answer any doubts that I may personally have so I might have a ready answer to those who ask them. It is not a waste of time to me, personally, and it may not be in the inner workings going on in the mind of Eccles. I assume that has something to do with his interior life. It might not be mine or yours but it is his. Thank God for the range of contributions . . . some are direct, others humorous, and some are scholarly, historical, theological or spiritual. I see no point in evauating and delivering ad hominems his way. It would be better perhaps to see a point that you find fault in and criticize it. You haven’t delivered that criticism yet.
There are folks who lurk in the shadows and come out to snipe and then run away. Then there are others who at least confront the man on their point (if Bosco had one) and show its silly nature. Not that we need proof of it but his method of responding is at least funny. Ad hominems in Bosco’s instance are usually the only thing that can be done as there usually isn’t a point in most of what he writes but at times there are.
In a little website like this where we know one another and usually like one another there isn’t much constructive contribution other than getting to know each other better and making our arguments more cogent. I don’t see arrogant, self-righteousness around every corner. I see people honing better understandings of what they believe and why they believe it. You seem to think that there is some kind of militant internet faction at work here; possibly because you were in one?
This is, or was, a place where we could each express, or try to express ourselves without any inhibitions. But if we are just going to be drive-by shooters of individuals it surely seems to be more like a vendetta of sorts rather than a helpful and constructive contribution. I know that I now feel inhibited here . . . limiting myself to non-controversial questions or a simple straight forward answer. I’m sure you mean well, but I wonder if you are having the opposite effect of shutting down discourse.
I don’t know what drives you or motivates you in this matter and it is of no business of mine anyway. You, like the rest of has the opportunity to jot down what you are thinking and that is great. It is just sad that a lecture and/or criticism of someone or some conversation or some argument being carried on as being useless, harmful and off-putting to others has a chilling effect. If I were Eccles I think this comment might have put me off a bit but I, personally, would respond. But then, as you say, he have a chance to respond or not; that is his privilege and I respect it which ever way he chooses to handle it.
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Dave – there is a history here, which you (probably) aren’t so aware of. Long before this blog started, there was a blog run by Damian Thompson as part of ‘The Telegraph’ web site. Although I’m not certain about this, I’m convinced that the person behind Eccles was also responsible for a bunch of other characters, which refused to engage in any dialogue, but simply came in, made some entertaining and at the same time cutting and nasty comments and then left. Nobody knew who he was and (in these personae) he refused any interaction.
It’s quite different with you. Before you were ‘Servus Fidelis’ and then you quite openly changed to ‘Dave Smith’. I think this was a bad move, because you never know who is reading the internet or how they will react to what is written. Not everybody has all five planks (as they put it in Polish) and some people who don’t like what you write may be ordinary every day machete-wielding maniacs. Having a screen name different from your own gives a minor degree of protection. While you were Servus Fidelis, everybody knew who the Servus Fidelis character was, you wrote comments, people responded to them, you responded to the replies and there was a discussion. With the characters that the person behind Eccles came up with, there was nothing of that. Simply some clever-clever post (these were often entertaining) and point blank refusal to reveal the character behind the post (since there were a bunch of different identities) and point blank refusal to engage in dialogue.
It didn’t bother me, but I know why it bothers Gareth. I came away with the impression, ‘oh, the Catholic church is for clever-clever supercilious people who enjoy ripping the lungs out of those who don’t agree with them and do this hiding behind a cloak of anonymity’. It didn’t give a very good impression of the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ or whatever spirit was driving it. I’m not a Catholic and therefore this doesn’t bother me so much. It bothers Gareth precisely because he is a Catholic and it makes his church look bad.
To Gareth I’d say – loosen up, man. These internet discussions are a piece of fun. Of course, we’re discussing serious things, but I personally come to the internet for light relief either when I’m writing something hard and technical which is making my head hurt, or else when I’m sterilising bottles before feeding my son. It’s only light relief; internet discussions are not a serious business.
