Chesterton’s verdict remains truer than ever: the modern world is not exactly evil, nor neo-pagan. It is post Christian and so ‘full of wild and wasted virtues’, of Christian virtues gone mad’ because isolated from each other. Truth, love and liberty are now rival absolutes.
— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) May 20, 2022
The importance of Chesterton was for me long ago secured, but seems to regularly grow again.
Just want to note the common-cause here between Taylor’s thesis on secularity—a (unholy.. holy?) bastard of isolated Christian impulses, reconfigurations, and elite-led reforms attempting to set incompatible great goods on new footings—and Chesterton’s.
But you can add Illich (the search for agapé-analogues once it has been unredeemably institutionalised) and DBH (the necessary purgatory of a world that created, and so in fullness of time was forced to kill, a purely voluntaristic god with his accompanying mechanistic universe) to the list.
Does such a post-Christian diagnosis require a post-modern-inflected pluralistic mindset?
Something (something deeply Chestertonian) seems lost if we lose a reading of secular history with declamations of spiritual infamy and whoredom, of national-betrayal and enemies-under-the-feet, the kind which animated Christendom and Israel for all those millennia prior to our—disconcertingly recent—moral enlightenment.
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