Essays on Modernity: And the Permanent Things from Tradition

Essays on Modernity covers a wide range of topics, but the essential thesis remains the same throughout; contemporary Western society has abandoned the permanent things of tradition in favor of fleeting pleasures, self-worship, and the secular rationalizations that justify them. But the West is by no means doomed. It can survive and thrive if its citizens can only recover what they chose to lose: their pursuit of truth and beauty, their academic rigor and intellectual integrity, their Christian morals and mores. If these essays share a theme it is the critical relation between an idea or ideal that belongs to the intellectual patrimony of Christendom and modernity, that nexus of cultural pathologies which while it offers unbounded technical progress involves the unwary and unguarded in spiritual desolation. Ours is an age of revolution which was incipient in the fall of Lucifer, prophesied by the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and perfected in the series of wars between the motley crew committed to the defense of Eliot’s permanent things, broadly the flawed, humane, Christian tradition, and the apostles of modernity, that succession inaugurated by Ockham and perfected in his contemporary auxiliaries, Richard Rorty and Peter Singer