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When I placed the above comment 4 hours ago mentioning ‘every day machete-wielding folk’, I hadn’t read this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/07/bangladeshi-blogger-killed-by-machete-wielding-attackers/
Please Dave Smith, Gareth Thomas – stop using your real names. If you simply stick to a single alias, then the rest of us know enough about your character and religious / political outlook to interact with you – stating your real name adds nothing of importance and can give casual onlookers some unfortunate ideas.
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Thanks, for that Jock. It just seemed rather odd because it seemed as if Gareth just launched an unprovoked attack for no reason other than a deep seated anger with Eccles.
Being an American with 2nd Ammendment rights is why I didn’t care about revealing my name. I’ve got nothing to hide anyway.
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Thanks for the concern about our usernames. I’ll give it some thought and perhaps take your advice. I ought to use Fats Waller in honor of your concern.
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Yes, as much as I don’t like Beattie – all that you say is true – and my remarks below to the Venerable Eccles should be an opportunity for his response.
Of course he never does respond. He is always above such tedious matters as considering responses to his humorous and impregnable commentary!
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One reason I have always been in favour of freedom of speech is the feeling that I would be one of the first to be shut up if it went, and having been, in the recent past, the subject of an attempt to do just that, I am the last person to advocate it. I am not sure I should defend to the death Professor Beattie’s right to say what she wants, but that’s just cowardice on my part; I would, however, be the last to advocate silencing her. We know where that leads, and as a society we are, I fear, going back there.
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Geoffrey – I’d like some basic definitions here – what does ‘modernism’ entail? I thought I had some idea and I thought that I was anti-modernist when I saw that modern trends were against keeping Sunday as a day of rest and that the situation had disintegrated markedly over the last 30 years (shops open, Sunday drinking, Sunday sport, etc …..).
Reading the major prophets of the Old Testament, it’s quite clear that Judah was in good shape, Spiritually and economically when they kept the Sabbath; it was when they were relaxed about Sabbath observance that it all went horribly wrong. I’m waiting for the divine wrath that is bound to follow the decisions to play premier league football on Sundays, to have Sunday as the final day of The Open (golf) which started at Muirfield in 1980, to have Sunday for the men’s final at Wimbledon, to allow shops to open on Sundays and to allow pubs to serve on Sundays. I can’t see that any of this was a good move. I’m strongly anti-modernist in the sense that I abhor these changes that have taken place over the last 30 years.
I now discover that ‘modernism’ essentially means anything post 1600 (or at least that was the impression that No Man’s Land seemed to give) – so I’m now a little lost as to what exactly it means.
I’d also like some basic definition of anti-intellectualism. I have no problem with some learned books and with using our God-given brains, just as long as we bear in mind that Jesus chose highly intelligent, but uneducated fishermen as his disciples, who earned a living catching fish and didn’t have time to do a university degree in theology.
Some work on theology seems well worth reading and seems to put us on the right track (for example I’d recommend ‘The Mediator’ by Emil Brunner to anybody) but there is much nonsense that does seem far too ‘intellectual’ and makes ‘anti-intellectualism’ look like a good idea.
So you have to be a little more specific before I understand what you’re writing about.
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Jcck – In the RCC it is something a bit more specific. This last part from Wikipedia is not too bad:
“The final overall teaching of Modernism is that dogmata (the teachings of the Church, which its members are required to believe) can evolve over time – not only in their expression but also in their substance – rather than remaining the same in substance for all time. This postulate was what made Modernism unique in the history of heresies in the Church. Previously, a heretic (someone who believed and taught something different from what the rest of the church believed) would either claim that he was right and the rest of the Church was wrong because he had received a new revelation from God, or that he had understood the true teaching of God which had previously been understood but was later lost. Both of these scenarios almost inevitably led to an organisational separation from the Church (schism) or the offender’s being ejected from it (excommunication). Using the new idea that doctrines evolve, it was possible for the modernist to believe that both the old teachings of the Church and his new, seemingly contradictory teachings were correct — each group had its time and place. This system allows almost any type of new belief which the modernist in question might wish to introduce, and for this reason Modernism was labelled by Pope Pius X as “the synthesis of all heresies”.
