The Devout Life

We all know it happened. Most who have thought about it have given it names and attempted to date it, trace its philosophical ancestry. I have sometimes called it The Asteroid, in reference to the massive change of all life on earth that was supposedly brought about at the end of the age of the dinosaurs. A change so radical, so deeply rooted, so all-encompassing, that the world of our grandparents is more alien to us than the world of tenth century Germany would have been to Jane Austen.

It is this Before Time to which I am referring, half unconsciously, when I talk about a restoration of the traditional society. But we are all children of the Changed World. How can we ever internalize its lost presuppositions? I think we cannot, but we can rebuild what we are able to rebuild for those who come after us.

(As you can see, we have moved far from questions of Catholic liturgy, or even of Catholic doctrine and disciplines. This matter of Traditionalism is more broad even than that.)

"The effects of the introduction of this [Darwinian] pseudomythos into Western Culture can scarcely be overestimated. C. S. Lewis, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, makes a strong and well-substantiated case for the contention that between the early nineteenth century and the twentieth there was a change so radical "a transmutation of culture so complete" that it far exceeded all the changes that had taken place throughout the rest of Western history. He argues that between the age of Jane Austen and the very earliest Western civilisations known was a greater kinship than between her age and ours: that they were, for all their differences, together on one side of the divide and we on the other.

"We do not have to go so far in order to uphold the view that a cultur­al change of quite enormous proportions took place during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Nevertheless (and bearing in mind that Professor Lewis was only considering the patriarchal Iron Age in the Western world and had not seen the Eclipse) this contention is worthy of serious consideration. Never before had the world seen a substantialist culture. The changes in literature, thought and all other areas of life were phenomenal. While the philosophy of substantialism had been with us since these seventeenth century, it had not penetrated the blood and bones of the culture, and then, relatively suddenly, it did. The world was quite rapid­ly transmogrified into a different place.

In many ways, the human soul suddenly found itself cast adrift ” cut off from all its metaphysical moor­ings. And the world itself was, or rather appeared to be, cut off from its moorings. The things about us, seemingly severed from their oontological roots in the Celestial Archetypes became to us but random accidents floating in an aimless, meaningless void. For the first time in history, the mass of educated people, as opposed to a handful of hard-line theoreticians prepared to think substantiaism through to the bitter end, were suddenly cast into an accidental, non-Essential cosmos.

"From this psychological earthquake flow innumerable consequences, from the neurotic iconoclasm of Cubism, Dada, atonal music and modernist poetry to the extreme political fanaticisms of the twentieth century. All reflect a world where Form and order, and consequently all sense of proportion have departed. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the "mod­ernism" of the twentieth century was by no means uniformly malevolent. The tide of battle had turned decisively in favour of substantialism, but the war was not over, and great things yet remained to be done before the Eclipse closed off all healthy possibilities."