Restorationist Theology for a Decadent Age
There is no grandiose talk here about any end times soon, expected apocalypse, etc. The simple truism is that nations do rise and fall within the course of historical reality. For a few profoundly sentient and truly perspicacious minds, current compilations or supposed extrapolations of various, diverse, and sundry pseudo-moralities and quasi-spiritualisms have the context and smell of an enlarging cesspool.
So, a genuine crisis exists, nonetheless, and whether or not clearly recognized as such; it is, furthermore, decisively civilizational, in its integral depth and definite scope of consideration and meaning, for the (supposedly) rational animals of this fallen world. Could misfortune happen to a virtuous people?
But, the vast majority of the American people, of course, do think of themselves as being morally good (1) [see: notes], though they are just the opposite; no moral people would, e. g., allow for legalized abortion-on-demand as a significant and firm part of its marked national culture, with a bloody and satanic holocaust of over 50 million babies and still counting. A corrupt and degenerate populous actually exist here without question, inclusive of so crescively rampant sodomy, pornography, divorce, serial polygamy/polyandry, etc. And yet, there is a particle (and more) of real hope.
An Institution of Valid Precedence
In the long history of the West, however, what has rescued its classical culture (basic Greco-Roman thought), revived societies and nations, and done more to inspire generations of selfless sacrifice and devotion beyond mere human reason? As was so thoroughly demonstrated by, e. g., Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s The Life of Christ, one may keenly ask about whose birth has been more extensively heralded in all of recorded human history?
What institution and its cognate theology have manifested more proofs of its own holiness and sanctity, unity and universality, apostolicity and veracity than the Church founded by Jesus Christ, meaning the Roman Catholic Church? These three potent questions are, of course, seriously interrelated and more than suggest a single important truth, as to the only real answer available in the face of a monumental social, cultural, and civilizational crisis.
The need for traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholicism, which necessarily includes Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium, the three pillars of the Faith, is made urgent when placed against the clear decline and degeneracy, massive depravity and maniacal decadence, of American and, in general, Western society, culture, and civilization. Thought may be given as to if there is any power that could come, as needed, to successfully reconstitute a social order.
Mere spirituality is not enough. To suggest otherwise is heretical, meaning also logically perverse and morally malicious to an extreme degree. Theology and religion are not antiquated notions of a bygone era; their influences and consequences are still prevalent, though proper discernment of them may, however, take a degree of concrete intelligence in this era. But, what is being talked about?
To the point that needs to be solidly made, heresies, in often unrecognized modernist or postmodernist forms, must be rightly fought against by orthodoxy, if liberty and justice, truth and order, among men are not to be mere semantic terms crushed by the demonic weight of power politics, of Machiavellian duplicity and cunning. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a 19th century atheist-anarchist, ended up astonishing himself one day, when he came to the remarkable realization (for him), that all political disagreements were, at their foundation, actually religious in origin. He had stumbled upon a rather profound truth.
Consideration here is of what has been proven, empirically and historically, to be a creative force for genuine good in terms of restoring and reviving, reestablishing and rebuilding, Western civilization; after the Fall of the once mighty Roman Empire, the Church had to then somehow fill the enormous vacuum created by the disappearance of the once enormous civil infrastructure, if some sort of human order was to be restored, if a needed regeneration was to be effected.
There was certainly no guarantee of any supposed perfection on earth, which is unrealistic nonsense; religious authority, backed by the Gelasian doctrine [Pope Saint Gelasius I] of the two swords that forever prohibits any establishment of a Church-State, was and is the appropriate way to go; the alternative of radicalization, especially collectivist, monolithic, futilitarian, uniformitarian egalitarianism, is always much worse, is always indicative of the oriental despotism of the East.
Neither a theocracy nor a dictatorship, as Lord Acton (1834 – 1902) would have agreed, is, thus, worthy of a free people under God; and, he would have recognized that whatever has been the best of Western civilization has become, more or less, intimately bound up with the forces within the Roman Catholic Church, regardless of the known imperfections of human beings; so, yes, there are qualifications for any such statements.
Failure of Modernity, the God that Failed
Modernist Catholicism, however, contaminated permanently by the truly horrid aftermath of the ill-fated Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965), cannot come to ever provide the foundational theological basis for a fruitful and energizing force for restoration purposes (2); this would only be filled with a creative purpose, through religious orthodoxy, by which the true civilizational needs of people can be manifested by and through an ecclesial structure acting as the intellectual, ethical, moral, and spiritual yeast for a revived, rejuvenated, Western world. Nothing less will do. However, a gargantuan modern State, Hobbes’ Leviathan, is not needed for securing religion in contemporary society or culture.