The “evolution of dogma” theory (see Development of doctrine), much in the manner of Luther’s theory of salvation sola fide (‘by faith alone’) allows for a constant updating of standards of morality.[citation needed] The phrase sola fide derives from Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium, a Eucharistic hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas: et si sensus deficit, | ad firmandum cor sincerum | sola fides sufficit.[citation needed] Since majority moral standards shifted heavily during the 20th century, Catholics not accepting the theory were placed in the position of having to abstain from receiving Communion if they wished to engage in some of the actions of some of their fellow-religionists. As for the others, the theory that dogma can change enabled them, as they saw it, to “update” Catholic morality while not being concerned with possible contradictions.”
For the whole article, see here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(Roman_Catholicism)
Outside of the Catholic Church modernism can mean a host of other things.
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Ah ha – thanks. Now we have a working definition. Then I understand what ‘modernism’ means in this context – and (based on this definition) it’s clearly a bad thing.
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This offers a decent set of indicators:
http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/modernism.html
Like you, I always had it down as essentially the consumer society and its incessant demands for all the time we have to be spent shopping, but yes, it seems it goes back further. It sometimes seem like a ‘stop the world I want to get off’ thing – something I can sympathies with. But the world isn’t going to stop, and if we want to witness to Christ, the bright ones among us have to be able to go head to head with the secularist intellectuals.
Some of what I was saying was a reaction to QV’s post on Monday.
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Thanks for the definition. Based on this definition, modernism is clearly a good thing and we should have more of it.
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Just a few things that I think need to be cleared up, since this post seems to be aimed at me, if only indirectly:
1) As an Orthodox, outside the 7 ecumenical councils, and of course there is also the matter of the what the councils really said, the licit range of theological opinion is pretty wide, so I think there is a great deal of room for development and theological creativity and of seeing things anew within Tradition and the Church. We don’t have a magisterium in the East. Some Orthodox don’t like this, but that’s the reality.
2) There is no turning back the clock. Imo, modernism, as I said to Jess in a previous thread, sets itself up in opposition to Christianity, its values are the rejection of, the flight from, Christian values. Take a look at the West with its late modern consumerist culture, truly consumerist, in Adorno’s terms, its nationalism, colonialism, Western supremacism, capitalism, etc. For instance, nature is no longer theophany in nature, as in the patristic and medieval age, but a machine to be taken apart and studied or an economic commodity to be exploited. And so are human beings. We’ve got to put nature on the rack, as Bacon had it. Or the fact that late modern society is obsessed with fabricating and gratifying desire and removing impediments that block the gratification of desire. To me, such a society is already, at least implicitly, unChristian. Because in such a society there are no final values only price tags and pleasures. And there’s no re-evangelizing the West like Gaul. Gaul was pagan. Paganism and Christianity are not contradictory religious expressions, they’re different expressions of the same religious impulse. But the late modern West has set itself up in opposition to Christianity, at least insofar as its norms and values are concerned.
3) I am not trying to idealize this. Some cultures get things right that other cultures get wrong and vice versa. I mean Aquinas advocated the killing of heretics to save souls. So there’s no reason to idealize this. But I think we have to recognize that every ideology opens up its own special space of possibilities, and the late modern project is, not only historically confused and metaphysically impoverished and logically incoherent, but its possibilities are frightening. And we need to remember that it is precisely an ideology that is at issue here. I think this is kind of what Heidegger was talking about. The idea that nature is essentially machinery is a license to not only study it, but to take it apart, to adjust it, to use it as we deem fit. And, perhaps, it is mere historical coincidence that right around the time that the mechanistic philosophy of early modernism arose, we get also the larger Western project of human mastery over nature, hence the language of Bacon and Leibniz–we’ve got to put nature on the rack, we’ve got to torture her until she yields her secrets, etc. And, I suppose just coincidentally, the early modern period was the beginning of nationalism, colonialism, political absolutism, the new imperialism, capitalism, and so forth.
