What Is Is?

It only took 500 years for Luther to destroy the West

The attempts to reformulate Christendom in what is often called the “Second Reformation” in Scotland was inspired by the preaching of John Knox. His Common Order provided the Scots the formula of worship of the new Presbyterian Kirk. This proved to be a rupture from the organic development of the Celtic worldview of Celtic Christians. It reduced Christianity to a subjective biblicism; the natural connection of Celtic life with land, nature, seasons and saints was excised by the “Reformation.”

While the Gospel proclamation by Ss. Patrick, Brigid, Ninian, Columba and Ogilvie transformed the pagan culture of the Celts, Protestantism continued to fracture Christendom, which lost influence over time. The old belief in metaphysics was waning along with the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty; the abandonment of metaphysics in the so-called Enlightenment produced a spiritual vacuum in the West that reduced all religious expression to purely cultural phenomena characterized by ration-al morality. The “mythology” of religion was being replaced by a new religious entity wielding new scientific sacraments and devotions to new saints such as Kant, Rousseau, Hume, Voltaire, Locke, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Darwin, Huxley, Whitehead, Freud, and Jung.

The prophet Nietzsche, crying in a wilderness of nihilism, mourned the Death of God in the West and predicted cultural implosion with everyone doing what is “right in their own eyes.” Emerging in the 20th century, Heidegger, Sartre, Picasso, Camus, et al, brought a “post-modern” mood that abandoned rationality en toto, reducing all truth to cultural phenomena. If modernity was the “Age of Reason,” post-modernity is the “Age of Despair,” manifested in two world wars. In the West, as the nuclear family declined, cultural despair has become distracted by the drug culture, the sexual revolution and abandoning religion en masse.

Other aspects of classical philosophy, aesthetics and epistemology, gave way to skepticism and relativism. The former denies knowledge of the objective world and the later denies knowledge of Goodness and Beauty. The postmodernists introduced to the West a philosophical corruption: knowledge of the objective world, the world God created ex nihilo was lost to pure subjectivity. Truth is culturally conditioned and goodness and beauty are left to subjective interpretations. It is as Ivan Karamazov feared, “Without God, all things are permissible.”

The post-Christian West has survived on the merits of what Christendom produced: classical virtues, and morality; justice and goodness. In our time, we see the elevation of the imago sui; a new religious iconography in media and aesthetics at the altars of performance and presentation with crusaders suppressing dissent.

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An excerpt from the St. John Ogilvie Prayerbook, “Crumbling Foundations.”