Theological liberalism and radicalism remains integrally as a true part of the problem inherent within the overall failure of a decadent modernity, as was understood by Christopher Dawson (1889 – 1970); even elements of the postmodernist revolt, moreover, do yet give much quite vivid testimony to modernity’s inadequate spirit, as the various (failed) hopes of positivist, existentialist, pragmatic, phenomenological, etc. efforts fade away into a so well-deserved vacuous nothingness. How may this be easily proven to objective minds?
The evil worship of death has truly reached astonishing proportions, and the gross magnitude of the active seeking of death, the ever celebrated Culture of Death, shows no great signs of decreasing any time soon, if at all. America and the West is, therefore, plagued by ethical, political, social, cultural, moral, and spiritual insanity, on a massively gargantuan scale, never truly seen before in the past annals of recorded history. How so? This is demonstrated openly by the sociocultural centrality of such death worship that shows no signs of abating within the modernist-nihilist context.
As just one sign or indication, among too many to recount here, the demographic winter is upon the Western world in that the population replacement ratio (of the native-born) in the West has gone below 2%, meaning that geometric sterility frighteningly marks the obvious future; the human race, including the non-Western (and Islamic) world as it then further becomes Westernized, is now definitely headed toward a self-chosen extinction, a sure sign of modernity’s utter exhaustion and rather cognate futility. It is, thus, the primary manifestation of a so greatly death-oriented culture with is obvious futilitarian attitude manifesting, at least implicitly, self-contempt.
The aggressive and psychologically attractive Culture of Death has, therefore, become both pervasive and pandemic in scope. A good question, nevertheless, may be critically posed: Why has this occurred as the modern ages have progressed? Reasons can be given. It ought not to be a supposed mystery. The 19th century had believed in the earthly god of Progress; the 20th century was filled with enormous revolutionary optimism, coming out of the late 18th and into the 19th century, by which Progress, aided by wondrous technological mastery, would so usher in the expected Utopia, the New Eden on earth.
Of course, admittedly, such (failed) past history is usually forgotten, in a case of rather too convenient and raw political and ideological amnesia, on a massive scale. What ethically, morally, and spiritually afflicts the modern world, pertaining to its degeneracy, has been mainly due to the secularization of religious heresies, though this fact is usually unrecognized. It is part of the aforementioned amnesia.
And, honestly speaking, the very broad incorporation of such (secularized) heresies just gets generally ignored and is almost never mentioned at all by a secular society and culture plainly blind to or, perhaps, dedicatedly ignorant of needed and contrary religious teachings.
Max Weber, a champion of strident modernity and progress, had once seriously thought that a modern world directed properly by rationalization, bureaucratization, routinization, and secularization would, just logically, lead toward greater degrees of secured humanistic efforts, cultural achievements, and, especially, peace; this was, however, all before his secularist-humanist illusions were forever shattered by the horrors of World War I, of course. He had, also, been an exemplary neo-Pelagian, of course.
While many, for instance, have wrongly attributed the main, sociocultural degenerative results to neo-Gnosticism, however, the real and centrally predominant thrust of energizing justification for most depravity has, in fact, been neo-Pelagianism, the wanted deification of MAN.
The only problem is that many tens of millions must be gratuitously slaughtered, concentration camps must be built, death ovens must be constructed, etc. whenever MAN has been substituted for God. The neopagans want to go their merry way, though obsessed with the worship of death that makes any merriment a merely bizarre illusion having no solid substance, especially in a fallen world.
The anthropocentric point of view has its definite penalties and necessarily demonic results, as Richard M. Weaver, long ago, well noted that ideas have consequences. Utopianism, as a consequence, has substantially seized the contemporary and ill-informed mind, though it is usually rarely recognized for what it really is; modernity has led to the devaluation of human beings who are no longer described as the children of God, only interchangeable parts; assumed “liberation” without Christ has lead inevitably to self-enslavement, to enthrallment to the powers of this world, especially the State.
In solid contrast, only traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholicism can provide what is needed for the restoration of proper conceptions of right order, genuine authority, and legitimate power relationships so vitally necessary for appropriately reconstituting civilization and its many valid requirements. And, Dawson correctly and insightfully knew that religion was the foundation of civilization, not vice versa.
