Just a Bit of Berdyaev

Sometimes, please don't laugh, I get to read books. I'm especially enjoying Berdyaev's The End Of Our Time. He was writing after World War I:

European man strode into modern history full of confidence in himself and his creative powers, in this dawn all seemed to depend on his own power of making, to which he put neither frontiers nor limits; today he leaves it to pass into an unknown epoch, discouraged, his faith in shreds - that faith which he had in his own powers and the strength of his own skill - threatened with the loss for ever of the core of his personality. No, this man does not shine.

And again:

In the present century, the apex of the humanist era, European man stands amid a frightening emptiness. He no longer knows where the key-stone of his life may be found, beneath his feet he feels no depth of solidity. He gives himself up to a surface existence and lives in two dimensions as if he occupied exactly the surface of the earth, ignorant of what is above him and what below. 

Prescient words, unless you think everything's fine with the collapsing modern age. Interestingly, Belloc, and perhaps Berdyaev too, argue that the end of the secularist experiment leads inevitably and paradoxically to slavery.

I stand against that and for the Faith.

LSP

Europe and the Faith

Belloc

Every year or so I read Europe and the Faith, written in 1920 by Hilaire Belloc. In it, Belloc sketches the history of the late Western Roman Empire, explaining its evolution under the aegis of the Church, into what, for him, was the high watermark of European civilization, the Middle Ages of the 13th Century. He then describes the Reformation and its aftermath, the dislocated culture of the past four centuries, in which the human soul and her endeavor has become increasingly alienated, fragmented and miserable. 

As an aside, the author believes that the Reformation only succeeded through the defection of a civilized Roman Province, England, to the various forces in mutiny against the Church and her culture. An interesting theory and one which, I think, originates with Belloc alone.

Whether you agree with him or not, Belloc's unconventional, clear-sighted and always sharp reading of history is certainly provocative, sometimes aggressively so, and, for me at least, always entertaining. I find his conclusion prescient:

So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

Orthodox catholics will love this book, others perhaps less so. I count myself amongst the former, albeit from an Anglican perspective.

Stockpile ammo, go to Mass.

LSP