But it was also the beginning of the ideological notion that all truth is quantitative in form, measurable, and that questions that cannot be put in this form are meaningless, which found its ultimate philosophical expression in logical positivism and its ultimate cultural expression in the New Atheism. Which is why I think evangelical, or at least fundamentalist, Christianity is not the rejection of modernism, but merely a product of it, for it agrees with this basic metaphysical principle–all truth is scientific or historical. God is just a demiurge, Scripture is just, largely, a history book, etc.
The mechanistic approach to the world, I heard someone say, is nothing but ontological obliviousness translated into a living tradition–the ‘that it is’ and the ‘what it is’ are no longer distinct questions.
So, yes, I think any society concerned primarily with purchasing things and fabricating and gratifying desire is unChristian, because transcendent values cannot survive in such a society, as we are seeing–ultimate ends give way to immediate ends.
4) Of course, the Enlightenment was not evil, at least not in itself. Some wonderful things came out of it like Kant, who exercised a great deal of influence over Einstein’s conceptual apparatus. One could probably say that Einstein’s scientific speculations were rooted in a Kantian conceptual scheme. So, I would never be dismissive of the Enlightenment in itself. But, again, we need to recognize that the Enlightenment way of seeing reality, the conceptual picture of the whole of reality, materialism, as it is popularly called, has philosophical implications. It opens up a large array of ideological, practical, and cultural possibilities that other modes of thought would make impossible. It’s not historically inappropriate to point out where this leads: abortion, scientific racialism, Social Darwinism, eugenics, criminological theories of inherited criminality, remedial lobotomies, compulsory sterilizations, the racial ideology of Nazism, the ideologies of the communist totalitarianisms, and, even to move back in time a bit, the wars of religion, which were the birth pangs of the modern nation-state. I don’t think that it is ill-mannered to note that a lack of belief in the Transcendent, of a divine standard of moral truth, then, the great task that opens itself up is, well, the barbarisms of the 20th century. But, again, I am not blaming the Enlightenment or materialism for the terrible evils committed under its banner, in much the same way, I don’t blame Christianity for the destruction of Constantinople. However, we must recognize that every ideology opens up its own special space of possibilities.
5) When you say: “By all mean defend the last ditch – but there is a reason it smells – it is full of dead matter.” I think you are being far to dismissive of other cultures and other ways of thinking, especially ancient and medieval. The late modern West sustains itself on the backs of exploited third world peoples, at least economically, it feeds its palette preference by sadistic slaughter of cows, chickens, pigs, etc something at the rate of like 10 billion a year, it kills its most vulnerable in the womb, it sends out predator drones in the Mideast, and so on. Are we really morally superior? Are we really intellectually superior? Bonaventure reminded us long ago that a mind that does not understand reverence is very close to becoming so enamored with beings that it forgets being in itself.
6) Most upsetting about this post though is that it has made perfectly clear that the ideological tradition of the late modern West has become so prevalent and ingrained that most folks have no idea how to doubt its premises or how to avoid its effects.
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Chaouqui, who has previously implied that Balda is gay, added: “He confided in me about sexual matters which I will not recount in full out of respect for his status as a priest. The habit he wears has a value for me.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-not-sex-priest-vatican-leaks-trial-told-194848548.html
The costume he wears has value to me.
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Listening from the dock, Balda repeatedly rolled his eyes towards the ceiling while Chaouqui received a sharp reprimand from the judge in charge of proceedings.
“This court is not a stage. Keep quiet. The questions are for me to ask,” he told her at one point.
The trial, which many Vatican officials regard as a huge own goal, had been scheduled to continue Thursday but has been adjourned until Monday, the Vatican said later.
The Holy See has been widely criticised for prosecuting journalists for revelations about waste and financial mismanagement which the Church has recognised as well-founded by implementing reforms to address them.
ibid
This sends chills up my spine. The catholic church has a court that tries people for religious crimes. I mean, it always has and its nothing new, but that it still does is scary. A pilgrim with a court and judges. And a jail. Lets go religion shopping.
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