What is being witnessed to is the broad apostasy of the Western world; Christianity is being diminished; neopaganism is spreading because secularism disenchants reality, while not removing the urge toward spirituality; as a result, many variants of advanced mysticism, as a higher form of superstition, replaces religion, though almost never in a Gnostic pattern. But, what must be said?
Analysis of the Intellectual Degeneracy: Spirituality Debased
True Gnosticism, one ought to note for instructive purposes, is necessarily pessimistic and logically made so by its attribution of integral evil to all of materiality by its related Manichean attitudes, by its allied philosophical dualisms; Pelagianism (3) is, by definition, absolutely optimistic and manifests itself, when it gets secularized, through the ardent revolutionary spirit and cognate revolutionary movements, as with Communism, Fascism, and Nazism, concerning certain historically prominent modern examples.
The basic point of the heresy of Pelagianism, as should be known for clarification purposes, was that all people were and simply are born as immaculate conceptions, meaning conceived without sin, without what the theologians call the taint of Original Sin. People are, thus, not to be seen as fallen creatures living in a fallen world. In clear secular terms, this surely means the inherent capacity of assumed perfectionism within human nature, the self-subsistent ability to actually achieve a form or type of earthly nirvana, and notably without any outside or extrinsic metaphysical aids involved. Immanentism surely thrives, within ideologically-spired atmospheres, on this constantly war-torn planet.
Religion or, for that matter, any metaphysical order/superstructure of reality, consequently, is always held to be either totally meaningless or, usually, just superfluous nonsense. Man is, thus, entirely sufficient unto himself, no “god” or gods need to ever exist. Even any, e. g., nontheistic paganism is easily to be then rejected as, ultimately, just childish stuff, mythic superstition, as with all of Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity, though some neo-Gnosticism also afflicts the Western world.
As can be historically perceived, however, the secularization of the ancient Pelagian heresy is, in turn, done through the basic workings of both modern and postmodern ideologies. Utopianism (read: ideological insanity), moreover, is really the true foundation of it all and the final goal being sought is, of course, Utopia itself [a nowhere land] on earth, the New Eden without God. Such a world is without (outdated) notions of judgmental things as guilt, shame, or sin, which, of course, defines contemporary secular society; virtue becomes, in effect, a mere joke related to a supposed antediluvian era.
This Brave New World freely incorporates, e. g., homosexual liberation as a firm part of the accepted mainstream social order with its now militantly pro-sodomite culture; this is also with the spread of so-called transgender rest rooms, being one small indication, among many large and small, of this major overt reality. What may be broadly called “ideologization” has taken hold of the contemporary mind, beyond mere politicization, through the further rationalization and acceptance of evil as being good.
Radicalization, furthermore, of life has now been made to appear entirely normal as plain insanity itself (e. g., the transgender illusion) has been, thus, increasingly normalized as to social practice; there is the widespread celebration of shamelessness as then being normal, not psychotic.
What is not perceived, however, is that the impossible wishes to be concretely achieved, namely, a metaphysical order without any principle of real order (aka God); it amounts to, in essence, an anti-metaphysical metaphysics qua ontology. There is to be the broad sociocultural structure of a society that “worships” godlessness (supreme relativism to the nth degree) as its highest aspiration, though not explicitly often admitted as such; this implies strongly a world with the nonexistence of mortal sin as well as depravity of any kind, shape, or form. Ideas have consequences, however.
Truth, beauty, and grace all become abandoned, as a result, whenever vice, especially such intellectual vice, becomes the new norm. But, all of this is not normally recognized as being, equally, intellectual degeneracy, which is the more immediate crux of the ontological problem presented, though often deliberately disguised by epistemological and axiological verbiage, semantic devices, especially among deracinated hordes of academics, besides the general public at large.
For instance, most of the major thinkers of the modern era, past and present, typically presented to students on college and university campuses by their professors, adamantly celebrate either modernity or postmodernity in the direction of the Culture of Death, either directly or indirectly; furthermore, as Malcolm Muggeridge had intelligently and cogently discussed the matter, the contemporary world wishes to live with the distinct novelty of assuming that God does not really exist.
The modern ideology, e. g., of democratism, as was so very cleverly spawned by J. J. Rousseau in the 18th century, was one manifest example of a secularization of Pelagianism that had produced a form of neo-Pelagianism; Rousseau’s “General Will”, as the terrene mandate to “force” men to be free, was a satanic inspiration if ever there was one; it went well with the Enlightenment’s creation of the (only seemingly) contradictory idea of enlightened despotism, a child of classical Liberalism that was later hypocritically disowned.
