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How to Rebel Against the New Barbarism
Russian mystic and philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948) spoke about our world entering a new kind of Middle Ages.
Two elements battled for supremacy in the Middle Ages: barbarism and the Catholic Church. The Church won.
In the new Middle Ages, will the Chuch reassert itself . . . or will barbarism come back?
If barbarism, it will be much worse than the old barbarism. The post-modern barbarism will be, in the words of Berdyaev’s younger contemporary Henri de Lubac, “centralized, technically efficient and inhuman.”
De Lubac wrote those words in 1944. Since that time, it has become pretty clear that our world is reverting to barbarism, not the Church.
The Church has lost a lot of ground over the past 75 years, fighting waves of enemies from within and without, losing credibility with anyone who finds it unsettling for erstwhile celibates to sodomize emotionally vulnerable 14-year-olds, plus suffering the lowest of plights — getting kicked while down — as western institutions, from the New York Times to the universities to Hollywood, gleefully kick at the Body.
So, barbarism it is.
And it’s a “centralized, technically efficient and inhuman” one at that, as the federal government takes every American under its protective arm…
