Feb 3 Mon
Is any modern idea always better?
Modernists are wrong because they believe that the experience of ‘religious feelings’ is the measure of religious truth, but it is not the experience itself that is heretical.
The Modernist errors regarding faith and revelation consist in understanding faith as “a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will, trained to morality.” According to Modernists, the external proofs of revelation, miracles, and prophecies are not the surest signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion, nor are they well-adapted to the understanding of all people and of all times, including ours.
Modernists create two independent worlds in the believer’s life:
- What he believes, against
- What he knows;
- Commitment to God and ordinary life, religious practice, and
- Human experience.
This lack of unity can cause only serious conflicts, detrimental to the life of faith. Consistency between faith and culture both presupposes and reinforces consistency between faith and life.
To exorcise the devil of post-Modern foolery, we must go into realism and beauty.
We need to unplug from rationalism and fill our souls with heavenly and beautiful things (tweet this). The great unnamed saints of history who built cathedrals created the greatest architecture the world has ever seen –or will ever see– because they built for the sake of beauty.
The Gothic cathedral became a building after it was only a dream. Modernists cannot build Gothic cathedrals because they cannot dream of cathedrals; nay, Modernists cannot even really dream, they can only analyze dreams.
Our ancestors built for God; consequently, what they built will last until the consummation of the world.
The loss of the sacred has meant the loss of beauty. Therefore, if we desire to recapture the sacred, we must pursue what is beautiful.
Compare modern music and its syncopated rhythm with the heaven-sent flittering of Baroque crescendos and recalibrate your spirit. An afternoon spent in a sunroom with an espresso and Vivaldi will do more to rid your soul of Modernism than almost anything. A walk through a crimson forest in October will teach you more about Creation than any theologaster blowhard lecturing you about theistic evolution. The smell and feel of an old Chesterton novel will satisfy your soul more than any viral video.
You may think that studying the inner workings of the Universe will show you the Divine Hand and may provide some insight, but we do not call God the Mathematician or Architect like the Freemasons; He is the Author of Creation, and His great work is a poem and a song. Chaucer and Dante will guide you through the heavens more than any physicist.
Chesterton said it best in Orthodoxy: “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do… Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion… The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
Free yourself, dear reader, from Modernism by purifying yourself of the unholy intellectual and artistic milieu that birthed this monster.
Some excerpts from Kennedy Hall
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