The postmodernist ideology of deconstructionism is yet another allied variant, all rooted in philosophical nominalism, that also aims toward supporting neo-Pelagianism and its always heavily, not heavenly, utopian orientation toward an either explicit or usually implicit atheistic culture and society directed toward tyranny, injustice, corruption, and oppression. But, as to the critical point being made here, much more than this is so intimately involved.
Hedonism, materialism, pragmatism, positivism, and, ultimately, nihilism have become the predominant values where (old) subjectivity has become the new objectivity. Modernity in cognition, therefore, has been created by such horrid beliefs contrary to the traditional disciplines of the four cardinal virtues, meaning prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, and, more than that, the three spiritual virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The unfortunate fall of Christendom (4), moreover, had allowed the twin evils of Capitalism and Socialism to reciprocally plague the modern age with their profoundly mutual respect for reified materialism (read: intramundane salvation) made, in effect, sacred.
One ought to come to cogently perceive that people, in the modern era, can find some excuse or other to easily self-justify any intellectual position taken, which is mainly based upon emotion, not reason; rationalization through the clever use of rationalism, not rationality, has substantially replaced clear thinking. The pursuit of virtues, as to the acquiring of them, has been mainly laughed out of existence. There are, of course, known reasons for this unfortunate situation.
Many, e. g., have gone so extremely far as to radically assume that if one has a clear conscience, then objective evil is no longer, for that person, a true evil to be, thus, morally avoided. For instance, an insane application of “Catholic conscience” has it that artificial contraception is not intrinsically evil if an individual Catholic thinks that to be true, which is ever contrary to classical Natural Law (5) teachings, right reason (as such used to be philosophically called), and the explicit doctrines of the Church as well.
Such an immoral choice represents a usually unrecognized extremism, a manifestly radical attitude, which earlier (Christian) ages would have seen to be both abnormal and perverse as is all of sodomy; the latter refers to immorality among either heterosexuals or homosexuals because there is always only a single standard of right versus wrong in proper terms of traditionalist, orthodox Catholicism. Conscience alone, even when aided, perhaps, by reflection, is still no real guarantor of certainty. Mere spirituality is not enough. Nor is rationalism a safe guide.
A modernist or rationalist, therefore, simply assumes that he genuinely has the kind of truly informed conscience of, say, a St. Thomas Aquinas on moral issues of grave importance. As to the larger point, Catholics, in short, are never to assume that they can act as their own popes. The literally frightening results of an absurd universality, applied to moral infallibility, are to be empirically seen in how the majority of Catholics are so freely contracepting at basically the same level as are their non-Catholic neighbors. Thus, Vatican II-style Catholicism has its observed and ever-so-persistent problems.
Secularization (especially as a creeping and implicit atheism) has clear consequences, almost all of which are baleful. These include the radicalization of a society and culture, as is founded upon nominalist principles of thought, as is opposed then forever to traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholicism.
The roots of this matter, of course, go at least way back into European history. Too many Renaissance popes had led worldly lives, at their papal courts, where scandal and corruption had become the norm; they and their willingly debased followers fed into the secular side of the Renaissance with its clear sanctioning of neopaganism, individualism, humanism, hyper-masculinity, and egotism as means of imitating the classical Greco-Roman world. And, what were among the seriously dreadful results?
All this had logically contributed, in turn, to the weakening of religious orthodoxy. As a clear sign of Christendom, the Medieval Age’s once requisite theological-spiritual tension of subordinating individual human wills to the Will of God, along with the Cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s resultant raising of womanhood, had been substantially broken. The ever expanding exaltation of self, the ego, marks the rise of modernity in human thought, along with the deification of MAN.
It was, thus, not very surprising that Protestantism, with its own form of religious individualism, came forcefully into existence to further the ongoing radicalization of society and culture toward greater and greater degrees of blatant heterodoxy; ideas have consequences. The diminishment of God, therefore, ironically forges the need for a terrene messianism, as consequent immanentism spreads its web across all corners of the human psyche, with its goal being intramundane salvation through the modern State qua massive Leviathan.
