The Jury Is Still Out on Europe’s Religious Future | Christianity Today christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/june-w…
We are indeed still living out the irony that with Vatican 2 the Catholic Church finally came to terms with the French Revolution just at the point where a second and bigger cultural revolution was beginning which only validated negative liberty and a given, disenchanted nature.
It should be no surprise that this left liberalism quickly gave rise to unrestrained capitalism and runaway exploitation of a now desacralised natural world. Of course speeding up processes long in existence.
In reassessing Vatican 2 etc it needs to be seen that in dumping the modernity (sic) of the ancien regime it made too many concessions to the other modernity of liberal democracy. It swerved too much away from pre war and forties personalism/corporatism.
This over-embrace of political liberalism has left the churches basically defenceless and incoherent in the face of ethical liberalism. Here also they need to refuse *both* modern strict deontology and modern naturalism/cult of the will. Instead dynamic and creative teleology.
A kind of fusion of Macintyre with Bergson and Blondel. With the Plotinian vitalist legacy ultimately lurking. (See Hadot). Mediated by Victorinus, Maximus and Eriugena. (Macintyre though mostly right too neo-Thomist and residually Marxist dialectical).
We have to allow that ethics as implied by the gospel is freer than the tradition allowed. (There will be no going back.)Yet we also need to see freedom as positive as searching for objectively true and shared social and environmental ends. The new can still be the true.
In fact the truth is always new. Yet this is not to deny the longterm intuited stabilities of marriage, family, heteronormativity (but allowing exceptions) that we will always need. Nature is not infinitely malleable. In fact were it so it could not also be a doubt of creativity
In concrete terms then the task is to work out what is truly essential and what ephemeral or even dubious in the detailed ethical legacy. In relation to the Sixties cultural revolution as with the French political one the churches need a third way. It’s imperative.
Fount of creativity.