The pervasive secular-humanist point of view has, therefore, come to be generally accepted as the only proper or normal way of looking at the world, along with the Western compartmentalization of one’s existence as applied to human life. Religion, consequently, has been logically relegated to only one segment of a then (increasingly) limited and compartmentalized reality that either denies outright the metaphysical order of reality, or simply minimizes it toward the state of virtual meaninglessness.
Humanism has popularly meant, for the most part, a steadily myopic dedication to basic secular humanism, to an often deliberate desacralization of life, which has, as a direct result, so critically cheapened its meaning and value. Witness abortion-on-demand in the Western world, besides all of euthanasia, infanticide, genocide, etc., as geometric testimony openly favoring the Culture of Death.
Of course, it is fully granted that there are those ignorant (read: uninformed)) people who may refuse to believe that America and the West is inevitably spiraling down into the cesspool of history. Many do simplistically think that if, e. g., Mitt Romney replaces Obama, then all, in general, may be well. Not so.
What has and is occurring, meaning in modern society with its overtly decadent culture, is, however, fundamentally irreversible, meaning as to the larger and more significant forces and trends that do powerfully exist. Can any hope be offered? The rotted core of the modernist-postmodernist age must be critically replaced, meaning if the Western world is to survive into the future, with a true sense of sanity and with its peoples having a moral purpose.
However, things must logically get much worse, it has been stated, before there will be any chance of genuine improvement. What, therefore, must be made known? The sick Leftist counterculture of the 1960s has, essentially, become the basic mainstream culture of today, though most people do not so clearly recognize the related and definite radicalization process that has, in fact, occurred; extremism, more and more, seeks to become recognized and understood as being the new normality.
As G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936) had well noted early in the 20th century, that century he lived into consciously sought to increasingly replace the normal with the abnormal. Thus, this madness has been going on for some time now and shows no sign of really slowing down.
As a cognate consequence, Western Civilization can never be reborn, cannot have another renaissance, without grasping again an explicitly theocentric, meaning Christocentric, orientation in fundamental cognition, contrary to the now predominant secularist-humanist culture and its, thus, necessarily allied hedonistic, materialistic, and nihilistic society preoccupied so mightily with its self-inflicted demise.
It has been seen, time and again, in the sad course of modern recorded history, how when religion is ceremoniously thrown out the front door, then various substitute or ersatz “religions” qua ideologies are often covertly smuggled in the back door. But, genuine theology always abhors ideology, inclusive, e. g., of any State-Church arrangement. The greater threat today is an unseen or underappreciated degree of thoroughgoing radicalization brought on by the compelling forces of secularization that keep moving the culture and society more and more to the ideological Left.
Bereft of orthodox theological standards of right versus wrong, nonjudgmental sentiments and value-free values then become the new norms of disintegrating socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems, entire nations, rushing toward their moral destruction. Equally, there are those who insist that, e. g., technological supremacy, unrivaled military might, (or any other such secular notions) can fairly act as a kind of substitute for spiritual (read: religious) excellence and all that it implies.
Both modernist and postmodernist ideologies are necessarily filled with their greatly seductive and intramundane salvific hopes and dreams that yet inspire fanaticism and devotion beyond all logical reason. Emotionalism, optimism, secular humanism, and various means of psychological persuasion, as a result, then drive on the deluded adherents, ever regardless of any empirical signs of real failure, for Utopia, the neo-Pelagian New Eden, is only always another fantastical dream away.
It is not surprising, for instance, how the Hollywood movie stars and their various attendants, living in staged worlds of fantasy, can easily come to warmly support the equivalent of daydreams settling around utopian notions of a fantastic glorified collectivism. Thus, Sean Penn had actively campaigned in Venezuela to help the corrupt and evil dictator, the tyrant, remain in power. Tyranny and Utopia are made two sides of the same ideological coin; the vain secularist attempt to make a Heaven on earth turns always, therefore, into a Hell on this planet, though not always properly recognized as such.
One can, instructively, compare what were normal American values in, say, the 1950s to those of today. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, has repeatedly referred to Martin Luther King, Jr. as having been a great American conservative, which is not said, by him, as a joke. Has it been forgotten that he was trained by members of the American Communist Party and that, among many other examples that could be given, he openly and rather vigorously supported North Vietnam’s Communist regime during the Vietnam War. This amazing amnesia, as was mentioned already in this article, is highly indicative of the neo-Pelagian mindset and its general predominance.
What had been traditional political reality has gotten itself turned both upside down and inside out to an amazing degree of absurdity and insanity as well, though it is all a part of the aforementioned and quite definite radicalization. How is this meant? The former, supposed sociopolitical “center” has been moved so extremely far to the Left of the ideological spectrum; this is by which past, hard-core leftists, such as was King, are later wildly transmuted or transmogrified into being (assumed) conservatives.
What has happened? A dramatic but almost unnoticed shift in fundamental moral thought has clearly occurred, coming from the modern and into the postmodern era, that may be called the nominalization of human life by which the classical concept of evil has become essentially obliterated. In past ages, people could do evil and recognize it as such or, at the least, they could suspect that what was thought, said, or done had evil implications.
This, for the most part, is no longer the case. One small but highly indicative, contemporary example is how about a third of young under 30 years of age, in the USA, describe themselves as having no religion or being plain atheists, in public opinion polls. But, of course, this is fairly typical of the basic drift of the Western world in general. No informed observers of modern culture ought to be surprised.
Another small example can be rendered about what is meant. In modern society, anyone using the “N” word is to be universally shunned, condemned, and treated as an evil pariah; but, a woman having one or more abortions, acts of murder, is supposed to be praised and honored universally for so being a liberated woman exercising her respected pro-choice political and other rights, which, also, acts as a confusion and confounding of conventionalized mere mores with morals.
Versus someone who just utters a racial insult, the consequences, therefore, are highly perverse and extremely disproportionate to the nth degree surely indicative of insanity, as compared to the having of an abortion. As Euripides sagaciously wrote, over two millennia ago, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” And, Obama and his too willing minions are working hard to prove the truth of those words.
Today, the masses and especially the intellectuals, due to the noted nominalization effect, seem to have no solid idea about just what evil might or might not be, assuming that its existence is accepted as an empirical reality, which is, increasingly, rather doubted. Moreover, there is an unreal world created and composed of valueless values and related standardless standards, a kind of second reality, where full nonjudgmentalism reigns as a kind of secular god, as a type of perverse pseudo-theological structure granting spurious validation.
It is thought, consequently, to be grossly unsophisticated or quite naïve to speak in terms of evil, except if the term is ideologically used for making it a tool of propaganda, as with, e. g., environmentalism, such as the “evil” involved with environmental pollution. For the majority of people, however, there is no true evil pertaining to, e. g., artificial contraception; to others, there is no evil concerning sodomy or incest or sadism.
So, one intelligently sees that along with such notable major things as modernization, urbanization, bureaucratization, routinization, secularization, etc., there must be rationally added the equally real phenomenon of nominalization, the dogmatic displacement of there being any true metaphysical order of reality. If there is no God, meaning the chief or ultimate expression of such order, there is then no evil because it (evil) is dependent, intimately, upon the actual existence of a metaphysical order.
Relativism, subjectivity of one’s perspective, has now become the new objectivity. And, Limbaugh, of course, is not at all an isolated example of such political and other insanity in this country, as is the similar blatant case with Glenn Beck, an apostate Catholic. One can profoundly perceive, therefore, that Western, not just American, society, culture, politics, etc. is in a terrible shambles; an ethical, moral, and spiritual heap of garbage manifestly presents itself, moreover, to truly candid minds.
Nominalization and all that it obviously (and not so obviously) represents must, therefore, be fought against quite vigorously if any genuine effort at profound restoration, foundational renewal, is to vitally succeed.
Only the proper theological perspective and its adamant support can, therefore, truly help to requisitely bring about a much needed restoration and revitalization, regeneration and rejuvenation, of the present Western world. There is, for instance, a certain integral and fundamental truth about Mike Savage’s valid concern for borders, language, and culture. And, ever so much more than that, Chesterton’s appeal for the classical virtues of a traditional normality must be made both publicly and prayerfully.
This new Dark Age can, thus, be overtaken by spiritual energy and moral determination, which can come to then provide a required social civil orthodoxy, predicated openly upon the requisite cultivation of civic virtue and free, republican, representative, constitutional government qua governance, not statism or tyranny.
Not just classical Natural Law teachings and right reason, but Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium, as understood by pre-Vatican II Catholicism, all helps toward the requisite defense of man’s humanity and dignity against the regnant nihilism and Culture of Death, against the truly vile Weimarization (6) of the Western world.
Conclusion
Consequently, as was indicated explicitly by the argumentation of this article, the only sound remedy that can substantially reverse this quite evident extremism and, moreover, realistically restore much needed sanity and order to Western society and culture is actual adherence to traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholicism. While intelligently recognizing that there can be no perfectionism on earth or any simplistic guarantees of supposed certain success, how would this be done, nonetheless, as a practical matter?
It will be up to the relatively tiny enclaves of moral sanity, of serious religious devotion, such as the Latin Mass Community (7), furthermore, to then set about going to work toward the important civilizational task of slowly and carefully rebuilding the social and cultural order, if anything is meant to survive, of course.
This is not described as a task fit for morally or spiritually deracinated failures; some true substantive degree of heroism is, moreover, involved. It surely would, one could rationally guess, take a great deal of time and effort, along with the proverbial blood, sweat and tears, to then significantly accomplish much of anything, for the old saying is that, e. g., Rome was not built in a day.
Several hard centuries, a multiplicity of human generations, may be needed (at the least) that can then be suitably expected for such an impressive accomplishment. And, sincere prayers and petitions to Holy Mary, Mother of God, for any such wanted success would not ever be remiss or unneeded.
Athanasius contra mundum!
Notes
1.) Glenn Beck, among other popular commentators, has overtly declared that the American people are a “good people.” But, in philosophical and other terms, this necessarily raises questions about the particular meaning of “good.” There are, admittedly, technical indicators/measurements by which to supposedly assert this. Contributions to charity, efforts to see that government provides the so-called safety net, voluntary work done for hospitals and other such institutions, etc. are usually noted as to overt or practical meanings attached to examples of observed goodness.
But, this, upon examination, gets reduced to the subjectivism of good being equated with American. The point of an objective or orthodox morality, in permanent contrast, is that there yet ought to be universal standards of right versus wrong and, moreover, that evil is not to be promoted. As with, e. g., legalized abortion-on-demand in the modern world, American society, thus, so publicly condones and sanctions what is a vile form of actual and evil human sacrifice, a blood offering to Satan.
It is a surely strange part or, at a minimum, a rather odd aspect of the goodness manifested or notions of a good people who notably incorporate obvious and malicious evil as somehow constitutive of the understanding of the American folk as being a good people, meaning here a society placed in the public service of objective evil, which is often called being pro-choice. This needs to be equated, beyond euphemisms, with being pro-death; it is fully consistent with the celebration of the Culture of Death.
This death worship is, of course, condemned by Pope Benedict XVI because it is absolutely inconsistent with the teachings of the Church. One can come to perceive, therefore, that modern relativism, as with most of contemporary semantics, has basically captured any conventional or popular understanding of what “good” means, as with, e. g., a good people.
By allowing for such gross violations of Natural Law, human decency, right reason, moral order, and the past, present, and future allowing of the heinous murdering of the most innocent of humans (babies), the American people are, therefore, not a good people. Beck, Limbaugh, etc. are, thus, politically, socially, culturally, ethically, morally, and spiritually wrong in their estimation of the folk of the country. And, with the vast weight of such disgusting sin, what should be a proper consequence? A punishment ten thousand times worse than Obama ought to be inflicted upon such a nation as its so well deserved chastisement.
2.) Defense of the Second Vatican Council (VC II) has been and will always be encrusted with the need to greatly defend modernity in thought; this is in terms of the Hegelian dialectic that has developed by which the Spirit of VC II (thesis) is contrasted with the Letter of VC II (antithesis) that, in turn, is supposed to have produced (or, will some day in the [ever] unknown future of the Church) finally produce a supposed synthesis.
This points out, however, the integral intellectual-spiritual error of the warped cognate thinking involved that has, in turn, fostered the inanity and absurdity of there being a once supposed preconciliar (read: unreformed) Church versus a different postconciliar (read: reformed) Church, as if a certain type of, e. g., Protestant-style transformation had positively occurred. There is the great need for the Church and its hierarchy, therefore, to get psychologically and emotionally past VC II. They must get over it already. It ought not to be the permanent and unquestioned modern touchstone for all contemporary Catholic faith, nor any supposed test for a new orthodoxy versus any old orthodoxy.
The Church should assign that mistake to the historical archives and, as should be understood, move on confidently into the future totally unburdened by having to repeatedly defend, define, clarify, reform, etc. VC II and its terrible aftermath and consequences. There have been, in fact, many councils and there will be, no doubt, many more in the future. Moreover, it is entirely disproportionate that VC II is to be forever preeminently chosen as the one and only pivotal council that must now end up critically interpreting, in effect, all other councils past, present, and future.
3.) There is, of course, no implication being made whatsoever that any of the vast majority of the people in the world are at all conscious that they are involved with supporting heretical thoughts or heresies, in new modes of expression, far detached from specifically religious settings of cognition. The particular pandemic secularization of heretical thought, as to its fundamental mode or manifestation, is made formally explicit, in epistemological derivation, by use of the term neo-Pelagianism in that ideological noetic structures have replaced past theological ones.
Predominantly secular or, at least, secular-oriented societies/cultures are not likely, as understood, to be that conscious of the (past) theological roots of contemporary ethical, moral, or spiritual disorders. Ideological constructs have, therefore, fundamentally replaced religious understandings of life and reality as to popular and most professional thought. Moral illnesses are, for instance, either viewed as being mere psychiatric disorders, psychological problems, or can even get themselves defined out of existence by politically correct formulations of new realities.
4.) Christendom, as to a definition, were those lands and kingdoms consecrated to Christ and His Church. It is freely acknowledged, nonetheless, that there never was any idyllic place called Christendom; what this means is that there was once a sense that all Christians, in Europe at a minimum, were part of one Christian society, culture, and civilization oriented toward a theocentric attitude, not an anthropocentric one; no perfection on earth is implied, as if there had been a thoroughgoing reality absolutely controlled by completely theological principles, that had directed the intimate lives of all such people all of the time, within the borders of this (supposed) Christendom.
At most, a, perhaps, vestigial sense of a qualified Christendom lasted, decreasingly, until before World War I. Christian nations, e. g., used to be engaged in a crusade to wipe out slavery in this world; today, any still so-called Christian nations routinely have business with slave powers/slave-owning nations that do yet maintain their horrific institution; modernity, really, had crescively no valid place for Christianity.
Prior to the rise of Protestantism, however, there was then something fairly discernable and substantial, as to an international institution, by which and through which there was a definite manifestation of something that could be seen as truly being Christendom when held within the scope of the Church; this is the best, within reason and allied argumentation, that could be said regarding such a concept.
5.) Classical Natural Law should not be confused or confounded, as it often terribly is, with the 17th and 18th century-derived, nominalist Law of Nature thought up by Rousseau, Locke, etc. The former and more precise understanding dates back to at least the ancient Greeks and Romans and it is based upon a permanent human nature; the latter is merely an ideological construct having a plastic meaning that has changed/will change through the centuries.
Classical Natural Law, moreover, rejects all the nominalist contentions of the forever spurious Law of Nature because, among other reasons, it is built upon both numerous abstractions and strange fantasies incorporating prehistoric mythologies and diverse notions.
6.) Weimarization, a lust for death of a society dedicated to shamelessness (read: abnormality), is then meant to correctly indicate a kind of nihilistic transformation of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic order of a nation; it historically refers to what had happened to Germany, after World War I, with the unfortunate formation of the progressive, socialist-democratic Weimar Republic, which was never able to gain the substantial support of the vast majority of the German people; such an explicitly ideological regime had contained, therefore, the seeds of its own future and deserved destruction.
For instance, the extensive eugenics legislation of the Weimar Republic and its so quite horrendous consequences, applauded then by progressives and liberals in the United States and elsewhere as enlightened, was later adapted and, rather willingly, expanded by Nazi Germany. Weimar’s abortion laws were, also, extended and then made mandatory for non-Aryans, of course, during the expansion of German Nazism and its insane consolidation.
At a minimum, it ought to be morally said that Weimarization is not a good thing to have occur in any nation; there is a marked and logical tendency for it, as a nightmarish type of domino effect, to provoke further degradation and degeneration in any populace. All this comes from damnable defiance of what Rudyard Kipling had, long ago, notably called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” the eternal verities that, if mocked, lead inevitably toward deserved disaster; and, they do seek justifiable vengeance.
7.) An alternative society or counterculture must be steadily developed against and during the time of the collapse of what now exists as the decadent mainstream culture, which will not be easy to do. However, the internet exists today, besides other means of e-communication; and, it has the power to reach millions of people for helping to gradually congeal the, for now, disparate elements of a new future community oriented toward the Culture of Life, the theocentric/Christocentric point of view, of course.
In contrast, one may confidently assert that the odd pursuit of abnormality and shamelessness, whether as either modern or postmodern values, has never been the foundations of coherent, creative, and life-sustaining cultures or civilizations.
